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 so

>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.
      - tharkun__ 5y ago
        Definite +1 to my sibling about coming in and keeping the head down. Not sure which kinds of silos you are talking about. If it's silos as in social circles, that exists with 100% in-office as well. You know, the people that always sit together at lunch, always go out together for lunch or coffee, that meet after work at the pub and the people that eat lunch at their desk or off to the side, drink office-coffee only and don't go to the pub but go home to their family instead. If you're talking about departmental or team silos those existed with 100% in-office as well. Marketing not talking to Product or Dev? Nothing really changed here I would argue. If anything it might have gotten better because everyone thought it would get worse and very actively tried to do something about it. Face to face communication works very well over video and I derive enormous value from it. Only using written communication or audio only would suck big time. Especially when first getting to know someone that you've never met in person. But I don't have to sit in the same room with them or be 12 floors away from them for most of the day except for the meeting at three, when we both take the elevator, them 3 floors down, me 9 floors up to talk about something. I agree that there will probably be a loud cohort of in-office workers that demand others to come back and if they succeed it will spoil the whole deal. But that doesn't get better with a 2-day in-office hybrid compromise either. If anything they would have much more pull already when they demand we go back to 5 days a week "because obviously 3 days of remote work are bad, we only get anything done ever in the 2 forced in-office days".
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 ------

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.
    - tharkun__ 5y ago
      Definite +1 to my sibling about coming in and keeping the head down. Not sure which kinds of silos you are talking about. If it's silos as in social circles, that exists with 100% in-office as well. You know, the people that always sit together at lunch, always go out together for lunch or coffee, that meet after work at the pub and the people that eat lunch at their desk or off to the side, drink office-coffee only and don't go to the pub but go home to their family instead. If you're talking about departmental or team silos those existed with 100% in-office as well. Marketing not talking to Product or Dev? Nothing really changed here I would argue. If anything it might have gotten better because everyone thought it would get worse and very actively tried to do something about it. Face to face communication works very well over video and I derive enormous value from it. Only using written communication or audio only would suck big time. Especially when first getting to know someone that you've never met in person. But I don't have to sit in the same room with them or be 12 floors away from them for most of the day except for the meeting at three, when we both take the elevator, them 3 floors down, me 9 floors up to talk about something. I agree that there will probably be a loud cohort of in-office workers that demand others to come back and if they succeed it will spoil the whole deal. But that doesn't get better with a 2-day in-office hybrid compromise either. If anything they would have much more pull already when they demand we go back to 5 days a week "because obviously 3 days of remote work are bad, we only get anything done ever in the 2 forced in-office days".

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 ------