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Poll: Do you prefer the office or work from home?

• ngngngng 5y ago
  For me the sweet spot is working from home with a place away from home I can go when I feel like it. This could be a coworking space or coffee shop but my favorite is the public library near me which is not too trafficked, has excellent Wi-Fi and is a great place for everything but meetings.
• j7ake 5y ago
  I guess one distinction is : at the office , do you have your own private office, sharing an office, or completely open space ? For me, the ideal is my own private office at work, and my commute to the office is walking distance. There, you have the benefit of serendipitous encounters, own space for zoom meetings, and quiet space for uninterrupted work.
• holoduke 5y ago
  I can't do anything from home. Pure lack of motivation. Too much distraction from other things. No social interaction. I think I need to have interaction all day. Not via a computer screen. I hate working from home really.
• sparrish 5y ago
  Been working from home for 12+ years now. I can't imagine going back to an office. I get more work done at home than I ever did in an office and I have 7 kids and we homeschool.
  • throwawayboise 5y ago
    You have my respect. No way do I think I could manage the time commitment and work needed to effectively homeschool.
    • sparrish 5y ago
      My wife deserves nearly all the respect for homeschooling. She does the lion's share. I help with checking the work and mostly science and math.
  • enobrev 5y ago
    20 years for me - since late 2001. Loved it in a 450 square foot apartment in a very lively Brooklyn neighborhood; I loved it in my peaceful 2br apt with a view in Seattle; I still love it now with a house and a toddler (still in the city). I started my career in an office - a very fancy one at that with an incredible view and great coworkers. But office life has never been for me. > I have 7 kids and we homeschool Impressive.
  • jwHollister 5y ago
    10+ yrs wfh, 4 kids homeschool. Ditto, amazing wife.
  • pensatoio 5y ago
    That's awesome!
• deleted 5y ago
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• toomanydoubts 5y ago
  Going to an office to write software is absolutely insane. I like going on fridays and leaving early to drink beer with coworkers.
  • interpol_p 5y ago
    Agree. I go in once a week to pick up a shared lunch for everybody and we hang out and play some board games
    • hh3k0 5y ago
      Hanging out with coworkers would be my own personal hell, to be frank. And there's nothing wrong with my coworkers, I'd like to emphasize that, but I have friends and family that I'd rather hang out with. Coworkers are just coworkers to me.
      • alecbz 5y ago
        I'm confused, what makes it hell if nothing's wrong with them?
        • hh3k0 5y ago
          Spending time socializing with people that aren't part of my social life by my own (direct) choosing feels like a chore to me, I suppose. A work party, to me, does not resemble actual work in many ways… and yet it does not resemble a party either. I would certainly enjoy to play volleyball on the beach with friends and family but would rather avoid it as a reward or team-building activity.
  • Trasmatta 5y ago
    The absolute absurdity of sitting in an open office, and pretending to program the full 9-5. That's just not how work like this happens. Why do companies pay their developers high salaries, but then tie one hand behind their backs like that. For me? Never again.
• twalichiewicz 5y ago
  I think my views have changed over the course of the pandemic— originally I was thrilled by not having to commute, being comfortable, having an easy way to take a break. Now in 2022 it sort of feels like living at the office, and the lack of separation between the two can be annoying. The flexibility to pick when I want “intense focus” time at the office has been working really well for me. (Thank goodness my company allowed us to be hybrid.)
  • bee_rider 5y ago
    Yeah. I'm working from home. I'm loving the convenience and the ability to use, for example, my favorite keyboard. But working in my bedroom and livingroom has kind of ruined those rooms for me. I think I'd enjoy it much more if I had a separate home office room to go to.
    • User23 5y ago
      If you can get a dedicated home office somehow I’d recommend it.
    • fartcannon 5y ago
      My job supplied a laptop and I just use another desk for that. So When I'm working its the work desk, when I'm at home its the home desk. Conveniently they're at 90 degrees but share a chair which let's me sometimes be at home when I'm at work. Which is nice.
      • bee_rider 5y ago
        I actually have a desk in my bedroom which is completely devoted to work. I believe the problem is that it is in my bedroom, but this is how it worked out with two people working in a tiny apartment.
  • kilbuz 5y ago
    Yes, "it's not working from home, it's living at work" is how I feel and how I have heard it expressed.
• quickthrower2 5y ago
  WFH is so much better for 2 reasons: can focus, no commute. Other great reasons: not spreading germs. get chores done during lunch break. see more of kids. look after pets. easy take holidays where you work from another location. own office space. decent coffee machine. not being caged in a city centre during lunchtime. bring in washing if it rains. be near school if there is a problem (like kid is sick). conversation over zoom means both of you get to work at a desk and have good ergonomics while solving an issue.
• stickyricky 5y ago
  I'm a social person. I vastly prefer working from home. I've been doing so for the past 8 years. My work days are short. My time with family, hobbies, and friends is long, peaceful, and uninterrupted. Working in a remote first organization is better. No asses to kiss. Just results. And ample amounts of free time.
• redman25 5y ago
  Work from home but head into the office once or twice per week. I’m liking the mix of comfort at home without losing connection with colleagues.
  • WalterSobchak 5y ago
    We're about to adopt the same hybrid schedule. It's a good compromise from what it was before the pandemic (always in office).
    • fartcannon 5y ago
      The first rule of change management is to boil the frog slowly. Unless the hybrid schedule is optional, expect to be back full time in under a year! You'll know you're about to go back when your managers manager has an all hands and mentions something about people being confused or not knowing when their team will be in the office. They'll manufacture consent by doing a bunch of surveys that they claim people want to go back. Then 3 months later they'll mandate teams return to work full time (with a flex alternating friday off or something) for 'team cohesion'. You can actually be a change management consultant. It's big money.
• ketzo 5y ago
  At the start of the pandemic, I knew I would miss working with people in person, but thought I would be totally great with WFH. Now, I know that I badly need some amount of in-person time with my coworkers on a weekly basis, or I go crazy. It's a motivational thing for me. I thrive on solving problems for and with other people, and there's an "out of sight, out of mind" effect for me over zoom. It's just harder for me to get my brain going. I wish I were better at WFH - maybe with the right type of work I would be. I love everything else about it! My home office setup is awesome, I always hated commuting, I love the flexibility of doing chores during the day or getting some work done at 11pm because I don't feel like sleeping. But man, I miss people.
  • spurgu 5y ago
    > It's a motivational thing for me. I've always loved working from home (and was doing it for almost a year before the pandemic started), I'm quite self-driven, but I do recognize that it can be difficult to get back into the groove once you've been out of it for a while - meeting colleagues in person would help with that aspect. Ideally, if my colleagues weren't some 3000 km away, I wouldn't mind going to the office once a week or something.
    • pc86 5y ago
      It's hard to find places that have anything in the middle. It's either fully remote, they may or may not even have an office anymore, and they act like you're crazy if you suggest having some sort of standing office space available without special reservations or advance notice. Or on the flip side, they want you in the office 3, 4 days a week, 8-5 or whatever, basically pre-COVID requirements. I agree I think the best of both worlds would be some sort of schedule, maybe ~1-ish day a week on average. Personally I'd love something like Monday-Tuesday in the office every other week. But everybody is different, which in turn makes it really hard to coordinate and make everyone happy.
      • spurgu 5y ago
        > I agree I think the best of both worlds would be some sort of schedule, maybe ~1-ish day a week on average. Yeah this would be fine/nice as well. If nothing else there's at least been a strong step towards the potential of WFH with all of this, even though it hasn't lead to ideal outcomes.
• ianai 5y ago
  I would strongly prefer WFH or at least a hybrid. But I’m more than happy to work from the office if it’s a competitive advantage in the common era.
• NicoJuicy 5y ago
  For me it's the same. Perhaps a bit of preference to working from the office ( I'm also nearby). But I've noticed that our jr programmers haven't improved since 2 years ago.
• zamadatix 5y ago
  Work from home but within reasonable driving distance (2 hours) for a day or two in person event (usually some portion work oriented but mostly socializing focused) every month or two with folks in similar situations. I like this balance much better than my previous job where I was work from home but never got to meet everyone because it was a large company and we were all over the country. There was still ~weekly mix of getting together with local folks at the regional office but looking back it still seemed more often than I like. That said I like each much better than at the job prior to that where they had an aversion to people not being in their office chairs every day. All 3 jobs were in the same field and closely related outside of seniority.
• dleslie 5y ago
  Working from home means I get to see my wife and children for more hours of the day. It also means that I get to choose when I will allow myself to be interrupted, rather than sitting in an open concept office and being _continually_ interrupted. I've been working from home for over six years. I never want to return to the office. I will change careers before I return to a software development office.
  • cm2012 5y ago
    Same, I do marketing and have been working from home for almost six years. Nothing could make me work in an office again.
  • User23 5y ago
    Open concept offices are awful. As someone who is more vulnerable to interruptions than most, being able to control my work environment is a godsend. Everyone is different, but my ideal work environment is library quiet. No music and certainly no overheard conversations or people constantly walking past. I’ve never worked in an office that was willing to provide such an environment, but I have it at home.
    • catsarebetter 5y ago
      Totally agree, used to wear enormous noise cancelling headphones but I would have to pay music to completely block out noise from the office, but then there would be loud music playing in my ears. Real challenge there
      • erik_seaberg 5y ago
        Noise cancelling responds to droning, repetitive sounds, while a big chunk of plastic responds to everything. Not to sound like a shill, but there’s an old headphone model (HD-280 pro) I’ve always sworn by, and I was pleased to see that same model was in Google’s “stuff” catalog for any employee to request. Another colleague reused his earmuffs and earplugs from the gun range, but I think most of those are pretty uncomfortable.
• irrational 5y ago
  I worked professionally in an office from 1998 to 2020 and remote from March 2020 till now. There is absolutely no comparison. Working from home is so much better than working in an office that I will quit any job that wants me to work in an office from here on out. Fortunately my current company (a Fortune 100 company) is saying that at some point everyone will have to come back to the office T-TH, except for IT/programmers/developers.
• thatsamonad 5y ago
  I’ve been remote at least some of the time for the last 4-5 years and fully remote since the start of the pandemic (which is what I intend to do going forward). I totally understand why some people would rather be in an office, even those who are “just” writing code. But I’m just not a very social person and I value time with my family over in-person social interactions with my coworkers (despite my current coworkers being very nice and awesome people). There’s also just zero need for me to be physically colocated given the work that I do, so any benefits are greatly outweighed by the commute and lack of flexibility that comes with a requirement to be in an office everyday.
• zem 5y ago
  i'm happy with either during my actual work time, but commuting is a huge negative. wfh all the way.
• wfhthrowaway 5y ago
  Did freelance, was at home everyday for many years. I loved it. But since I reported to myself, keeping a good schedule or structure was a challenging task. Along with that I didn’t have coworkers so things got pretty lonely. Lacking both structure and socialization allowed me to be completely wiped out emotionally for a long time when I lost an important person in my life. I got a job, luckily an office job… in the second half of 2019. Covid hit and I was work from home again. But this time I had structure. I had some socialization with coworkers through messaging and occasional virtual meetings. This was a really great middle ground. For awhile I suppose. My office is still closed and I would enjoy the option to go in, but only for in-person socialization. That’s a pretty self-serving reason for an office though. I’ve recently found other means of feeling a sense of community, and I’ve literally have never felt better in my life. I guess my tl;dr, in-person work had been a long term substitute for community for many people. Remote work is great, but try to maintain structure and become part of a true community.
• vncecartersknee 5y ago
  wfh vastly better although I enjoy going into the office on occasion to catch up with coworkers over lunch or something
• markmark 5y ago
  I've been working from home for about five years and vastly prefer it. I wouldn't be completely against going to the office one day per week, my previous company did this (my current company doesn't have an office in my country much less nearby). It would take something significant to get me back in an office full time again.
• hiptobecubic 5y ago
  I would like hybrid, but I think it is missing the biggest benefit about WFH, which is that it lets you move away from the office. I would rather my house now be near my office so I could go in a few days a week, but if it were close enough for that I wouldn't have been able to afford it.
• smallmouth 5y ago
  I prefer both together.
• __turbobrew__ 5y ago
  Where is the option in the poll: “prefer private office with door”?
  • JetAlone 5y ago
    Agree, definitely. Even working from home, for temporary separation from distractions this is ideal. Rooms are unreasonably expensive and the toll of not partitioning and ensconcing enough people and things with them is steep.
• Arubis 5y ago
  Work remotely from coworking space at my option; prefer my ability to make my own decisions.
• BoysenberryPi 5y ago
  I've done both and I'm indifferent.I recognize this is probably a very pro WFH crowd but there are pros and cons to both of them. I find collaboration is just easier in person and most of the big "aha!" moments I've had came during water cooler talk.I've also had co-workers whose quality of work completely shit the bed when we went WFH and some of them were let go by management because of it. On the other hand, being able to just get up and go to the kitchen whenever I have down time or get some chores done whenever I have a moment is pretty great.
• jamesfinlayson 5y ago
  Last bout of working from home I got quite frustrated not being able to have some conversations in person but at the moment I haven't felt it (different projects maybe). I do like seeing people in person and there are definitely some conversations that are most easily had with everyone together in person, but working from home Mondays and Fridays has its appeal as well.
• chc4 5y ago
  Working from home was very bad for both my productivity and my mental health. Going in and seeing coworkers every day as mandatory social interaction is a godsend, and I now know I don't want to work for any company that is 100% WFH. The lower friction to just talk to people sitting next to me over having to DM them, and overhearing them complain or talk about whatever random thing they are working on is also a substantial upgrade in feeling connected to the work that I'm doing.
  • paulmooreparks 5y ago
    It is interesting to me how big of a gulf there is between the pro-office and pro-WFH groups. It isn't the case that one is completely right and one is completely wrong. Clearly, there are different working styles, different personalities, and different social needs. How do we build work environments that can accommodate both?
    • alecbz 5y ago
      I'm not sure we can, or should. I imagine the future looks more like different companies/teams with different working cultures. True "remote as an office" and "working from office" work styles are inherently incompatible. And trying to compromise will probably make everyone unhappy.
    • bckr 5y ago
      > How do we build work environments that can accommodate both? Maybe we don't need to. Maybe different companies can have different cultures. Or, in a compromise with your idea, maybe you split up teams in a company by their preference.
• catsarebetter 5y ago
  I found that if I make friendships and relationships, have meaningful, exciting, ambitious, and ambiguous work afterwards, remote work works really well, especially for personal growth
• notatoad 5y ago
  I much prefer working from the office, but since covid started I've mostly been working in an empty office, and that's been great. And my commute is about ten minutes by bike, so most of the downsides of working from an office don't really apply to my office. I mostly just like having the division between work and home: I work at the office, I don't work at home. I think my ideal work location would be an office in town, but not in my company's building.
• woofcat 5y ago
  I'm fine with WFH, or in office 5 days a week. I think a mix would be terrible, as all meetings would end up being online anyways due to x% of the staff being remote on any given day. My company is currently planning on doing 40% in the office, 60% remote, however with everyone picking their own schedule heading into the office for 2 days a week seems stupid if I'm just going to be on Microsoft Teams there.
• madrajib 5y ago
  Work from office
• mastazi 5y ago
  I adapted to WFH well but - and that's a big one - I had multi-year experience working solo from home, for multiple years, before COVID started. Back when I started working solo around 10 years ago, I remember it wasn't easy and it took me a long time to find out how to do it right (e.g. things like "you still need to decide what your working hours are", or "you need self discipline" etc.). Back then, I remember having a hard time and I could not wait to get back to an office - which I did around 2015. But this second time around, I knew what to expect and I was able to adapt well from the start. Plus I have awesome coworkers and boss, that makes things a lot easier. We do things like virtually hang out once a week to play games etc. - that helps with not feeling lonely. EDIT: but the biggest difference is probably that I now have a family. Back then I had flatmates, but I guess it's not the same.
• deleted 5y ago
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• m0llusk 5y ago
  What I like most is to work from a rented office that is not the office. That separates work from home but without being forced to constant closeness with coworkers.
• DevKoala 5y ago
  Work for home by far. It saves me 1 hour and a half of commute everyday, and allows me to have a semblance of work life balance.
• ggm 5y ago
  I like catching up with my co-workers but I'd be lying if I claimed it was for improved efficiency on the day/at-the-time. It pays back in motivation and common understanding, but travel to and from work, time wastage catching up, longer lunches eats into the productivity. Its a LOT harder to maintain "flow" in open-plan. But my ears hurt less when I don't have to constantly zoom in with 'phones. That said, Because not 100% of the overlap worklife people are in the office at the same time, most meetings incur a zoom cost anyway.
• mfrw 5y ago
  Using the commute time to invest in my social-skills and spending time with family in my opinion is one of the reasons why I am now leaning towards a permanent WFH. Before the pandemic I did not know what I was missing in life -- spending quality time with family/friends.
• barbazoo 5y ago
  The pandemic has allowed me to change my life for the better. Once we started to work from home we took our chances and moved out of the city, hoping we wouldn't have to return to an office. We live close to nature now, close to family, have a wonderful community. We get to work from home so we spend much more time with family. There are many occasions throughput the week where I take a long break to work on something completely different, fixing something around the house, work on a project, go for a walk, it's just not possible in an office. I'm grateful for the time of my life not wasted in an office and the circumstances that come with it.
• ohCh6zos 5y ago
  Hands down working from home is so great compared to the office.
• mybrid 5y ago
  1 hour commute both ways in the SF Bay Area. Such a waste of life.
• JSavageOne 5y ago
  If by "office" you mean some large open office that you're forced to report to by 9:30-10:30 and stay for 8 hours glued to your desk the whole time with countless meetings, then no I prefer the freedom of working remotely. I think "working remotely" is more accurate description because one can work remotely without working from home (eg. working out of a coworking space, coffee shop, or park)
• Finnucane 5y ago
  I don't mind going to my office because my commute is a short bike ride and unlike probably a lot of you I have an actual little private office. But now, being in the office is suboptimal because there's still restrictions on how much direct contact we can have with other people in the building. I mean, why go to the office if I still have to use Zoom? (right now the office is closed for everyone).
• idrios 5y ago
  I would love to see this poll broken up into some kind of demographics of: Are you single/married/married with kids, do you have roommates (and are they also wfh) what industry do you work in, what stage of your career are you in, are you managing people, etc. I thought WFH would be great but it happened too early in my career. I had no savings and too many roommates, and I was not learning nearly as much on the job as I was while we were all in person. I still had to learn how to do my tasks but stopped having conversations with random coworkers about projects they were working on, stopped gossiping about our personal lives, all of our activity became measured and quantified (I freaking hate the MS-Teams online status) and my motivation suffered hard for all of it. It's hard for me to tell if it's my workplace that became dysfunctional or myself, but I wish I had spent long enough time in the office to get sick of it before being wfh.
  • rootusrootus 5y ago
    > Are you single/married/married with kids I think I'd have already gone completely insane if I were still a bachelor when this pandemic WFH experiment has been thrust upon me. I go stir crazy when I'm home alone, but I'm not really a social butterfly either. Work was a good compromise.
    • Hamuko 5y ago
      I'm single and I'm pretty pleased with with WFH. I've noticed that I do my best work when I'm listening to music anyways, so I'm still basically sitting in front of a computer with headphones on - except this time they're not noise-cancelling.
    • Qub3d 5y ago
      Mid-twenties bachelor here, your suspicions are 100% correct. I don't mind WFH too much, especially now that I have a companion pet, but I definitely feel like I can dig into work with more focus and vigor in the office. It also took a lot of conscious effort on my part to build a healthy hybrid work lifestyle. For one thing, I don't have the luxury of an entirely separate space to dedicate just to work -- my home office is also my bedroom and personal computer/gaming space. And as others have noted, its just... way too easy to fall into a pattern where you literally turn into a technological anchorite. I have refused to let myself use food or grocery delivery primarily because I realized there was a point in the depths of 2020 when I hadn't left my apartment in almost two weeks, and it really frightened me how easily the time passed, in a beige blur of life.
• abap_rocky 5y ago
  The pandemic really helped me confirm that I prefer the office. I always sought to establish a clear distinction between my work life and home life and the enforced work from home due to COVID has made the two blur to a point now where I feel like I've lost all rhythm. Now living through a pandemic itself has a way of disrupting the rhythm of life but I feel that the collapsing of space into a singular living and work area doesn't help matters. Another unexpected thing I've found that I missed while working from home is a commute. Now I imagine a person's opinion of their commute is highly conditioned on the mode of transportation but in my case it's a mostly relaxing public transit ride where I had 20-30 minutes of unstructured time to read, listen to a podcast, or just zone out. It similarly helped create additional space to separate the work life from the home life. This second point on a commute would probably completely change if I had a 90 minute drive in bumper to bumper traffic. If that was my life, there's a good chance I'd find work from home preferable.
  • TehShrike 5y ago
    I've been working from home for ~9 years. We live a short distance from town, so I use small grocery runs for about the same purpose as you were using commutes. Drive for 15-20 minutes listening to a podcast or thinking, do something useful, then drive back. Hard agree on a clear distinction between work life and home life. I require an office in the home with a door that closes. When I am in the office, I am working. When I leave the office, I am not working. The closed door separates my work life from my home life. My kids are trained not to come into the office, and my wife respects the boundary and messages me instead. I don't work from the living room or dining room. (I've tried, and I can't do it anyway, I become nearly useless to both the family members trying to talk to me, as well as my employer.)
  • alvatech 5y ago
    I am just like you. I used to also maintain a clear distinction between home and office. Also, I like driving and 45min(2 way) commute was therapeutic to me.
  • mdorazio 5y ago
    100% agree on the non-separation of "home" and "work" being terrible. It's easy to say "just don't work after 5/6/whatever" but in practice not having a physical separation between "this is where I work" and "this is where I don't work" makes that mental switch damn near impossible. I've ended up working far more hours since the pandemic started than I did previously, and when I'm "done" working, I'm still thinking about work and can't even summon the energy to work on hobbies. I'd love a private office in a co-working space, but as I posted in the "problem you want solved" thread earlier today, those are stupidly priced for individuals. Would love to hear how other people solve this.
• rootusrootus 5y ago
  I miss the in-person time, but I don't miss the commute. That's the conundrum. I don't like zoom calls, especially since we have so many pointless ones. Half the people (or more) don't even turn on the camera, and nearly all of them have crappy microphones. It's mostly an exhausting waste of time. There are a bunch of nearby teams that I'd interact with daily at the office, but we have no real reason to talk most days when we're just plugging away on our own narrow slice of the work, so that connection is fading. I feel more mercenary than I ever have in my working life before.
• progman32 5y ago
  Saw the light of wfh in 2020. Won't consider returning to the office anytime soon. I'm sensitive to my environment, and staying home has been a game changer. It's opened my eyes to other ways I was ignoring my needs, too. Now I can spend my precious introvert people budget on things that are more important to me than office interactions, and perform better at work to boot. I recognize other people prefer office work and that's totally fair. I'm just glad that the pandemic has opened easier avenues for people like me.
• rammy1234 5y ago
  Working from Home is great for 3 things. 1. It makes you to do work. End of the day you have to show your progress. WFH forces that coz everyone will now focus on your output than ever. 2. Forces documentation of your work. Everything needs to be documented. 3. You exactly know how your time is spent and with whom.
• doopy1 5y ago
  I hope I never have to commute to an office again. Working from home full time has been a dream come true.
• pyuser583 5y ago
  At start of pandemic was working from home, but with a company I had previously worked in person. I knew all my coworkers, and had plenty of in-person history with them. Now I work for a different company. I’ve never met any of my coworkers. None of them are in the same city. Most are on different continents. My ideal situation is working in office for a year, then work from home.
• cardosof 5y ago
  I'm never going back to work in an office. If companies stop with WFH I'll become a freelancer on Upwork or whatever. Sure, there are many advantages to being in the office, learning and career-wise. But those advantages are related to just one aspect of life: work. With WFH I get perks in every aspect of life, plus it is healthier for me and to the environment, while also being better to the community I'm in - I get to spend my money here locally and not in some corporate park.
• pmcollins 5y ago
  i work from home and have the option to work from an office but the office is shitty and has an open plan. so no, i’m not going to commute 1.5 hrs round trip so i can be uncomfortable all day and be distracted by my coworkers (who i like otherwise). but give me an office with my own space, a nice view, natural light, and a walkable neighborhood, and i’m very much in.
• 8organicbits 5y ago
  Is part of the prompt missing? Should this be "I currently work from X, [but] I prefer working from Y"?
• Hippocrates 5y ago
  I'm an EM who went from full onsite, to hybrid, to full remote. This is my favorite topic. Throughout the pandemic we surveyed employees and they largely preferred to WFH. A lesser but significant cohort preferred a hybrid setup. Almost nobody at all was in favor of full-onsite. I was in the hybrid camp. I thought I could have the comraderie of the workplace and the dynamism of a bustling city, plus enjoy the comforts and efficiencies of WFH. On paper it sounds great. In practice it doesn't work at all. As an employee: I found that the office felt empty and dead which made me question commuting in. Nobody was really around to go to happy hours or have events. A significant portion of the people I wanted to be around were opting to stay home more. As an employer/manager: We found capacity planning to be hard. You can't save by scaling office space down if everyone is hybrid and still coming in on the same days (tues, weds, thurs, obviously). You also can't have a lively environment with A/B days and half-staff, and it creates headaches around who needs to be in together and when people want to be there. Communicating is easier if everyone just joins the meeting from their own laptop _wherever_ and doesn't need to arrive to a conference room and fight with some silly speakerphone-camera-tv thing. So I'm ALL IN on remote work. Does it have downsides? Of course. I miss bonding with coworkers, going out to coffee/lunch, and impromptou hack-sessions. What I have gained is different and so much more valuable: Hours of extra time per day to devote to family, friends, health and hobbies. Work is work, and life is life. It's a revelation to realize that you don't _need_ to be IRL buddies with coworkers, just do great work together, and then go do your own thing. Commuting is literally wasted money and life-- Full-stop. Corporate workspaces are redundant if the work can be done from home rather than letting that space go unused. This is just trimming wasted time and money and putting it somewhere more useful. I also find office attire to be insane. Countless individuals stressing about what shirt/pants/shoes combo to wear... ironing and paying for dry cleaning. Just go on your zoom call wearing something and use your brain to get shit done. Thats the whole point of work.
  • Sebb767 5y ago
    > As an employee: I found that the office felt empty and dead which made me question commuting in. Nobody was really around to go to happy hours or have events. A significant portion of the people I wanted to be around were opting to stay home more. Having a fixed office day really helps. Also, what I really liked about the hybrid approach is that the commute can actually be better; i.e. I don't mind driving 1h to work if I do so once per week. > It's a revelation to realize that you don't _need_ to be IRL buddies with coworkers, just do great work together, and then go do your own thing. You also don't need to love your job, you just need to pay your bills. I don't think this is a revelation; at least for me, being friends with my coworkers is a significant part of what makes working fun. And even with WFH you still spend a lot of time working. This is of course just preference; if you're not much into socializing, cutting out that part of your life and instead spend the time somewhere else can make sense.
• alecbz 5y ago
  I'm working from an office now but my direct coworkers are all in other cities. I think actually working colocated with the people on my team is close to my no. 1 criteria for any new/teams jobs going forward. Maybe not totally ignoring comp, but I could definitely imagine taking some comp hit if it meant getting to work with a team again or not. I think the most interesting thing about a lot of this is how wide the spectrum of desires is. It ranges from "you couldn't pay me enough to work from an office again" to "you couldn't pay me enough to WFH".
• bckr 5y ago
  Thanks for this!
• bckr 5y ago
  Thanks for this! I'll try that next time.
• sverhagen 5y ago
  For me at least, the real answer is of course much more nuanced. I'm probably well off being in my home office. We're making it work. I get a lot more time to hang out with my wife, or pick up my kid from school in the middle afternoon. But do I miss some creative meetings around the whiteboard in the office? Bet you!
• elviejo 5y ago
  Small co-working space within walking distance from home. Get the benefits of working from home (no commuting, no traffic, closeness to family) Get the benefits from the office: other professionals with whom to share, clear boundaries between work and family. And even something that neither can provide: networking with people outside of your coworkers. And a healthy walk every day.
• wly_cdgr 5y ago
  I like anywhere between a couple days a quarter to a couple days a week in the office, with the rest at a coffeeshop or coworking space. I mean...what I ACTUALLY like is not having to work for a living, but I'm a wage slave, so that's not an option
• musesum 5y ago
  Prior to covid, was coming in a couple hours before everyone else and get most of my coding done before standup. After standup was lunch, so got the camaraderie. When we started WFH, meetings started to drag out longer and longer. It got to the point where I would DM the PM to stop snoring. Fave work environment was at a co-working space in Bali. No talking allowed in the AirCon room. So, you're around two dozen people whom are intently focused in getting work done. No interruptions and yet high energy. For Human connection, just pop out into the other space, where talking is allowed. Plus, shared lunches or tea throughout the week. Best of both worlds.
• mr_tristan 5y ago
  I've been fully remote since 2017. It's not just about personal convenience. The fully remote teams I've been a part of tend to have far more efficient meetings. I've now pushed status checks or round robin style stuff to Slack workflows. Every meeting I go to in this "good" remote world has an agenda, and generally good discussions. And I actually feel like more of a part of large organizations. Yeah, we are planning proper "meatspace" get togethers, which will help gel the team more. But that's 2-4x a year. I don't think that needs to happen a lot to really reap some social benefits. For everyone seeking more social interaction; just go find it locally, outside of work. I guess I'm fully in the camp of work being intense, but time bound. And that's what remote work affords me, though I've learned to draw the lines between my work time and my personal time starkly. Once you get it right, office environments feel like such a drag in comparison.
• kxrm 5y ago
  As a software developer I have been working from home for 20 years, I have no intention of ever changing this setup. I do better, more quality work when I can control my environment and minimize disruption. I have taken less pay in order to keep this going. It's well worth it when you consider the costs of commuting.
• diogenescynic 5y ago
  I'll never go back to an office. I've had two kids since the pandemic started and working from home has allowed me to spend way more time than I ever expected to. It's not worth anything else to be in the office. I don't have a commute so I can use those hours to get things done, plus I'm not fatigued/drained by dodging traffic, etc. I was also able to move to a lower cost of living area, which also happens to be closer to family which also helps with childcare. WFH is more human. Going to work was a total grind which I don't thing I could physically or mentally put up with again (if I weren't forced to by necessity). Plus remote work also allows me to live closer to things I want to do (like mountains for alpine sports).
• poink 5y ago
  I'm WFH and will never go to an office again, unless a team convinces me I'm missing something by being there, and I seriously doubt that will ever happen at this point in my career.
• lifeplusplus 5y ago
  Wfh
• mcorning 5y ago
  I'm a [graduate] student and developer working from home and doing classes from home. I am without a doubt less engaged in class, and I am completely loving it. I put my headphones on and do chores around my apartment and treat class like a podcast. When discussion or "lab" sections roll around, I pop over to my computer and engage with my friends/classmates for some collaborative social interaction. Especially as a person who is working with code during group sections 98% of the time, it is SO much easier to share what we are doing. The days of 3-4 students crowded around somebody's beat up 2016 Macbook are over, at least for me. Screen share, remote control, and a chat to drop useful links/resources is heaven on earth in comparison. Not to mention, thanks to not needing to make breakfast, eat it, pick out a nice outfit, make my bed, wash the dishes, commute, etc. before class, I am getting more sleep than I can ever remember, because I'm doing all of those mindless tasks during class.
• twayt 5y ago
  I find that I get more emotionally jerked around working in person and can insulate myself from it working from home. Coworker acts curt to me as though they are superior and more productive than me? Rage ensues and I get an ungodly amount of work done. Come across an inspiring/encouraging coworker or get recognition for something? I feel great and feel like I take more risks. Coworker types super loud or acts inconsiderately? My productivity is hampered and I keep focusing on that instead of getting work done. Attractive coworker or someone I want to impress within sight? I can’t concentrate on actual productivity and try to overcompensate by typing more and acting zoned in. Feel like a social failure during lunch and forced to sit passively as a couple douchebag workers on adderall dominate the conversation? Feel like a bitch for a few hours. At home, I’m as productive as I need to be and my motivation allows me to be. No more emotional volatility regarding how I relate to others around me. Fucking incredible if you ask me.
  • alecbz 5y ago
    Totally just my 0.02, but this reads a little like "opting out" instead of addressing issues interacting with other humans. Like yeah, humans are sometimes great, sometimes make you feel not great, sometimes are genuinely bad. I think life is learning to address and navigate all of that.
    • rendall 5y ago
      Speaking as someone who has at times felt the same as OP, some people's empathy or emotional reactivity is just amped up higher than average for whatever reason. You can argue that they shouldn't, or mustn't, or should do something else, but navigating all of that is simply more distracting and exhausting for some than others.
      • alecbz 5y ago
        1. I'm not saying it's not more of an issue for some than others, but I still think learning to navigate that is part of life. It depends a bit on what kind of life you want, but I think we're inherently social beings, and learning how to navigate difficult social settings is important, even if difficult. 2. I'm pretty empathetic and emotionally reactive, and honestly I've found that WFH makes this worse in a lot of ways. Working IRL helps humanize people. A disagreement over text might make me feel like I'm being attacked, but it's easier to see it more as just a discussion if it's happening IRL. People that I view as being malicious start to seem more human and relatable IRL. I'm better able to vent and commiserate with others IRL than over text.
• halestock 5y ago
  I struggle with ADHD, and I know I work much more effectively from the office. I learned during the pandemic that I really need and missed the social interactions that occur in the office, both for my mental health and for my job (there's nothing wfh that beats a five minute hallway conversation to meet new people, learn about projects, brainstorm, problem solve, etc etc). I also need the commute to help force me to bike and stay in shape (and it does wonders for my mood!). But at the same time, the flexibility of working from home is incredible. I have been baking like a fiend because it's perfectly suited for the periodic breaks I take during the day. I can take a nap or go for a walk almost whenever I want. I don't feel bad about these things because I'm not wasting time walking to a meeting or waiting in line for the bathroom, and they make me more productive. So, hybrid I guess.
  • rzz3 5y ago
    It’s interesting, I’m severely ADHD and I can focus much better at home. I find offices horribly distracting. I used to come to the office 1 or 2 days a week before the pandemic, and they were my least productive days by an order of magnitude.
    • tgaj 5y ago
      I think it's just complicated with ADHD. On one side it's easier for me to focus in a home, when I don't have problems with my executive function. But if I have problem with choosing what to do and to just start, then being in office with other people is helpful. It gives me boost in the motivation.
• beebmam 5y ago
  I don't really like physically being around only men, so I don't enjoy being in the workplace. I much prefer to work from home when I work at companies that have a small percentage of women on my team (which is every software job I've had in the last 15 years)
• Razengan 5y ago
  Home, though my ideal environment would be outdoors, in something like a gazebo or a sheltered spot in a park, sitting with my computer surrounded by nature, occasionally watching people and animals without having to interact.
• idorosen 5y ago
  A missing option here is Work from home, prefer working from home and meeting regularly (e.g. a week a month) at some nice destination (e.g. Hawaii).
• rubyfan 5y ago
  I’m convinced that I’m weird somehow because since the start of the pandemic I have very little in person engagement with anyone outside my wife and kids… and I’m totally OK. Most people I know are either seriously bothered by lack of in person interaction or they’ve said screw it and are living a pre-pandemic life now. Like people were depressed or otherwise in bad mental places and I’ve been overall better throughout, so I sort of feel guilty. WFH for me has been amazing, I get more personal time, more family time, less stress, less commute - feels like a total win for me. Like many corporate employees I am lamenting being forced back to a 3/2 hybrid arrangement in the near future. And like many I’m looking for a new employer.
  • shaunpersad 5y ago
    You're not weird. There are dozens of us! Dozens! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18419378 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18419378
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• omahane 5y ago
  Because we work in two week sprints, what I would really enjoy is having on person demos, retros and planning on a biweekly basis while working from home the other days.
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• jsrcout 5y ago
  Work from home, definitely. The office was fine but I'm very much an introvert and it's just so much less stress this way. The main thing I miss is random chats with people in the aisles or the break room. Haven't found a substitute for that at all. When our site reopens, we'll probably be coming in for meetings/whatever fairly often, so things should be about perfect.
• paulmooreparks 5y ago
  Work from home for me. I moved to Singapore in 2017 and I was already 80% WFH pre-Covid. The other 20% was just because some more senior people wanted to see faces in the office and possibly justify having as large an office as we did. Now I'm in a new company, still in Singapore but doing basically the same job. I work in retail POS professional services, and my reports and colleagues are scattered all over Asia and Australia. This is because our customers are also equally distributed, and most of our time is spent engaging customers and collaborating remotely. My manager is in Utrecht but soon will be in Sydney. Fortunately, she doesn't care where I work as long as I get the work done. That's also my message to my reports. It's a unique job and set of circumstances that lends itself to WFH, but it suits me perfectly. Now I can't imagine going to an office every day.
• on3twothr33 5y ago
  WFH FTW!
• _9omd 5y ago
  I'm currently living alone, and while not currently working, the idea of working from home feels like being stuck in solitary confinement all day. I've tended to have offices I biked to, where I worked with people I liked, so I generally enjoyed going in. The separation of work from home I find really nice too. I've worked from home before, but always had roommates or a partner living with me. Of course all that being said at this point in my life the idea of being forced to be in an office Monday - Friday sounds like torture too. I guess I can't win.
• jltsiren 5y ago
  I like working from home. I like living close enough to office that I can go there to meet people without advance planning. I like the idea of having an office day once a week, but I don't like waking up early enough and completing morning routines in a hurry to actually go there that often. So I guess it's the "daily/weekly mix" option.
• chrysoprace 5y ago
  Work from home with the option to meet with colleagues face to face (without obligation). I had a choice between a 100% WFH job and a semi-WFH job with more pay and I would've really liked the flexibility of 100% WFH, but with the housing market going the way it's going here I had to sacrifice that for more pay. Given the chance, I'd go for a 100% WFH option again in the near future.
• danhab99 5y ago
  It would be way better if I didn't have to commute 1hr. The money's way worth it and I love my bosses, but it's just the worst thing I have to complain about.
• shell0x 5y ago
  I prefer working from home. I moved to Toronto, but then I found out that Downtown is a bit of a shit hole, so I'll try to move out as far as I can(maybe even a different province)
• donatj 5y ago
  We went to temporary work from home at the beginning of the pandemic. Well it's been 2 years now. I have hated every minute of it. I used to have a 15 minute commute which was a nice bit of time to get my thoughts in order. Now I roll out of bed when my alarm goes off and do daily stand-up on zoom in my home office literally 5 minutes later. My brain is literally still asleep. I miss people, I miss spontaneous interactions, I miss interactions with people who are not in my department. With very rare exception, I have not spoken to anyone outside of my department of 15 people in 2 years. There are over a thousand people in my company. My wife works nights and I work during the day, which is the worst of all worlds. I hear her TV shows, TikToks, etc through the walls and they really distract me. I have noise canceling headphones, they only go so far. When I worked at the office, my brain knew it was work time and could focus. At home, my brain is like "oh you should do the dishes", "what was that loud bang, you should check the basement?". My output has completely crashed. My friends all had kids and moved to the exurbs, so I've seen them a couple times since the whole thing started. I'm genuinely losing my mind from lack of social interaction. I want to go back to the office so badly.
  • McNutty 5y ago
    >Now I roll out of bed when my alarm goes off and do daily stand-up on zoom in my home office literally 5 minutes later. My brain is literally still asleep. You can fix this yourself, incredibly easily. Personally I have never changed my alarm clock based on if I'm WFH. My wife is happy to pop in her headphones if I ask her to while I'm working. I keep scheduled breaks. If I decide in the morning that the dirty dishes are bothering me then I might do them on my lunch break or when I "get home". And to be fair, if you heard a loud bang at your office anyone would go check it out immediately, no difference at home.
    • bckr 5y ago
      It's interesting to see how the pro-WFH folks largely seem to sneer at pro-office folks' complaints, regarding them as trivial. I'm not seeing the other way around in this or other recent threads. Of course, this may be partially explained by the structural pressure against WFH, which has left its proponents on the defensive. But it strikes me as anti-compassionate.
• chologrande 5y ago
  I often feel like an overlooked part of working from home is the cost you have to take on to do so. While I love the convenience of working from home, making an office space at home takes a huge portion of the square footage available for me. My company offers $100/mo as a stipend to work from home. This is approximately the cost of .25 square feet of real estate. I can't afford to work from home, but I have to anyway. Most companies I know have closed down their offices. :(
• madeofpalk 5y ago
  In the before times, I (thought I) loved working from the office. I'm a reasonable social person, so I enjoy hanging out with people in the office and after work at the pub. It took me a while to get used to remote work, but now I couldn't have it any other way. I do miss the social aspects of being in the same physical space as other people, but I greatly prefer the other freedoms like not wasting 1-2 hours of my day commuting to work. I used to get pretty bad seasonal depression over winter which has now disappeared as I'm not longer coming home in the miserable cold dark for a few months of the year. I'm also grateful that I have a decent apartment with a seperate and dedicated office that is a very distinct area from where to cook, eat, and sleep. I'm thankful that I have a good social circle (who I all met through past jobs in an office...) that still regularly hangs out. One silver lining of the past few years is that we just go over to each other's place to hang out, which is much more comfortable and cheaper!
• tootie 5y ago
  I think the huge irony of tech work over the last twenty years is that the WFH revolution was preceded by the offshoring revolution. I spent probably half my working days since 2012 working with partly or fully distributed teams around the world or at least the country. I don't grudge because I had some great teammates in Colombia or Ukraine or Costa Rica or Roumania. It was obvious they could do good work without being with us in person. There's very little about tech work that can't be done remotely. I worked in consulting and we had no trouble doing sales and support remotely too.
• ajkjk 5y ago
  One thing that the whole pandemic-induced WFH debate has really proven is this: in every HN post even tangentially related to the subject, everyone will state their strongly-held stance on the matter over and over, shouting into the void. I do it too (there are a few in my comment history), but I don't quite understand why. It's maybe something like: if I state my stance (wfh, prefer working from office, for the record) then maybe the comment-section-at-large will stop assuming everybody else wants to WFH forever. But it rather feels like the community has a collective neurosis, chanting their opinions on the subject in a loop with no purpose. Perhaps we can do better.
• sebastien_b 5y ago
  Our small company went remote-only since well before the pandemic - started out with the engineering crew working from home 2 days a week, to eventually full-time remote, and finally the rest of the employees. Generally it's worked out well - more flexibility and better work/life balance, but does need adjustment, especially if you have a busy household. We try to get together for monthly all-hands, and usually try to have some social/team-building activities at the same time (conditions permitting - only remotely during the pandemic).
• euske 5y ago
  A university teacher. I work from the office for now but without student. I understand the appeal of online classes but man do I miss in-person teaching. In an online class, there's virtually no reaction from students (as most students here prefer to turn the camera off) and I feel like I'm a YouTuber who's constantly talking to an empty camera.
  • bckr 5y ago
    Thanks for sharing a different perspective! I liked not communiting to University but the lack of socialization with fellow students and professors was a drag.
• systemali 5y ago
  Commuting to office at odd hours is one drawback and hence, In the current situation that I am in, I prefer WFH !
• NAHWheatCracker 5y ago
  Work from home has a huge list of tangible benefits to employees. It seems hard to argue against. Less time driving and travel costs. Freedom to take a breaks however you please. Fewer distractions (YMMV). More autonomy. Better office equipment (depends). That said, there's far less camaraderie in my teams with WFH normalized. Initially, people put effort into talking regularly. The effort has evaporated. Now talking only happens for project-related things. There is far less passive "team building". When we were in the office, there were many random events that I miss. Eating lunch with people, often from other departments/projects. Free food in the break room. Playing MTG with coworkers. Playing Smash Bros with coworkers. Random hallway discussions. As a naturally introverted person, I love WFH. As an introspective person, I think WFH has done hidden damage by enabling my introversion to an extreme degree. However, I think that's more of a strike against my personality than against WFH.
• cebert 5y ago
  Covid has taught me that I really enjoy working from home the majority of the time. This surprised me as I did not expect to like remote work as much as I do now. I have a private office at my home instead of a crowded open office plan at work. Additionally, my team is distributed across the US; even if I did go in the office my whole team wouldn’t be there. Now that I’ve learned how to adapt to remote work, it’s my preferred arrangement. I do miss some professional interactions. My plan is to start regularly attenuation Meetup type groups as we return to normalcy. This is likely even better than only networking with folks who work at the same company as me.
• jayd16 5y ago
  I don't mind hybrid and I especially do not mind a casual office environment but... I'm getting a bit annoyed with the the lack of core hours. You don't need to pretend to be working, but what happened to being reachable during work hours? I feel like what was once a quick walk across the office room can be a two day turnaround these days.
• errcorrectcode 5y ago
  Face time at the office is essential for career development. Also important for mental health is leaving the cave and a cognitive change of scenery.
• dvtrn 5y ago
  Home. My setup here is better, and my chair doesn’t make my lower back scream. Plus there is absolutely nothing that can beat lunch hour siestas in my own damn bed, let me tell you
• whateveracct 5y ago
  Goes to show that the negative commentary on remote work is a bit of a vocal minority situation on HN.
• georgeburdell 5y ago
  Perhaps for selfish reasons, I prefer to work in an office. First off, I have small children who have a nanny, and so I get interrupted a lot at home (my office at work is relatively quiet). Second, I live in the Bay Area so I theorize that my compensation is implicitly tied to a need to go into the office. The fact that my work is not WFH has the side effect of limiting the talent pool to those who can move to the Bay Area. I bet there are thousands of people world-wide who could do my job better and for less pay, if only they could immigrate to the U.S. I expect that paying Bay Area compensation for remote roles is transitory.
• techsin101 5y ago
  Working from home can get to a point where you feel like you are stuck in some time loop and going crazy, but it's better to take time off and go around and be in different env, than to be required to commute daily and sit in meetings you have no say or impact on you at least with remote you can mute yourself and relax.
• ChuckMcM 5y ago
  When I first came to the Bay Area I was thrilled that California law stated unequivocally that I could work on, and profit by, my own stuff on my own time and equipment. I exploited that law by consulting on other projects while I worked for Intel. But what I discovered was that since I had made "home" as much an office as "work" I didn't have anywhere to go that wasn't "work." That was very stressful for me since sometimes you really do need to get away. After that experience I became much more judicious about working from home. A trick I used to help maintain mental sanity was to "set up" a home office for doing work when I needed/wanted to work from home, but then taking it down when I was done. That it wasn't there was the important bit in allowing me to not get stressed out about it.
• AtlasBarfed 5y ago
  When I was single: work from home. Now that I'm not: work from office.
• makeitdouble 5y ago
  Working from home was a lot harder than from office in many ways. The most obvious part was becoming my own office manager, somewhat stay motivated and focused, adapting the new work rythmes, getting clues about how coworkers are doing etc. Then scheduling that with family and maintaining the home on the private side. But it is really worth it. Mental health has improved a lot, even as objectively I’m doing longer days in total. Getting to interact a lot more with my family is a big part of it. It also means better understanding how the day goes for them, instead of the end of the day self-report at the dining table we were used to. Work quality improved, there’s just way less “doing random stuff to look busy”. Social life went way down, but the parts that stayed are also way more meaningful. My hope is we see the light at the end of the “how do you socialize remotely ?” tunnel and find a middle ground between the current situation and the having everyone commute/wander in the city.
• jader201 5y ago
  One consideration that I don’t see covered here much (among the many other considerations often mentioned) when discussing WFH vs. WFO is whether you live with others. I’m married and have two (teenage) children and have been working from home 100% for (going on) 8 years, and have very little issues with feeling alone. Obviously if I lived alone, it would be a different story, and I would likely prefer going back to the office. It seems like we constantly discuss and compare WFH and WFO without really discussing the difference living with others makes, especially if you have older children (where “older” = are mostly self-sufficient, which I consider about 10+, give or take).
• LAC-Tech 5y ago
  I live in a small rural village, looking out over a cattle pasture, which itself is against the backdrop of national park - a long mountain range covered in forest. Now in my ideal world this village would also have lots of amazing companies with cool offices that pay lots of money. But that's not going to happen. So even though I do miss in-person stuff, I'll take the peace and quiet and not having to commute.
• Mandatum 5y ago
  Regular social events in-person with colleagues is a must. But all my actual work can continue to be from home.
• pkukkapalli 5y ago
  As a single guy, I prefer work from office. I'm sure if I was married with kids, I would prefer just the opposite.
• amyjess 5y ago
  I didn't realize how much I love working from home till the pandemic began. Last spring, I left a company I'd been at for five years and had made several friends at because they wanted us to return to the office. I ended up landing at an all-remote subsidiary of a multinational that's super cautious about covid and hasn't even started to reopen their offices at all aside from a small handful of people who do shipping and receiving and need to do physical stuff in person. I don't regret it one iota. I ended up getting a drastic pay increase and a seriously more impressive title out of the switch. Back in October, I went out drinking with my former boss and he told me my old company cancelled their return to the office and went all-remote again when the delta surge started. I'm enjoying my new company too much to go back, though (and, no, they haven't replaced me, and that's a long story). Some clarification on the subsidiary I work for: they were remote-first even before covid, and while they had an office, nobody was required to work there in person even well before the pandemic started. While our parent company wasn't remote-first, as soon as covid began, they immediately told my subsidiary's landlord that they wouldn't be renewing the lease. I've also been told that the parent company has 100% committed that all meetings will be Zoom-only forever even after offices reopen, because they've found that, as a multinational company, Zoom-only meetings have solved a problem where, pre-covid, if a team had 1-2 members in a different office than everyone else, those 1-2 members would be marginalized on the team and cut out of major decisions. Zoom has been the great equalizer. Edit: Oh yeah, the best part is that I'm in Texas but everyone else on my team is on the east coast. So I get to work from 8-4 and then close my laptop and enjoy the rest of my afternoon. Getting off at 4 every day has done wonders for my mental health.
• alwaysanon 5y ago
  Part of why working from home was soo effective for me at first is all the good will and camaraderie that I'd built up with my coworkers over many years - and vice versa. I imagine that if I had started a new role during the pandemic it'd have been quite different. When people ping you on Slack or email and ask you in a really curt/terse way for something it can feel very transactional without the occasional small talk to humanise your coworkers. And I find it really hard to do that sort of small talk remotely/virtually. So I think personally I need to have a day every week or two when you have a coffee/lunch/beer with people and get a chance to really have the small talk and put a face with the name. I also love huddling around a whiteboard for certain problems. Before Omicron I started going in one day a week and focusing it on the socialising and the meetings where in-person felt useful. The catch with that is that it means 'work from home' can't be 'work from anywhere' - as everybody needs to be an occasionally commutable distance from the office for it to work. I also realise that it doesn't save the company money on the office if every team comes in the same day - so you might need a roster kind of thing to maximise the space. That sounds solvable to me though - enough so where it is my preference if we can make it work for 2022...
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• slotrans 5y ago
  WFH is horrible and I can't wait for it to be over. Once mask mandates relax I may blow $200 a month on a coworking space just to get back into a rhythm where I leave the house daily, and see other humans.
• wruza 5y ago
  This has one flaw, it doesn’t ask if WFH preference is pre-2020 or post-. Two years is sometimes too little feel all side effects. Also it highly depends on which office. If you work at typically loud open space office, it’s one thing, if you have a room of 3 coworkers, that’s completely different. I’m afraid that this poll is partially of “does my office suck” type.
• shruubi 5y ago
  I prefer working from the office, not because of the social aspect but because I find that I just can't bring myself to be nearly as productive at home as opposed to in the office. What I really miss was the period in time where I could work in the office and everyone else was working from home. The quiet of no-one else around, the productiveness of not being at home and the commute for that period of time between work/home where I can have some time just to myself.
• eyelidlessness 5y ago
  I prefer working from home and have most of my career, but have found some aspects of broader remote work adoption really challenging because it’s a lot noisier at home. My poll vote is easy but I wanted to register this more complex experience as well.
• aj_nikhil 5y ago
  I collated the current numbers, in short 70% people desire to work from home, 30% from the office.
• tastysandwich 5y ago
  I'm torn between the two. On the one hand, I feel like working in the office makes me more productive and is better for my mental health. It's a change of environment, and I'm working around colleagues who keep me a bit more focussed (less likely waste 30 minutes watching YouTube if a coworker is right beside you). Also, on the hour-long commute I tend to read, which is terrific. So many of these books have changed my life for the better. When I'm at home I find I have too many distractions. You make a cup of tea, the cat meows and you let her in, she meows again and you let her out. You decide to read outside. Then you realise it's too sunny and grab a hat. Before you know it you've burnt through 30 minutes. On the other hand, since working from home during the pandemic I've filled the time saved with a lifelong dream of mine - learning to play guitar! I'm absolutely loving it. So a mix is a pretty good compromise
  • croh 5y ago
    Agree with this. And as day passes, pressure gets built to finish work and if you don't, you can't enjoy remaining day & night. At least with office setup, once you leave it physically, you also leave it mentally but with work from home setup that is not possible. Still it is good to have wfh option for emergencies. so yeah mix of both.
    • shard 5y ago
      Regarding tastysandwich's comment about having no time to read, my hack is to put the book I want to read in the bathroom, and never bring my phone with me. This give me some time to read every day, and I've polished off several books this way. Regarding your comment about work/home separation, similar to what someone else has mentioned in another thread, I have the work laptop that my company provides to me, and my personal laptop. I have no personal files on my work laptop and no work files on my personal laptop. I don't even have any work-related app (Teams, Slack etc) on my personal phone (my thinking is that if the company wants to reach me through those on a phone, they need to provide me with the phone). I only have my work laptop turned on when I am working. When I close my work laptop, I am done for the day.
• paradite 5y ago
  Neither. I am most productive working at a cafe or an outdoor sitting area (in a campus).
• anshumankmr 5y ago
  I like a mix of both, but since my office is in a completely different state, I am fully remote. Social interaction has been terrible for me, so I am working on finding a cycling club in my city. Also, since pretty much all of my friends are gone (all of them are in different cities), so this is all I really have (I don't count my office calls as social interaction) So if someone is a situation like I am in, I really really recommend cycling (or some outdoor sport). It really helps with the mood.
• CephalopodMD 5y ago
  WFH and prefer WFH with one major caveat. I've said this before, but really, I just want my own office. That's all. I'd be pretty okay with going in if I had my own office with 4 walls. First job of my career, they told me I would have an office of my own. First day I came back in for full time (I had interned there with my own office as well), they tell me they're switching buildings to go open office in about a month's time. I got a precious few weeks with a personal office, and then it was all gone. I hated this change of scenery immediately, but I guess I got used to it after a few years. Working from home took me back to that zen. I didn't even know how much I had missed it - how much I needed my own space to feel productive. I've since changed jobs, and I kinda dread having to go to the open office nightmare once this is all over. The facilities are way nicer than my last job, but it's still an open office. Open. Office. As. Implemented. In. Our. Industry. Is. Stupid.
  • deathanatos 5y ago
    Yeah, in all these polls about WFH or work-from-office preference, I'd really like to see it broken out by whether the respondent has an office in their WFH setup. I want to know if that changes the answer. I know my own opinion of WFH improved once I got a desk (once there was finally stock…) and a chair. It might be that the grass is always greener, but I feel like having the ability to close the door & have a private room (at home or in the real office…) can be a huge plus if you need some quiet time. Similar to the desk/chair, it's just a better working space. Open office floorplans were effective paycuts, IMO; nothing more than less space == cheaper, and no thoughts were given to the long-term effects because nobody in our industry thinks long-term about anything. Who would when whole companies turn over every two years? I'd love a home office… but real-estate prices are ridiculous.
    • nucleardog 5y ago
      I think it's just everyone trying to minimize their miserableness. For a lot of people with long commutes or terrible work offices, "minimizing suffering" is working from home/a co-working space regardless of what those look like. For a lot of people with terrible home office setups or lack of boundaries with family and short commutes, "minimizing suffering" is going to an employer's office. Personally, I think work from "home" (anywhere) is the better path for most of the HN-types. At its core, it's us taking back _control_ over our workspace and we have the resources to make it better if we choose to. I can move somewhere with a spare room to use as an office. I can't make my employer give me a private office. Which is all to say yes, I'd love to see a more in-depth poll/study on _why_ people are making the decisions they're making. My suspicion is that it largely comes down to which problems are easier to fix for that individual.
• bb88 5y ago
  I keep saying this, but at 1pm, if you're trying to find a stall -- some companies make this really hard to do.
• rcpt 5y ago
  Office but not in California because commute
• AdamJMarsh 5y ago
  Work from home. I can't describe how much better my life is doing remote work full time. I actually have the ability to exercise, cook wholesome meals, spend time with my girlfriend and invest the time spent travelling into hobbies / businesses / Never again will I be in an office. It's a hard limit for me now.
• sdoering 5y ago
  When I started to WFH at the beginning of the pandemic nearly two years ago I thought that a few days/weeks would be a nice change of scenery. Now, two years later I wouldn't want to go back to the office. I can imagine doing offsites together with my team. Or client workshops. But regularly driving a quarter hour into the office is off the table for me. Three days a week I start with swimming between 07:30 and 08:30 am. Sitting at my desk at 09:00. The other days I start early and am able to get some hours done before the meetings are killing productivity. And this way I am able to call it a day quite early.
• banana_giraffe 5y ago
  Due to a series of events at the company I currently work for, I've been one of a few permanent WFH employees in an otherwise office-bound company for a few years now. For the most part, everyone is still WFH in my company even now, though that's beginning to change. I prefer this for mostly selfish reasons. I'm no longer an outlier, someone that they need to remember to loop into meetings, or that single outlier with an odd schedule. That part has made my job easy. What's not easy for me: I'm now seen as the expert on how to WFH efficiently. I know what works for me, but communicating that to people in wildly different living arrangements, or just different work styles is surprisingly hard. And, it turns out I do miss meeting up with colleagues in real life. I used to travel to our different offices a few times a year and meet with colleagues. As much as I'm one of the ones that's really adapted well to WFH, turns out even I need some face-to-face time. I suspect I'm going to be a bucket of nerves and stress next time I attend a conference.
• schipplock 5y ago
  Headhunters now are asking me if I'm ok with home office, like it's something bad. My problem with home office is that I don't have a dedicated room for my "office". Also my heating costs went up, so did my power consumption. I still need to pay for car insurance and maintance :D. I seem to work more at home. My stress level actually increased. Also some people don't understand the concept of home office, and are now bugging me during work (my mom e.g.).
• GianFabien 5y ago
  I get more work done at home and prefer to avoid the commute. It's always possible to organize regular (weekly?) meetups at convenient locations where you talk shop, thrash out issues and socialize. Even if you rent a conference room in a co-working space or hotel, it is still less costly than maintaining unused office space in a downtown location.
• musicale 5y ago
  I like working at home, but I dislike living at work.
• jerzyt 5y ago
  Really depends on the phase of the project. At the start, getting everyone in the room is really beneficial. Once we decide what we're doing, I'd rather be left alone and work from home. At the end, testing, debugging and fixing, I'd rather be in the office.
• tempestn 5y ago
  I've worked from home for over a decade now, and would never go back. When I started autotempest ~2008 I assumed that once it evolved into a "real" business we'd eventually need to get an office, but it didn't make sense when it was just me. And then it didn't make sense when it was just me and one other guy. And then... eventually I realized there was no point at which someone was going to make me move to an office! :) You do really need to be intentional about team processes, communication, collaboration, etc. though for it to work. Also on an individual basis I do think it's easier for people with families or roommates. Can be a bit tough working from home while living alone if you don't have many other social outlets. (Especially during a pandemic when it's going to be a lot harder to engage in in-person activities outside of work.)
• gabrielsroka 5y ago
  See results sorted and totaled. https://gabrielsroka.github.io/hnpoll.html?id=30239441 https://gabrielsroka.github.io/hnpoll.html?id=30239441 Source https://github.com/gabrielsroka/gabrielsroka.github.io/blob/master/hnpoll.html https://github.com/gabrielsroka/gabrielsroka.github.io/blob/...
• whateveracct 5y ago
  Remote:hybrid:on-site preference seems to be 3:2:1
• allthecybers 5y ago
  Commuting to a crowded downtown core every day never made sense to me. I much prefer WFH. In my admittedly well appointed home office, I am much more focused, productive and it's easier to connect with my distributed team via video chats, Slack messages and Huddles. I do go into a corporate office about once a week and candidly I have issues with concentration and productivity because of the open office and stark lighting. To take calls or video chats you have to step away from your desktop setup (monitor, etc) to find any empty conference room so you don't have to compete with other people talking in the open office area. Sometimes when I go in I am the only one on a floor with 50+ desks. Those days are slightly better for productivity, but the vaunted social aspect of the office isn't there anymore. Or other team members are in so randomly and infrequently that the serendipity of water-cooler world problem solving never happens. While I prefer WFH for a number of reasons, I can understand why people prefer the office. But even on the days I appreciate having a corporate office, I still hate the open office configuration. It's almost like WFH has evolved and changed to be much better, and the office is stuck in the past. Candidly, you won't get me to come back into an office consistently, until there is a way for the office to be more like WFH.
• jinushaun 5y ago
  The results reflect other polls I’ve seen… My only conclusion is that everyone else had shitty 2 hr commutes in heavy traffic from their large house with extra rooms. Others, like myself, had a pleasant subway ride playing games/listening to music from my cramped tiny apartment.
• sturmeh 5y ago
  I miss how it was prior to the pandemic, and would happily office 5 days a week if I could get that back. However knowing that it's never likely to be the same, as people get used to WFH and companies realise they can save a load of money without creating incentives to get people in an office, the office is going to be far less desirable. I'm down for a mix or even WFH, but I miss the socialising greatly.
• skinkestek 5y ago
  I have found that I usually work better when I am in the office. Getting 5 kids to understand that I am at work is really hard. I also appreciate the separation of work and home that my commute provides. Also while I am very much allowed to work from home the customer I work with really live the effect that we older teammates have on younger ones. (The young ones currently in the teqm in my team are brilliantly smart and hardworking, we just share experience so they don't have to learn everything the hard way.)
• ixtli 5y ago
  I really wish there was an effective way to know what job descriptions answer what
• hiimshort 5y ago
  Perhaps a bit different from the usual stories and situations I hear, so I figure I'll share my thoughts. A few years ago (end of 2018) I ended up with a debilitating combo of anxiety, panic, depression, and stress from being overworked. That year and the following were the most difficult of my life. I had quit my job at the beginning of 2019 because I couldn't even think about work due to the cinstant chest pain. After half a year, I'd improved somewhat but began running out of funds and found another job. Unsurprisingly, my health improvements stagnated again and I continued to deal with chest pain and throat issues. Then 2020 came. My team went remote and, suddenly, I was able to rest my back, improve my diet, avoid the majority of stressors (aside from pandemic-related ones). I ended up leaving that job for one that was intentionally full-time remote. Working remote has been the best thing to happen to my health in years. I've lost 40 pounds, eat healthier, and have total control to manage my day. I know others prefer the office, but I don't think I'd ever want to go back regularly.
• medwards666 5y ago
  Given that I dislike being around people in general the pandemic has been fantastic for me in that it enabled me to work from home, and I've now managed to continue that with my current employment contract which has my permanent place of work listed as home. Overall, not having to commute to the office (and pay for trains, fuel, lunches, etc) is saving me over £8k/year, and I still have the advantage of being able to go in when needed (such as if there's a social planned for the evening or suchlike).
• konart 5y ago
  Work from home. Office may be an okay option but only if it is not an open space and if don't have to spend more than 1 hour commuting both ends (which is almost impossible here in Moscow).
• executesorder66 5y ago
  Personally I don't miss working from the office at all. Working remotely is better in every way when it comes to doing actual work. What I do miss though, is hanging out with my colleagues. It's nice to go for a coffee break or lunch break with a co-worker and just chat about (mostly non-work) stuff. We can organise socials etc. but it's not the same. I do have my own friends and family that I hang out with anyway, so it's not really a problem for me.
• antoniuschan99 5y ago
  It’s not even close! For “I like a mix of both” I would like to see what that mix is. From 1/5 days office/home all the way to 4/5 office/home mix :P Also reason why for either side would be interesting (no separation between office/home, want to be away from kids, no commute, etc)
• 01100011 5y ago
  I desperately want my company to announce their permanent WFH stance so I can find out if I can WF a real house outside of a tech hub instead of WF a tiny apartment that has turned into a cage for the last 2 years. As it is, I think I have one more year of SiValley before I can't stand the competitiveness or the iciness of the tense, joyless local population. Financially it was a good move for a while, but joy is too precious to sell for a few more dollars.
• dusted 5y ago
  In the beginning I enjoyed WFH a lot, I thought it was really neat, but that declined quickly (to be honest, I should have seen that coming, because I've also had a fully remote position before, and it didn't suit me, for the same reasons). To me, it's just less friction to be in the office, where I don't have to care about anything and can just do my work without distracting tasks like making sure there's coffee and food and avoiding doing chores "oh, I could clean a bit while thinking through this..."
• pmontra 5y ago
  Work from home and be self employed is the best if you can manage it. Saturday shitty weather, I work. Sunday shitty weather, I fix stuff at home and visit friends. Today wonderful sun, I get on my bicycle and go on the hills near home.
• jillesvangurp 5y ago
  I miss having a place to meet the people I work with but I don't need to meet them every day. I actually have been working with remote teams for the last six years or so. So, I've been used to not having a permanent office for quite long. I actually signed up with a co-working space four years ago just so I would get out of the house a bit more. And during the lockdown they were open throughout. My frequency of going there roughly stayed the same (once or twice a weak). A co-working space gives you most of the comforts of a workplace. Except my direct colleagues are not there and I don't have a fixed desk. It's great. Even just the bustle of other people around me doing whatever it is they are doing puts me in a mind to do something myself. I actually go there when I want to focus. When I have online meetings, I prefer taking them from home. It's more quiet there and it's just easier. During the lockdown, I actually joined a local startup as the CTO. Most of us are in the same city (Berlin). But we rarely meet in person. I meet some of the people for coffee or socially once in a while but we run the company like it is a remote company. We don't even have an office. It works but it's not ideal and we are eager to fix our office situation as soon as funding permits. Specifically, I'm eager to get our engineers (the usual selection of mostly introverted types) in one room to force some communication to happen a bit more naturally. We use a mix of discord, google meets and slack to meet online. None of these is ideal but collectively they have a feature set that's workable. Google meets, makes my CPU spin like crazy. It's alright when all you are doing is attending the meeting. Slack is on permanently but we never use its audio/video features. When I want to do pair programming with engineers, we tend to use discord. We could probably lose slack completely since discord has most of the relevant features. But for historic reasons we just have it and we get very little out of moving over. We are on a freemium plan with both. During the lockdown, I also started doing long walks. That's something I now actively make time for since I usually feel great after having one. I can walk for hours if time permits. I'll put some BT headphones on and listen to podcasts. Sometimes I bring my camera to shoot some photos along the way. For a lot of people, a commute more or less fills the same role.
• hycaria 5y ago
  I work two jobs, the second one is not possible remotely. Now that the first one (SWE) is fully remote, my interactions with coworkers in job 2 are more intense and I feel much more a part of Company 2 than before. So I need human interactions but it’s fine if it’s another group of people. I have hobbies outside with people too, but the mandatory aspect of a job, and the variety of people (compared to a hobby where we all like the same thing) just makes it better.
• bradlys 5y ago
  Gonna add to the noise. I know this will go mostly unnoticed so I’m gonna unhinge my jaw here. I like a mix. The last 2 years has been basically hell on earth for me. I live in the peninsula - one of the most expensive parts of SFBA. I feel my money is mostly wasted due to this. I’m unfortunately unable to afford SF proper in the way I’d need to in order to be happy. I can afford the peninsula in the way I need to get by. (Detached in-laws are more common here) I live where all the children and spouses are but I am a childless divorcee. It’s miserable AF area to live because of that - yet I can’t move due to needing to be in the area. The big issue is that I fucking cannot stand the way people interact online. Zoom calls are a plague. Most of my coworkers are already socially awkward - add in another layer like Zoom and it just goes through the roof. It feels like everyone has Asperger’s when they’re on Zoom. Even for my more “social” coworkers who definitely think they’re highly socially skilled (PMs, execs, directors, biz ops, sales, etc) - they are 10x more inept over Zoom or especially Slack. For some of you, this might not be an issue. You’re anti-social yourself and treat your job very much as a 9-5 clock in and clock out thing. I’m extremely social and don’t have the mentality of someone who can clock out. I’m someone who is obsessed with getting ahead and being at least 2nd best at everything. This means that my ambition levels are unparalleled and so anything that gets in my way (e.g. social stupidity) is very aggravating. I’m not going to explain how this aggravates or gets in the way of advancing - someone who is social already knows what I’m talking about. Not being able to work with people in person has shown that most of my coworkers treat each other like they’re not real people. They’re just faces on a screen like hostages in a cs_assault. They don’t care and really see them as an objective and a means to an end. Again - for some of you - this is ideal because you’re a borderline sociopath who shouldn’t really be interacting with anyone to begin with. For the rest of us - it’s banal spoon death. This treatment is lessened when people see one another in real life. Thus, I prefer hybrid. I’d like full in office being the default with the option of being at home if you want - but the office would need to be really good. I’m not into shitty loud open offices where loud sales jockeys with gongs and noise makers are going off and shitty music playing the same 60 minute set in the background - I’m not talking that. I also don’t need offices or whatever. I just want a sane office environment. Not a bull pen. Not a library. Something that has a reason to go in besides all your coworkers being there too. (A gym, basketball court, parks nearby, good meeting rooms, food, etc.) Anyway - I’m annoyed. I lack all of the good of WFH and the good of office. I mostly experience the worst of both so far and I’m very bitter about it.
• jll29 5y ago
  The important bit is: I like to choose where I work from and when. "home" and "office" are not the only choices, I sometimes enjoy working from a third location (e.g. a cafe).
• amir734jj 5y ago
  I'm single unmarried and no kids. At the start of the pandemic I preferred working from home because it gave me flexibility to work on my part-time schoolwork and no more commuting to work. However, my mom lives with me and recently she has been suffering from various health problems and I don't see myself going back to the office even now that I'm done with my schoolwork. Stay healthy everyone.
• rebeccaskinner 5y ago
  I find almost everything about working from home nicer than going into an office. I have a larger desk, a more ergonomic workstation, better coffee and more options for lunch. I have a spouse who is also home and I live in an apartment building with sometimes noisy neighbors, but it’s still a better work environment for deep focus than sitting in an open office with hundreds of other people. The things you often lose with remote work, like opportunities for spontaneous collaboration and socializing with co-workers can be retained in a distributed team if the team wants to learn and puts in the effort. For all of the benefits of working from home though, it’s really a tertiary concern for me when I prioritize remote work. Much more important are the larger set of opportunities I have not being limited to one particular region, and the greatly improved quality of life I get from not commuting. As someone who lives outside of a tech hub, the value of having access to remote work can’t be understated. There is certainly enough work for a software developer in my city, and some of it pays well enough even if it’s a bit lower than what I can make doing remote work, but none of the companies locally are invested in technology as a business strategy. If I were restricted to local work I’d be stuck working as a cost center at a regressive thinking Big Corp adding features to a decades pile of technical debt. Even if I relocated to a tech hub, I’d be stuck with the startups in that particular city plus the companies large enough to open satellite offices around the world. As it is, working remotely I can stay in a town where I have friends and family and work at jobs that are interesting and let me stretch my skills wherever they happen to be.
• tehbeard 5y ago
  I enjoy the mix, but I hate the commute, and I don't have dedicated space at home to compartmentalize it from "home".
• captainbland 5y ago
  I mostly just despise commuting. It's a huge waste of time, money and energy and broadly pointless. Not to mention how uncomfortable and unreliable the situation can be regardless of mode of transport - your car can be stuck in gridlock, your train will be delayed/cancelled, your bus can get diverted... I'd rather just go up sporadically for socials as and when they occur. If I could just walk into an office that would be great, but that's impractical because flats/houses in walking distance of major employment centres are really fucking expensive (or extremely poor quality for the price, you decide!). Not to mention that I have a partner who works in a completely unrelated field such that we wouldn't both be able to benefit from that arrangement. And if everyone who works in an office or from home tried to benefit from living within walking distance of work, all at once, they wouldn't be able to because there's just not enough accommodation in those areas for it to work.
• synthc 5y ago
  I'm working from home now, but it gets lonely sometimes and for some discussions face to face contact is just better. I'd love to work in an office if I had my own room, or share one with a few team members at most, but nearly all jobs have open offices with tons of distractions. My last office had 12 employees in a room designed for 6: it was draining my energy and cut my productivity in half. I'd work in an office if it was actually a place conductive to work, but I'm never working in an open office again.
• throwaway22032 5y ago
  My poll option isn't here, but I voted for "Work from home, prefer working from the office". It's not really the _location_ that I care about but the environment. Going into the office and shooting the shit in a care-free manner with my co-workers. My industry kind of just disappeared when WFH came in and I've been on a sabbatical since. I don't want to go into an office and then do video calls, or have to work around some silly "if bit of paper says this then half the office does video calls", or listen to some sort of speech about responsible standing or whatever, so at least for the time being I've left software and I'm studying instead. I was, for a while, waiting for 2019 office work, but that's probably just gone forever, which means I'm not a professional software developer any more, I think. Basically I'd need to find an office in which everyone agrees with me that corona is an overblown threat. Most of my friendship groups and meet-ups are on the same page there, but barely any companies are if any.
• deleted 5y ago
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• TheGigaChad 5y ago
• lsferreira42 5y ago
  After starting working from home i got to quit a adiction that was ruining my life, i got to threat my depression with the first signs of success in a long time, i will fight for my home office like my life depends on it, because it might very well do
• nikau 5y ago
  > When people ping you on Slack or email and ask you in a really curt/terse way for something it can feel very transactional without the occasional small talk to humanise your coworkers. And I find it really hard to do that sort of small talk remotely/virtually. I'm the opposite, its work and everything is a transaction. Nothing worse than pointless 'hi how are you?' Slack messages where the other person doesn't give a shit about your response, just ask your question as concisely as possible.
• philwelch 5y ago
  As someone who prefers private offices to cubicles and cubicles to open offices, I prefer working from home purely because it’s the only way to balance the business’s unwillingness to pay for private offices with my unwillingness to work in an open bullpen.
• smattiuz 5y ago
  Depends on the days really, I generally don't like WFH anymore (was fine during lockdown#1); I am going to the office daily now, even when it's empty. Better lights, better desks, a monitor, seats, noise. I do quite like hiding away in a coffee/restaurant etc, if I don't have meetings. But having a buzz and people around is important indeed.
• fidla 5y ago
  I teach mandolin and Fiddle online. I work from home
• kmm 5y ago
  For context, I'm a PhD researcher in physics. I can't imagine ever going back to working from home, and I'm dreading the inevitable day the next pandemic hits. The experience of being able to casually to someone's office and sit around a blackboard, having a discussion, is something I just never managed to replicate with teleconferencing. Curiously I am not the only one here with this experience, and almost everyone here in the institute I work at has returned to the office full-time. This is even despite working from home being mandatory by law in Belgium, and I'm unclear how the administration deals with it, as I doubt they can argue in-office presence is necessary for theoretical physics (i.e. we don't even have the excuse of having to run experiments). Though another issue is that my home office is also my bedroom, and after a while of working from home I get an intense feeling of being cooped up that doesn't go away even after going outside. On the other hand, my office at work is very quiet and isolated. I realize for people with a decent home office but who have to work in some kind of open office at work, these experiences might be the other way around entirely. Apart from that, I was already allowed a lot of flexibility in choosing the hours I come and go, so I never had an issue with commuting or taking breaks for things like appointments with doctor/dentist/hairdresser/... etc... Either way I'm genuinely happy for people who prefer WFH having that choice more and more, and occasionally I enjoy the flexibility of WFH for a day or so.
• discord23 5y ago
  I prefer working from home. On a good day the commute to work is an hour, plus an hour back. Rain? Snow? Accident? Add more time to that. Snow/rain + Accident? Forget about being home before 8PM. That's just the commute though. Traffic over the years has gotten much worse, I used to do the same commute in 40 minutes on a good day. The office itself is another matter. Like most offices, mine is an open plan office, so continuous noise, constantly people talking, phones and the works, and that's not counting casual interruptions. There's days where I arrive at the office, some people see my face, and I know in advance they'll drop by one after another to "talk". I take countermeasures for the noise. I work with noise suppressing headphones on, playing some music that gets me "in the zone". A large chunk of my work requires long periods of concentration, so with some downtempo music I hardly hear the guy in the desk next to me shout on the phone about god knows what. The interruptions are what gets me most. Just as you're "in the zone" working on an interesting problem, that guy who saw your face in the morning decides to come by to have a chat. They've got a problem they want your opinion on, which for the most part is okay, or they want to have a short pre-meeting to prep an actual meeting which is almost guaranteed to be a waste of time. The problem is that you get pulled out of "the zone", and you need a few minutes to get back in there and get back to your line of thinking. There's days where the interruptions are almost continuous. A coworker once joked I should setup a system with tickets at my desk, like at a butchers shop in the '80s, so you can call a number for the next person to step up. There have been days in the office, where I have done very little except for getting in the zone, being interrupted, having to find the zone again, and being interrupted. There's a hurdle now with WFH for the real time wasters, the useless pre-meetings have all but disappeared except in the cases where there's a problem that actually requires an in-depth discussion beforehand, which I suppose would be "useful" pre-meeting. I've also noticed that the casual problem solving discussions have become more well thought out in most cases, because for some reason people seem to think more about the problem before asking my opinion, so I'm quite pleased with that. We keep the teams together via an informal coffee break twice a week. It's basically a lunchbreak where someone plans a half hour meeting, invites a bunch of people and you talk about whatever you want to talk about. The topics vary: sports, news, entertainment, rumors, sometimes just talking shop. The coffee breaks at the office tended to sometimes lead to interesting conversations and ideas. I suppose that if I were to miss something, those conversations during the random coffee break would be it. The commute disappearing has given me a lot of time to spend on something useful. Sometimes that's more work, most of the time that's spent on myself and the people around me. In general I'm happier nowadays, gained some time to exercise, spend more time with loved ones, and in general things feel less rushed than they did before. Having more time on weekdays has made the weekends less busy. For work-home separation I have a ritual. I have a small office setup at home, desk, comfy chair, monitor and something to play music on. Every morning I make myself a thermos of coffee, walk into my office and close the door, grab my laptop from my bag and set it up, and start working. At the end of the day, I put the laptop back in the bag, clean up the desk, grab my thermos and wash it out in the kitchen. It creates a mental boundary, a moment in time where "home ends, work begins" and "work ends, home begins". I've been to the office once this year, which was a matter of necessity to physically deliver something. I have zero intention of going back to the office multiple times a week. Company policy has changed and WFH will remain the way it is now, but if it changes back to the way it was, I will likely start looking for other opportunities. I won't mind going to the office every now and then, for example once a week on average, but I don't intend on doing that commute again every day. There's some thing that are less convenient with WFH, but for the most part, the benefits have largely outweighed the detriments.
• deleted 5y ago
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• dwild 5y ago
  There's a choice missing. I prefer working from the office but I also prefer saving the 350 hours of daily travel a year (god damn it, just realized that it's literally 10 weeks of works for me...).
• jdmoreira 5y ago
  I love working from home and it has made made me at least 1.5 times more productive. That being said… some people lack the mental fortitude and responsibility to sit by themselves at a desk and deliver their work when no one is watching. I notice people all the time that must be slacking a lot! There can't be any other explanation. They simply can't work by themselves.
• coryfklein 5y ago
  My ideal is working remotely from home, but coming into the office once a quarter for the whole week, and spending that time doing interpersonal things. I come away from that week feeling very refreshed and enabled to dive into work again with solid focus. I'll rarely make any progress on my "sprint" tasks during the in-office week, but I organize fun social events after-hours for all the other remotes that fly in at the same time (and any locals that want to spend after-hours together). Last time I did a screening of Princess Mononoke in the main office gathering area, and then we went out for drinks & dinner 2-3 times that week. One evening we all went out to play ping-pong.
• lcooper 5y ago
  Add to the question whether you have kids or not in home.
• loco5niner 5y ago
  Ever since my company moved our office to another state (upped my commute to 30 minutes both ways), and put us in a horrible open office design, I've been pushing hard to get to work from home. FINALLY it happened, and I never want to go back. With the success we've had WFH in the last 2 years, I think leadership is finally listening. Happy employees are better employees.