10 ms·

Just as a contrast, I think I've had the exact opposite WFH/lockdown experience as you. My quality of life has tangibly and significantly degraded across every

Just as a contrast, I think I've had the exact opposite WFH/lockdown experience as you. My quality of life has tangibly and significantly degraded across every positive point you listed. Even if my employer began offering office access, I don't think it will ever be the same as what I had before. I used to bike to work, a productive 2 hours of exercise that kept me very healthy, mentally and physically. I got to see other people, even if they weren't strictly friends. Hell, I went outside on a regular basis! Now I'm gaining weight (although not enough for a booster), lonely, and overworked as the involuntarily designated quasi-stay-at-home parent.

znpy 5y ago
> I used to bike to work, a productive 2 hours of exercise that kept me very healthy Just go and bike for two hours around the block and don't bother people fine with wfh. It's literally something nobody is preventing you from doing (besides yourself).
- wirrbel 5y ago
  Stop bullshitting. As a parent the dynamics are totally different especially with Covid measures still in place. My child has not been to pre school for 4 weeks due to sickness and daycare group being closed because of Covid incident. And that must be like the 4th month within this year. It’s hard to maintain any routine in this ever changing emergency.
  - znpy 5y ago
    No you stop bullshitting. The problem you lament are due to covid, not due to wfh. And covid it's not an incident, its a f-ing global pandemic.
    - wirrbel 5y ago
      so what do you suggest, that the person you were replying to just stop the pandemic?
- Steltek 5y ago
  That was a pretty rude dismissal of a fraction of my experiences during all of this. You might want to reflect on what WFH has done to your social skills.
  - tablespoon 5y ago
    > That was a pretty rude dismissal of a fraction of my experiences during all of this. You might want to reflect on what WFH has done to your social skills. I agree with you there. The problem with WFH is that it doesn't force very many "transitions," which turns a lot more things into intentional acts that take more mental energy to initiate. The result it it's a lot easier to slide into a "blah" kind of state without even realizing it, and a lot harder to pull yourself out of one.
  - znpy 5y ago
    My social skills are absolutely fine, i can assure you of that. But I am utterly annoyed with selfish people effectively pulling the whole collectivity back to the office because they can't go bike for two hours or some other dumb reason. It's okay if you got a bit lazy during the pandemic and no one is denying that... but you don't have to pull all your coworkers to the office, you can just go bike or do some other physical activity it's probably going to get better.
    - lowkey_ 5y ago
      > I am utterly annoyed with selfish people effectively pulling the whole collectivity back to the office You might want to re-read their comment — there was no call for everyone to go back to the office, and the parent comment is right that you're being antagonizing for no reason. Here's an analogy for you: I had a childhood I very much enjoyed, where I wasn't on the computer as often and I spent more time in nature. If I were to state this and how much happier I felt, would you start harassing me for trying to drag everyone back to the dark ages and ruining productivity? (No! I can express my own personal opinion and preference, just as you can express yours, and it's not automatically a call for everyone to do the same as me!)
    - tablespoon 5y ago
- borski 5y ago
  First: you can disagree with someone and not be an asshole about it. Please consider reading the HN guidelines again. Second: you are dismissing the fact that having an office to go to gave a lot of people a routine as well as forced social interaction. Now, it requires strict discipline to try and enforce it on yourself, whereas before it was a default. I share this commenter’s experience. That you don’t is fantastic for you, but doesn’t make it any less legitimate.
  - znpy 5y ago
    I just want to point out that reading rudeness in that comment is your own choice, my intent was really a suggestion. Rudeness here is in the eyes of those who call it that.
    - borski 5y ago
      You responded to someone describing their experience with an aggressive “just do it and don’t bother people fine with wfh,” implying that the poster was somehow trying to encroach on your ability to WFH. They never said that. You even express your frustration directly in a sibling comment below. Pretending your comment wasn’t rude, especially after elsewhere expressing your explicit frustration, is only half-true at best. Have a nice day. :)
      - znpy 5y ago
        Making up stuff is half true at best too but whatever, have a nice day you too :)
        mlyle 5y ago
        FYI, it also read as excessively dismissive, bordering on aggressive to me. There's plenty of ways to phrase your disagreement without invalidating the person you're talking to quite so much.
      - causehealth101 5y ago
        "Encroach on your ability to WFH" - you perfectly summed up the reason for the vitriol from remote-only people, IMO: They are fearful that people with your stance will give companies a better argument for less remote-work. It's one thing when executives talk about it, because they're "not on the ground" and "just want control" or "don't understand individual contributors", but when peers like you support non-100% remote, it's a real worrisome prospect for them.
- rmdashrfv 5y ago
  I find your take really interesting because everyone who is pro-WFH tells people that they love WFH because of this long list of things that I was doing before the pandemic, and they were free to do as well. I personally find the notion that by merely having a commute, your quality of life is 10x diminished than if you didn't. If most employers make people return to office, are people just going to drop exercising? Would it not be fair to call that ridiculous?
ren_engineer 5y ago
>I got to see other people, even if they weren't strictly friends. Hell, I went outside on a regular basis! all of the complaints about remote work are more about the pandemic rather than remote work
- borski 5y ago
  Somewhat. Seeing people during WFH also requires advance planning now, to align schedules, etc. In a non-WFH environment, it was much easier to see people spontaneously. That has nothing to do with the pandemic and everything to do with the fact that you were already colocated and could thus grab lunch, dinner, go out to karaoke after work, or whatever, and it could be done without significant advance planning.
- Steltek 5y ago
  Very true but it felt strange how everything that evenhovercraft listed as something gained from remote work was also something that I had lost. I don't think a post-Covid world would change that for me. My office is downtown, with restaurants and attractions and people. My home is in a streetcar suburb and while it has lots of nice things to walk to, it doesn't have what you would call a night life.
  - evenhovercraft 5y ago
    Just wanted to say - I hope you’re able to find ways to get those things back in your life. Remote work is certainly not without its challenges and of course, not for everyone. Companies should let the individual decide for themselves.
shadowoflight 5y ago
I understand the fact that you don't have the motivation of "gotta get to work/home!", but you could always get up earlier and go on a looped bike ride before and/or after work (I've actually seen a lot of people doing this as a sort-of "simulated commute", which they claim also helps with creating a mental office-home separation).
idrios 5y ago
Similar situation, WFH/lockdown massively degraded the quality of my life. Work became more stressful and metric-driven, social life died as all my friends & coworkers moved to their hometowns and I did too, and I've gained weight / fallen into a rut. I was just under a year into my first role as a software developer after a career change, and I was learning a lot from my coworkers and still meeting people. If I was at a later stage in my career I would have probably loved this, but WFH has been pretty terrible for me. Also important to note, my commute was only about 10-15 minutes and I was extremely lucky for that.
- Steltek 5y ago
  Sorry to hear that. Any tips for mentors? I feel peer collaboration hasn't been too bad and honestly I strongly favor remote-style work even in the office. However, effectiveness in mentoring junior engineers has nosedived. There's more to programming than a pull request. Workflows, tools, and behaviors are also things that people learn from others. You don't get that over infrequent screen sharing and quick daily syncs.
  - idrios 5y ago
    By asking that question I think you've identified part of the problem, because around the time Covid started we lost a very competent senior dev and nobody has been hired to replace him. Still, I used to have some pretty cool impromptu conversations in the hallway with people from other teams about projects they're working on at home, and they were great to learn from. With WFH I'd have never met some of those people. No idea how to recreate that environment.
  - Cerium 5y ago
    My experience is that impromptu mentoring has essentially gone away and only concerted efforts remain. When I was stuck on a problem or just needed a break I used to walk around the software lab and look for someone who looked frustrated and then try to solve their problem. Obviously I don't do that anymore. Instead I do have (probably not enough) screen sharing work sessions with other engineers when there is a problem that one of us needs to talk through. It is a good opportunity to learn about how others work and get some work done.
emrah 5y ago
One is not better than the other. It's not a contest. Kudos to employers who can acknowledge that different people have different needs and cater to both!
rmdashrfv 5y ago
My quality of life dramatically went down as well. I'm a highly extroverted SWE and I need some modicum of social interaction to be able to function at peak performance. Prior to the pandemic, I had a social life that I was very much grateful for. I'm also a minority and don't come from Ivy League/Top 10, so I felt that my biggest advantage was the impression I could make on others in person. In a remote-first world, I lose my biggest advantage. Me aside, I can't help but think there are some underlying drawbacks to a remote-first world that we aren't talking about enough. But I know that, at least within the tech industry, I'm in the minority by believing that a life that is easier and more comfortable is automatically the better design.
seanmcdirmid 5y ago
I was thinking about it, but before as an academic before I always had the option to remote work, just I didn't do it at home. The cafe, the museum, just bike to my best thinking place in the morning and then bike to the university for lunch and an afternoon meeting. I never really had decent work and exercise opportunities at home, so I would spend as little time as there as possible. These days I'm no longer an academic but ironically I've been full time WFH since I switched at the beginning of the pandemic. So now I have a nice house with a nice chair and a nicer monitor than I could get in the office. And an oculus 2 for exercise, which works out (but might not be for everyone). And those second places where I did all my best thinking outside of home and the office don't really exist anymore and might not ever exist again :(. > and overworked as the involuntarily designated quasi-stay-at-home parent. Ya, being at home would be really a lot worse if my 4 year old wasn't in pre-K.
mbrodersen 5y ago
Which is why smart employers give their employees a choice of how to work instead of a one-size-fits-all solution that doesn’t. Working two days in the office is perfect for me for example.

znpy 5y ago

> I used to bike to work, a productive 2 hours of exercise that kept me very healthy Just go and bike for two hours around the block and don't bother people fine with wfh. It's literally something nobody is preventing you from doing (besides yourself).

wirrbel 5y ago
Stop bullshitting. As a parent the dynamics are totally different especially with Covid measures still in place. My child has not been to pre school for 4 weeks due to sickness and daycare group being closed because of Covid incident. And that must be like the 4th month within this year. It’s hard to maintain any routine in this ever changing emergency.
- znpy 5y ago
  No you stop bullshitting. The problem you lament are due to covid, not due to wfh. And covid it's not an incident, its a f-ing global pandemic.
  - wirrbel 5y ago
    so what do you suggest, that the person you were replying to just stop the pandemic?
Steltek 5y ago
That was a pretty rude dismissal of a fraction of my experiences during all of this. You might want to reflect on what WFH has done to your social skills.
- tablespoon 5y ago
  > That was a pretty rude dismissal of a fraction of my experiences during all of this. You might want to reflect on what WFH has done to your social skills. I agree with you there. The problem with WFH is that it doesn't force very many "transitions," which turns a lot more things into intentional acts that take more mental energy to initiate. The result it it's a lot easier to slide into a "blah" kind of state without even realizing it, and a lot harder to pull yourself out of one.
- znpy 5y ago
  My social skills are absolutely fine, i can assure you of that. But I am utterly annoyed with selfish people effectively pulling the whole collectivity back to the office because they can't go bike for two hours or some other dumb reason. It's okay if you got a bit lazy during the pandemic and no one is denying that... but you don't have to pull all your coworkers to the office, you can just go bike or do some other physical activity it's probably going to get better.
  - lowkey_ 5y ago
    > I am utterly annoyed with selfish people effectively pulling the whole collectivity back to the office You might want to re-read their comment — there was no call for everyone to go back to the office, and the parent comment is right that you're being antagonizing for no reason. Here's an analogy for you: I had a childhood I very much enjoyed, where I wasn't on the computer as often and I spent more time in nature. If I were to state this and how much happier I felt, would you start harassing me for trying to drag everyone back to the dark ages and ruining productivity? (No! I can express my own personal opinion and preference, just as you can express yours, and it's not automatically a call for everyone to do the same as me!)
  - tablespoon 5y ago
borski 5y ago
First: you can disagree with someone and not be an asshole about it. Please consider reading the HN guidelines again. Second: you are dismissing the fact that having an office to go to gave a lot of people a routine as well as forced social interaction. Now, it requires strict discipline to try and enforce it on yourself, whereas before it was a default. I share this commenter’s experience. That you don’t is fantastic for you, but doesn’t make it any less legitimate.
- znpy 5y ago
  I just want to point out that reading rudeness in that comment is your own choice, my intent was really a suggestion. Rudeness here is in the eyes of those who call it that.
  - borski 5y ago
    You responded to someone describing their experience with an aggressive “just do it and don’t bother people fine with wfh,” implying that the poster was somehow trying to encroach on your ability to WFH. They never said that. You even express your frustration directly in a sibling comment below. Pretending your comment wasn’t rude, especially after elsewhere expressing your explicit frustration, is only half-true at best. Have a nice day. :)
    - znpy 5y ago
      Making up stuff is half true at best too but whatever, have a nice day you too :)
      - mlyle 5y ago
        FYI, it also read as excessively dismissive, bordering on aggressive to me. There's plenty of ways to phrase your disagreement without invalidating the person you're talking to quite so much.
    - causehealth101 5y ago
      "Encroach on your ability to WFH" - you perfectly summed up the reason for the vitriol from remote-only people, IMO: They are fearful that people with your stance will give companies a better argument for less remote-work. It's one thing when executives talk about it, because they're "not on the ground" and "just want control" or "don't understand individual contributors", but when peers like you support non-100% remote, it's a real worrisome prospect for them.
rmdashrfv 5y ago
I find your take really interesting because everyone who is pro-WFH tells people that they love WFH because of this long list of things that I was doing before the pandemic, and they were free to do as well. I personally find the notion that by merely having a commute, your quality of life is 10x diminished than if you didn't. If most employers make people return to office, are people just going to drop exercising? Would it not be fair to call that ridiculous?

ren_engineer 5y ago

>I got to see other people, even if they weren't strictly friends. Hell, I went outside on a regular basis! all of the complaints about remote work are more about the pandemic rather than remote work

borski 5y ago
Somewhat. Seeing people during WFH also requires advance planning now, to align schedules, etc. In a non-WFH environment, it was much easier to see people spontaneously. That has nothing to do with the pandemic and everything to do with the fact that you were already colocated and could thus grab lunch, dinner, go out to karaoke after work, or whatever, and it could be done without significant advance planning.
Steltek 5y ago
Very true but it felt strange how everything that evenhovercraft listed as something gained from remote work was also something that I had lost. I don't think a post-Covid world would change that for me. My office is downtown, with restaurants and attractions and people. My home is in a streetcar suburb and while it has lots of nice things to walk to, it doesn't have what you would call a night life.
- evenhovercraft 5y ago
  Just wanted to say - I hope you’re able to find ways to get those things back in your life. Remote work is certainly not without its challenges and of course, not for everyone. Companies should let the individual decide for themselves.

shadowoflight 5y ago

I understand the fact that you don't have the motivation of "gotta get to work/home!", but you could always get up earlier and go on a looped bike ride before and/or after work (I've actually seen a lot of people doing this as a sort-of "simulated commute", which they claim also helps with creating a mental office-home separation).

idrios 5y ago

Similar situation, WFH/lockdown massively degraded the quality of my life. Work became more stressful and metric-driven, social life died as all my friends & coworkers moved to their hometowns and I did too, and I've gained weight / fallen into a rut. I was just under a year into my first role as a software developer after a career change, and I was learning a lot from my coworkers and still meeting people. If I was at a later stage in my career I would have probably loved this, but WFH has been pretty terrible for me. Also important to note, my commute was only about 10-15 minutes and I was extremely lucky for that.

Steltek 5y ago
Sorry to hear that. Any tips for mentors? I feel peer collaboration hasn't been too bad and honestly I strongly favor remote-style work even in the office. However, effectiveness in mentoring junior engineers has nosedived. There's more to programming than a pull request. Workflows, tools, and behaviors are also things that people learn from others. You don't get that over infrequent screen sharing and quick daily syncs.
- idrios 5y ago
  By asking that question I think you've identified part of the problem, because around the time Covid started we lost a very competent senior dev and nobody has been hired to replace him. Still, I used to have some pretty cool impromptu conversations in the hallway with people from other teams about projects they're working on at home, and they were great to learn from. With WFH I'd have never met some of those people. No idea how to recreate that environment.
- Cerium 5y ago
  My experience is that impromptu mentoring has essentially gone away and only concerted efforts remain. When I was stuck on a problem or just needed a break I used to walk around the software lab and look for someone who looked frustrated and then try to solve their problem. Obviously I don't do that anymore. Instead I do have (probably not enough) screen sharing work sessions with other engineers when there is a problem that one of us needs to talk through. It is a good opportunity to learn about how others work and get some work done.

emrah 5y ago

One is not better than the other. It's not a contest. Kudos to employers who can acknowledge that different people have different needs and cater to both!

rmdashrfv 5y ago

My quality of life dramatically went down as well. I'm a highly extroverted SWE and I need some modicum of social interaction to be able to function at peak performance. Prior to the pandemic, I had a social life that I was very much grateful for. I'm also a minority and don't come from Ivy League/Top 10, so I felt that my biggest advantage was the impression I could make on others in person. In a remote-first world, I lose my biggest advantage. Me aside, I can't help but think there are some underlying drawbacks to a remote-first world that we aren't talking about enough. But I know that, at least within the tech industry, I'm in the minority by believing that a life that is easier and more comfortable is automatically the better design.

seanmcdirmid 5y ago

I was thinking about it, but before as an academic before I always had the option to remote work, just I didn't do it at home. The cafe, the museum, just bike to my best thinking place in the morning and then bike to the university for lunch and an afternoon meeting. I never really had decent work and exercise opportunities at home, so I would spend as little time as there as possible. These days I'm no longer an academic but ironically I've been full time WFH since I switched at the beginning of the pandemic. So now I have a nice house with a nice chair and a nicer monitor than I could get in the office. And an oculus 2 for exercise, which works out (but might not be for everyone). And those second places where I did all my best thinking outside of home and the office don't really exist anymore and might not ever exist again :(. > and overworked as the involuntarily designated quasi-stay-at-home parent. Ya, being at home would be really a lot worse if my 4 year old wasn't in pre-K.

mbrodersen 5y ago

Which is why smart employers give their employees a choice of how to work instead of a one-size-fits-all solution that doesn’t. Working two days in the office is perfect for me for example.