7 ms·

I'd spin this around and cast it as a challenge -- regular, forced interactions with coworkers is minimally sufficient and retards some people from pursuing soc

by ethbr0 5y ago

I'd spin this around and cast it as a challenge -- regular, forced interactions with coworkers is minimally sufficient and retards some people from pursuing social activities outside the home. There are already a number of options in even the smallest town. I expect that will increase as more people move to WFH and seek social outlets. And at the end of the day "interacting with coworkers in the break room" is a pretty low quality bar for an alternative to surmount. Maybe your work conversations are more fascinating than mine, but I get more value elsewhere.

30367286 5y ago
>I'd spin this around and cast it as a challenge -- regular, forced interactions with coworkers is minimally sufficient and retards some people from pursuing social activities outside the home. Absolutely. Additionally, even getting to that set of regular, forced interactions necessarily consumes the limited time those people would have to pursue those social activities outside the home. That is, it's hard to have a strong social life when you commute, at best, 5 hours a week. And that's if you're lucky. All of this benefits corporations. Especially, insidiously, the notion that your job can and should double as your social life. What concerns me, today, is that that we're in this middle stage where things could tip either way. For this reason, I think it's important for us to bang the drum loudly that we won't spend 40-50 hours in the office. Hybrid is a sufficient compromise.
- lamontcg 5y ago
  > Hybrid is a sufficient compromise. No it isn't.
  - iso1631 5y ago
    I'm happy to meet up every few months, assuming my time and travel is paid for and it's arranged well in advance
    - 30367286 5y ago
      This is really how it ought to go. Once a quarter, we all descend on one city for one week. We make big plans, we revel in each other’s company, and we see a new part of the world or see a familiar part of the world in a new way with colleagues. Then we go back.
  - 30367286 5y ago
    What is a sufficient compromise, in your view, that satisfies the need of some workers to have regular face to face interactions with coworkers and prevents corporations unprepared to manage a remote team from whipping back to full in-office? I do not want to put words in your mouth, but since you offered so few of them, I am tempted to believe you are one of the few lucky workers who has sufficient leverage to wholesale refuse to work in an office. If that is you, or if you the reader are such a person: consider the path we must take to bring flexible work to more people. With that goal and those prerequisites in mind, what is a sufficient compromise?
    - tharkun__ 5y ago
      A sufficient compromise would be to allow the people that want regular face to face interactions with coworkers to go to the office and do just that. Not sure what the culture is in your place but at my place everyone has their video on in calls, so there's always face-to-face communication (exceptions can apply of course in some circumstances but that is the general rule) that way. People that want that do go to the office from time to time and do just that. But they do it with like minded people. What is not a sufficient compromise is to force people that don't need face-to-face in person interaction into the office again when we have found out that remote works perfectly well.
      - 30367286 5y ago
        > But they do it with like minded people This is the main problem I see with your compromise. The self-sorting will create or enforce existing silos. The compromise is not only between you and your employer, but also between you and your coworkers. You might derive no value from face to face interaction, but your coworkers certainly do — and that includes you. I suspect that this self-sorting will result in a very loud cohort of in-office workers demanding everyone come back, which spoils the whole deal.
        SketchySeaBeast 5y ago
        But if I'm forced to come in for two days I'm going to go in, keep my head down, and get out, which is what I did 5 days a week before. The loud people have always and will always dominate those conversations.
- humanwhosits 5y ago
  Hybrid has all the downsides of office work, it's just less hours of it
  - 30367286 5y ago
    Alas, this is the nature of compromise. Your downside is your employer’s upside.
    - eikenberry 5y ago
      It just means "the employer" has to keep the office space for a lot of people who will only use it occasionally and all the costs associated with that. I doubt most employers would consider that an upside.
  - vladvasiliu 5y ago
    Not strictly all. You still have more time on the days you work from home, which you could use to be social. But yeah, if everyone is "hybrid", then the pressure on the housing market is unlikely to go down enough, which means that many people may find themselves in living conditions poor for remote work, which means they're more likely to go more often to the office, which means they're back to where they started...
  - beamatronic 5y ago
    My objection to office work these days has more to do with thousands of unmasked people all together, spreading viruses.
  - harperlee 5y ago
    Quantity has a quality all its own.
- saltharp 5y ago
  > That is, it's hard to have a strong social life when you commute, at best, 5 hours a week. And that's if you're lucky. "At best"? The average commute in the US is 27.6 minutes, according to the Census Bureau. My commute is a 10 minute bike ride. Luck had nothing to do with it, just a different set of priorities in life. https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2021/one-way-travel-time-to-work-rises.html https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2021/one-way-...
  - Terretta 5y ago
    > 27.6 minutes Something’s wrong with this stat. Almost nobody can get from chair at home to chair at work in that time. My present office is 1.6 miles of which ~1 mile is Interstate, yet it’s at best 22 minutes house door to office door (not chair to chair) if I hit traffic lights, as low as 14 minutes if all greens. Google Maps and Apple Maps say it’s 6 - 8 minutes in off hours. Once car is on street, only greens, and before turning into parking, maybe that’s right. This suggests two things: (a) maybe they mean time in vehicle in motion not chair-to-chair, (b) maybe they are computing address to address absent traffic. I’m also suspicious of the word “average”. For instance, I can picture bi-modal commute times: a set that are 0 minutes (like Amazon support answering calls from ‘virtual call center’ at home), and a set that are long tail, as alluded to in this quote: > The average American is traveling 26 minutes to their jobs — the longest commute time since the Census started tracking it in 1980, up 20 percent. Commutes longer than 45 minutes are up 12 percent in that time span, and 90-minute one-way commutes are 64 percent more common than in 1990. With 90 minute one way commutes going on, maybe the average data is asking people who are in denial. But the simplest explanation is also in that quote: travel time. It’s certainly not start stopwatch, get ready to commute, get to your transit, wait for your transit (e.g. warm up car or wait for bus), get in motion, travel, stop, dispense with transit (park car, lock bike), get from your transit to workplace, get situated, stop stopwatch. // I’ve prioritized “least traffic lights” and ideally “walkability” since university. From 2017 to 2021 I paid a massive premium to be able to get chair-to-chair (including both elevator waits) in ~8 minutes on foot w/ no transit in midtown Manhattan. Commute times matter to me, I use tools to heatmap them when choosing work and residences, so just not buying average possibility of 26 mins. ------ BEGIN_EDIT ------ Yes, it was just travel time. I found the US Census source, it’s a question Census said was asking people for ‘travel time’ and respondents probably in optimistic denial: Question on Travel Time to Work from the American Community Survey 2019 Q.35: How many minutes did it usually take this person to get from home to work LAST WEEK? The Census writeup includes distributions: https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/publications/2021/acs/acs-47.pdf https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/publicatio... Yes, it’s a touch bi-modal, with a valley in the 5 minute period that’s also the “average”. No, bicycle isn’t helping much, only shaves 6 mins on ‘average’. Ten percent are in the car over an hour. Insofar as their data is travel time not total time chair-to-chair (time between being able to be doing something else at each end), and it’s self surveyed not measured, I buy it. ------ END_EDIT ------
closeparen 5y ago
I don't particularly enjoy the forced, stilted chatter but I do get a lot of value from: a) Being obliged to put on clothes and leave the house. b) Spending a large part of the day at a change of scenery. c) Having other people there, around, ambiently. Spending 23 hours a day alone in your room + 1 hour for outdoor exercise, with occasional weekend visitation, is among the worst punishments the state has at its disposal. It boggles the mind that people do this voluntarily.
- katbyte 5y ago
  Work is only 8 hours of the day, 8 to sleep, 2 for chores meals etc leaves 6 for whatever you want socializing with whoever you want? Being obligated to go to the same place with the same people 5 days a week following the same routine seems dreadful to me.
- tharkun__ 5y ago
  Don't mix up pandemic restrictions with 100% remote work from home. I put on clothes every day. I only wear a nice t-shirt though and otherwise wear my 'at home pants' that I would also put on as soon as I'd come home from the office. My nice pants last much longer now. I really don't like the office scenery very much. I also do not like the scenery in between, i.e. a huge city that has no greenery, the commute is equally dull, boring and unappealing. Vs. my home where in summer I can actually sit outside on the deck all day and enjoy the scenery. It's lush and green and warm vs. the cold, dry AC air blowing in my face and forcing me to wear a jacket inside the office. Depending on whether you have family and/or family that also works from home, people are even around 'ambiently' but at least they're only around ambiently without constantly distracting you. They're in a different room doing their own work most of the time. After 8 hours of work I am free to do what I want. Go outside, take a walk, meet friends etc.
  - marcosdumay 5y ago
    I do like my path to work. In fact, I go there once in a while, and come back just to get a long walk. I do like my previous office. It happens that I had to improve my home when I got here, but after spending around 1/5 of my monthly salary, my home is now even a it more comfortable and I use it when not working too. If you have a minimum of space, that's quite doable, and if you don't, why don't you want to move into a cheaper place? Even those reasons don't add up to much.
dtx1 5y ago
> I'd spin this around and cast it as a challenge -- regular, forced interactions with coworkers is minimally sufficient and retards some people from pursuing social activities outside the home. Or,it allows people with social anxiety or depression a room for social interactions with very well defined rules and in an environment where people generally interact positively with you. I like the convenience of WFH too but I do miss cooking with my colleagues and their families on Wednesdays. This might sound weird to you but living alone and having had parents that made every meal either a screaming match or a barrage of passive aggressive comments I enjoyed those lunches with my much more reasonable colleagues a lot. Being essentially alone most days certainly didn't help with my depression and that makes other social interactions harder. I still won't go back though, wearing trouser being optional at work is a worthwhile tradeoff
- marcosdumay 5y ago
  > I like the convenience of WFH too but I do miss cooking with my colleagues and their families on Wednesdays. Well, to fix that you can go cook with your colleagues and their families on Wednesdays.
  - dtx1 5y ago
    not as long as corona is still raging here in germany, no families (or colleagues) at the office
DiggyJohnson 5y ago
Eh, I’m kinda implicated here but I see office interactions as some bare minimum of socialization that, yes, can lead to complacency but does not subtract from the ideal of finding meaningful relationship outside of work. If anything, face to face work helps energize me to be social, and not just with my coworkers. More like a daily practice against Cabin Fever. For some reason, for me, Cabin Fever self-perpetuates. I still prefer WFH, but I go to a coffee shop most days of the week to work on a personal project. After a year+ my relationship with the other regulates and staff is like the best possible relationship you’d expect to have among coworkers - I’ve even grabbed a beer with the manager when then closed early one day - without the stresses of working for a common employer.
- ethbr0 5y ago
  I'm approaching this from my own perspective of a fairly serious introvert, and I feel like the biggest skill I've picked up in life is pushing past the introvert wall. Which is that thing that whispers "Going out will be a hassle. Why not just not?" Work was one way of forcing past that, but I feel that's analogous to saying "Prison is one way of curing wanderlust." It feels more reasonable to treat the underlying issue than take a bargain that comes with serious negative consequences.
Riverheart 5y ago
There are reasons people don't pursue activities outside of work because they only require a minimal amount of interaction with people or they don't have time for socialization outside of work. Conversations with clubmembers won't be appreciably more meaningful than conversations with coworkers. A benefit is that your social circle exists independent of your job status but you've got to do it on your own time.
shrimp_emoji 5y ago
>social activities outside the home I have no idea what you meant by this.
npteljes 5y ago
>There are already a number of options in even the smallest town Can you elaborate on what options do you mean by this? I have to admit I'd have no idea where to go or what to do if I needed this.

by ethbr0 5y ago

30367286 5y ago

>I'd spin this around and cast it as a challenge -- regular, forced interactions with coworkers is minimally sufficient and retards some people from pursuing social activities outside the home. Absolutely. Additionally, even getting to that set of regular, forced interactions necessarily consumes the limited time those people would have to pursue those social activities outside the home. That is, it's hard to have a strong social life when you commute, at best, 5 hours a week. And that's if you're lucky. All of this benefits corporations. Especially, insidiously, the notion that your job can and should double as your social life. What concerns me, today, is that that we're in this middle stage where things could tip either way. For this reason, I think it's important for us to bang the drum loudly that we won't spend 40-50 hours in the office. Hybrid is a sufficient compromise.

lamontcg 5y ago
> Hybrid is a sufficient compromise. No it isn't.
- iso1631 5y ago
  I'm happy to meet up every few months, assuming my time and travel is paid for and it's arranged well in advance
  - 30367286 5y ago
    This is really how it ought to go. Once a quarter, we all descend on one city for one week. We make big plans, we revel in each other’s company, and we see a new part of the world or see a familiar part of the world in a new way with colleagues. Then we go back.
- 30367286 5y ago
  What is a sufficient compromise, in your view, that satisfies the need of some workers to have regular face to face interactions with coworkers and prevents corporations unprepared to manage a remote team from whipping back to full in-office? I do not want to put words in your mouth, but since you offered so few of them, I am tempted to believe you are one of the few lucky workers who has sufficient leverage to wholesale refuse to work in an office. If that is you, or if you the reader are such a person: consider the path we must take to bring flexible work to more people. With that goal and those prerequisites in mind, what is a sufficient compromise?
  - tharkun__ 5y ago
    A sufficient compromise would be to allow the people that want regular face to face interactions with coworkers to go to the office and do just that. Not sure what the culture is in your place but at my place everyone has their video on in calls, so there's always face-to-face communication (exceptions can apply of course in some circumstances but that is the general rule) that way. People that want that do go to the office from time to time and do just that. But they do it with like minded people. What is not a sufficient compromise is to force people that don't need face-to-face in person interaction into the office again when we have found out that remote works perfectly well.
    - 30367286 5y ago
      > But they do it with like minded people This is the main problem I see with your compromise. The self-sorting will create or enforce existing silos. The compromise is not only between you and your employer, but also between you and your coworkers. You might derive no value from face to face interaction, but your coworkers certainly do — and that includes you. I suspect that this self-sorting will result in a very loud cohort of in-office workers demanding everyone come back, which spoils the whole deal.
      - SketchySeaBeast 5y ago
        But if I'm forced to come in for two days I'm going to go in, keep my head down, and get out, which is what I did 5 days a week before. The loud people have always and will always dominate those conversations.
humanwhosits 5y ago
Hybrid has all the downsides of office work, it's just less hours of it
- 30367286 5y ago
  Alas, this is the nature of compromise. Your downside is your employer’s upside.
  - eikenberry 5y ago
    It just means "the employer" has to keep the office space for a lot of people who will only use it occasionally and all the costs associated with that. I doubt most employers would consider that an upside.
- vladvasiliu 5y ago
  Not strictly all. You still have more time on the days you work from home, which you could use to be social. But yeah, if everyone is "hybrid", then the pressure on the housing market is unlikely to go down enough, which means that many people may find themselves in living conditions poor for remote work, which means they're more likely to go more often to the office, which means they're back to where they started...
- beamatronic 5y ago
  My objection to office work these days has more to do with thousands of unmasked people all together, spreading viruses.
- harperlee 5y ago
  Quantity has a quality all its own.
saltharp 5y ago
> That is, it's hard to have a strong social life when you commute, at best, 5 hours a week. And that's if you're lucky. "At best"? The average commute in the US is 27.6 minutes, according to the Census Bureau. My commute is a 10 minute bike ride. Luck had nothing to do with it, just a different set of priorities in life. https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2021/one-way-travel-time-to-work-rises.html https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2021/one-way-...
- Terretta 5y ago
  > 27.6 minutes Something’s wrong with this stat. Almost nobody can get from chair at home to chair at work in that time. My present office is 1.6 miles of which ~1 mile is Interstate, yet it’s at best 22 minutes house door to office door (not chair to chair) if I hit traffic lights, as low as 14 minutes if all greens. Google Maps and Apple Maps say it’s 6 - 8 minutes in off hours. Once car is on street, only greens, and before turning into parking, maybe that’s right. This suggests two things: (a) maybe they mean time in vehicle in motion not chair-to-chair, (b) maybe they are computing address to address absent traffic. I’m also suspicious of the word “average”. For instance, I can picture bi-modal commute times: a set that are 0 minutes (like Amazon support answering calls from ‘virtual call center’ at home), and a set that are long tail, as alluded to in this quote: > The average American is traveling 26 minutes to their jobs — the longest commute time since the Census started tracking it in 1980, up 20 percent. Commutes longer than 45 minutes are up 12 percent in that time span, and 90-minute one-way commutes are 64 percent more common than in 1990. With 90 minute one way commutes going on, maybe the average data is asking people who are in denial. But the simplest explanation is also in that quote: travel time. It’s certainly not start stopwatch, get ready to commute, get to your transit, wait for your transit (e.g. warm up car or wait for bus), get in motion, travel, stop, dispense with transit (park car, lock bike), get from your transit to workplace, get situated, stop stopwatch. // I’ve prioritized “least traffic lights” and ideally “walkability” since university. From 2017 to 2021 I paid a massive premium to be able to get chair-to-chair (including both elevator waits) in ~8 minutes on foot w/ no transit in midtown Manhattan. Commute times matter to me, I use tools to heatmap them when choosing work and residences, so just not buying average possibility of 26 mins. ------ BEGIN_EDIT ------ Yes, it was just travel time. I found the US Census source, it’s a question Census said was asking people for ‘travel time’ and respondents probably in optimistic denial: Question on Travel Time to Work from the American Community Survey 2019 Q.35: How many minutes did it usually take this person to get from home to work LAST WEEK? The Census writeup includes distributions: https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/publications/2021/acs/acs-47.pdf https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/publicatio... Yes, it’s a touch bi-modal, with a valley in the 5 minute period that’s also the “average”. No, bicycle isn’t helping much, only shaves 6 mins on ‘average’. Ten percent are in the car over an hour. Insofar as their data is travel time not total time chair-to-chair (time between being able to be doing something else at each end), and it’s self surveyed not measured, I buy it. ------ END_EDIT ------

closeparen 5y ago

I don't particularly enjoy the forced, stilted chatter but I do get a lot of value from: a) Being obliged to put on clothes and leave the house. b) Spending a large part of the day at a change of scenery. c) Having other people there, around, ambiently. Spending 23 hours a day alone in your room + 1 hour for outdoor exercise, with occasional weekend visitation, is among the worst punishments the state has at its disposal. It boggles the mind that people do this voluntarily.

katbyte 5y ago
Work is only 8 hours of the day, 8 to sleep, 2 for chores meals etc leaves 6 for whatever you want socializing with whoever you want? Being obligated to go to the same place with the same people 5 days a week following the same routine seems dreadful to me.
tharkun__ 5y ago
Don't mix up pandemic restrictions with 100% remote work from home. I put on clothes every day. I only wear a nice t-shirt though and otherwise wear my 'at home pants' that I would also put on as soon as I'd come home from the office. My nice pants last much longer now. I really don't like the office scenery very much. I also do not like the scenery in between, i.e. a huge city that has no greenery, the commute is equally dull, boring and unappealing. Vs. my home where in summer I can actually sit outside on the deck all day and enjoy the scenery. It's lush and green and warm vs. the cold, dry AC air blowing in my face and forcing me to wear a jacket inside the office. Depending on whether you have family and/or family that also works from home, people are even around 'ambiently' but at least they're only around ambiently without constantly distracting you. They're in a different room doing their own work most of the time. After 8 hours of work I am free to do what I want. Go outside, take a walk, meet friends etc.
- marcosdumay 5y ago
  I do like my path to work. In fact, I go there once in a while, and come back just to get a long walk. I do like my previous office. It happens that I had to improve my home when I got here, but after spending around 1/5 of my monthly salary, my home is now even a it more comfortable and I use it when not working too. If you have a minimum of space, that's quite doable, and if you don't, why don't you want to move into a cheaper place? Even those reasons don't add up to much.

dtx1 5y ago

> I'd spin this around and cast it as a challenge -- regular, forced interactions with coworkers is minimally sufficient and retards some people from pursuing social activities outside the home. Or,it allows people with social anxiety or depression a room for social interactions with very well defined rules and in an environment where people generally interact positively with you. I like the convenience of WFH too but I do miss cooking with my colleagues and their families on Wednesdays. This might sound weird to you but living alone and having had parents that made every meal either a screaming match or a barrage of passive aggressive comments I enjoyed those lunches with my much more reasonable colleagues a lot. Being essentially alone most days certainly didn't help with my depression and that makes other social interactions harder. I still won't go back though, wearing trouser being optional at work is a worthwhile tradeoff

marcosdumay 5y ago
> I like the convenience of WFH too but I do miss cooking with my colleagues and their families on Wednesdays. Well, to fix that you can go cook with your colleagues and their families on Wednesdays.
- dtx1 5y ago
  not as long as corona is still raging here in germany, no families (or colleagues) at the office

DiggyJohnson 5y ago

Eh, I’m kinda implicated here but I see office interactions as some bare minimum of socialization that, yes, can lead to complacency but does not subtract from the ideal of finding meaningful relationship outside of work. If anything, face to face work helps energize me to be social, and not just with my coworkers. More like a daily practice against Cabin Fever. For some reason, for me, Cabin Fever self-perpetuates. I still prefer WFH, but I go to a coffee shop most days of the week to work on a personal project. After a year+ my relationship with the other regulates and staff is like the best possible relationship you’d expect to have among coworkers - I’ve even grabbed a beer with the manager when then closed early one day - without the stresses of working for a common employer.

ethbr0 5y ago
I'm approaching this from my own perspective of a fairly serious introvert, and I feel like the biggest skill I've picked up in life is pushing past the introvert wall. Which is that thing that whispers "Going out will be a hassle. Why not just not?" Work was one way of forcing past that, but I feel that's analogous to saying "Prison is one way of curing wanderlust." It feels more reasonable to treat the underlying issue than take a bargain that comes with serious negative consequences.

Riverheart 5y ago

There are reasons people don't pursue activities outside of work because they only require a minimal amount of interaction with people or they don't have time for socialization outside of work. Conversations with clubmembers won't be appreciably more meaningful than conversations with coworkers. A benefit is that your social circle exists independent of your job status but you've got to do it on your own time.

shrimp_emoji 5y ago

>social activities outside the home I have no idea what you meant by this.

npteljes 5y ago

>There are already a number of options in even the smallest town Can you elaborate on what options do you mean by this? I have to admit I'd have no idea where to go or what to do if I needed this.