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Warning: Hot Take. I genuinely believe many people who prefer working in an office versus at home have unfulfilling social lives or bad home lives. The social

Warning: Hot Take. I genuinely believe many people who prefer working in an office versus at home have unfulfilling social lives or bad home lives. The social dynamics, competition, in physical offices fills the void in their lives. Also seems like most of the people clamoring for a return to the office are also climbers & middle managers. For some work a physical presence is required not just preferable, but for most of a software engineer's day to day there really is no unquestionable upside. I'll quit before I go back full time. I've never been happier or more fulfilled with my work/life balance, and I've never been more productive with my time. I'll even take a different remote position at a 20% pay cut and a reduction in equity, at least, to retain WFH. Most I'm willing to give is a day a week in office, and maybe temporarily longer in rare circumstances where the benefit in performance is clear.

deleted 4y ago
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mjan22640 4y ago
In my experience, young man at the start of their carrier are willing to go to great lengths to work from home. After they marry and get kids, they become willing to go great lengths to work from the office.
- cteiosanu 4y ago
  Exactly the opposite from my experience.
- jstx1 4y ago
  This sounds entirely backwards based on talking to many different people about it in the past couple of years.
- alex_suzuki 4y ago
  Other way round for me. Having more time for family/kids because I don’t have to commute is great. Also, starting out in a completely remote setting sounds a bit daunting to me.
jstx1 4y ago
> I genuinely believe many people who prefer working in an office versus at home have unfulfilling social lives or bad home lives. The social dynamics, competition, in physical offices fills the void in their lives. You're implying that this is a bad thing and I don't get why it should be.
- Glavnokoman 4y ago
  No. I do not think he's implying it is a bad thing by itself. Instead he explicitly says that those are the people who try to solve their problems at expense of others.
  - jstx1 4y ago
    The expense of others is a point that works both ways. You could equally say that someone who insists on being remote because it's better for their family life is preventing/slowing down the return to office, and that's at the expense of people who prefer to be in the office. But I wouldn't put it that way because I don't think it makes for a productive conversation - office or remote, people like what they like and they have their reasons for it.
    - nsotelo 4y ago
      These are not morally equivalent. The office-worker wants others to modify everyone's behaviour to support them, whereas the remote worker just wants to control their own behaviour. The remote worker is completely ambivalent to where others want to work.
      - TheSpiceIsLife 4y ago
        It's entirely possible that at least some of those who prefer to work at the office are equally ambivalent about what others what to do.
      - jstx1 4y ago
        I'm not buying this. - In a big team if everyone is in-office and 1 person is remote, that person certainly cares about being the only remote person. Maybe some people would be okay with it, but being the only remote person has been known to be a not-so-great working arrangement even before the pandemic. So you can't say that remote people don't care where others work. - If enough people choose remote, they're forcing everyone else to be remote too (whether they attend the office or not) because the communication model for the whole team has to be different now. <<< This is remote people modifying everyone else's behaviour to support them.
sinsterizme 4y ago
I definitely fall into this camp. I’m introverted, so the forced social interaction at work was perfect for me and sufficient to keep me socially gratified. I’ve tried to make up for it in the pandemic by being more socially active but it hasn’t been working. I’ll definitely be looking for an in-office position soon since some companies are returning. I think my mental health will greatly recover.
- odessacubbage 4y ago
  have you tried looking for a co-working space? i've known freelancers who pooled together for a shared studio space for similar reasons.
  - sinsterizme 4y ago
    I’ve tried it out, it’s not the same but it helps a bit. I appreciate the suggestion!
- twayt 4y ago
  Forcing yourself to get your social interaction requirements met at work isn't ideal. It is like trying to get your protein requirements met from potatoes. Yes, you can if you force yourself and try really hard. However, it is much more efficient and pain-free to get it from a protein shake. In this context, it means using the time you save with working from home and using it to meet people interested in the things you care about.
  - sinsterizme 4y ago
    I don’t see what’s so bad about it. Half of my waking hours are spent working, a lot of the other half are spent eating, working out, and relaxing. Am I supposed to spend an hour a day hanging out with people after work? Not only does that sound exhausting, it doesn’t seem like enough if that’s my main social interaction. At work, there is a shared goal and a community that I can be a part of, and it’s there for me for most of my waking hours during the week.
jxramos 4y ago
My friend joined Coinbase who he recommended to me. They are highly remote or very remote friendly. The CEO has a great vision too, I enjoyed some of the talks he gave eg with Gary Tan, etc.
curiousgal 4y ago
> fills the void in their lives Why is that a bad thing? We have a problem and this is a solution.
justinclift 4y ago
Alternatively, some of us (well, me at least) view "in the office" work as a way to help achieve work/personal-life separation. Saying this after many, many years of remote working, where the boundaries between work and personal life blurred so far they became practically indistinguishable. (yay 24/7 "DevOps" culture :/)
- coffeeblack 4y ago
  I close my work laptop and that’s it for the day. Simple.
  - vladvasiliu 4y ago
    Exactly. I even use the same monitor and everything, but when I'm done for the day, the laptop goes in the drawer and whoever wants something from me will have to wait for the next business day. I find the same kind of creep can happen at the office, too. Many colleagues end up leaving at 8 PM or later [0] because they have to do this one more thing or someone shows up with just a quick question to ask. However, I realize that for some people, who have a harder time saying no for whatever reason, it's easier to have a hard, external excuse. "Sorry, I need to catch my train, so I don't have to sleep here" works less well when you're already home. But I think that in both cases it's very important to set boundaries and stick to them. --- [0] Our workdays are normally 9 AM to 6 PM.
  - civilized 4y ago
    Seriously! Why do people think that working remotely entitles their boss to 24/7 access? Come on, set some boundaries!
    - givemeethekeys 4y ago
      They make the mistake of installing Slack on their phone.
      - civilized 4y ago
Closi 4y ago
> Warning: Hot Take. I genuinely believe many people who prefer working in an office versus at home have unfulfilling social lives or bad home lives. The social dynamics, competition, in physical offices fills the void in their lives. Warning: Hot Take. I have similar logic, but reach an almost opposite conclusion. I genuinely believe many people who prefer working at home rather than an office have unfulfilling work lives and struggle to form meaningful friendships/relationships with colleagues. I genuinely enjoy interactions with my colleagues during a work day, and wouldn't want to replace that with staring at a screen for 7.5 hours of my day or only talking to them via Slack. I have a great social group outside of work, but that doesn't diminish the value of enjoying the company of people I work with too. Sure, it might technically be more productive if I just locked myself in a room and worked intensely on my own for my whole career and only communicated through a webcam, but that doesn't seem particularly enjoyable to me personally.
- chrisan 4y ago
  > I genuinely believe many people who prefer working at home rather than an office have unfulfilling work lives and struggle to form meaningful friendships/relationships with colleagues. Absolutely not true. I've been WFH since 2008. Many followed overtime and the company went full WFH in 2015 closing our office. We have a video call 3x a week and shoot the shit learn about each others lives just the same before we talk about work. I don't feel any less connected to my coworkers than my physical friends. I also am part of a telegram group with ~10 old college buddies who live all over the country where we chat everyday and hop on voice to play video games or a monthly poker. This obviously isn't the same since we started out as physical friends and went to chat groups after going out separate ways, but again I haven't lost touch with any of them or felt less connected/meaningful because we are now remote only. Not only that but with all the various video games we have added random people we connected with to that group, I don't even know what their face looks like but I know just as much about them as my physical friends. They are just part of the daily discussions about sports, politics, movies/tv, whatever. I think if you are not connecting with someone you maybe aren't trying enough because it is totally possible. What exactly can't you talk about remotely that you can in person? I've yet to find a topic myself
aaron695 4y ago
lordnacho 4y ago
For devs, it's hard to debate this point. It's even hard to explain to others what the value of the flow state is, where you're just one with the code and you feel like you're making progress. You really need to not be interrupted, and you need comforts like your own chair, food, and clothes. I'm mostly coding these days so 100% WFH suits me just fine. Yesterday I talked to some people I used to face, ie they were taking the phone at another business years ago when I was trading with them. They are all against working from home, having continued to go to the office during the lockdowns. The point they made was that some things really benefit from being interruptible. Some things even benefit from not being recorded. Immediacy really matters for certain things like gauging who you should approach with some deal. What also matters is being able to weigh the mood. A lot of what we call political decisions depend on this kind of weighing of what the team wants to do, and is hard through zoom. Finally there's the problem of juniors. In finance you'd learn stuff when there was a quiet moment and someone more experienced seemed like they had a second to explain something to you. Unscheduled but valuable training. These folks basically took the opposite view of what you seem to have, and decided that people who like WFH are basically not productive and are just phoning it in, knowing that it has gotten harder to hire people willing to be in the office all day. It's kinda interesting the take that people on opposite ends of the spectrum have of each others motivations.
ZephyrBlu 4y ago
I think I would prefer to work in an office over remote solely because it's harder to meet new people in the company and make good connections remotely. I'd like to have some professional connections that carry over from my current company.
_ph_ 4y ago
You are categorizing it way to one sided in an offensive way. "Bad home lives" can be as simple as having too much social interaction e.g. by having children at home, which can be quite distracting. And of course, a lot of people don't have a separate room set aside at home for work. Real estate in many places is prohibitively expensive. And even if there is one, with full home office, both partners might compete for that working space and on many days even need 2 office rooms. Also, the "social interactions" at the office are usually not about replacing private social life, but well, interacting with your colleagues about work related topics which go beyond the range of scheduled meetings. There is a lot of value in meeting random people over a coffee without a set agenda. No surprise, that during the pandemic there were a lot of meetings schedule with no agenda set, just to keep conversation between people alive, the more so as they don't work directly together. On the one side I certainly appreciated the ability to work undisturbed at home for certain tasks, on the other side, I am working in a large organization (and I don't mean by large just a large headcount but a lot of people on joint or related projects), which mostly are not software engineers (but engineers of other disciplines). A lot of that goes online too - and as our organization is spread across large distances, always has been online - but I am aware of the benefits of direct interaction. At minimum, I like to have had some direct interactions with people I am working online with. But of course, one cannot (and should not) just turn back the clock. The pandemic happened, and a lot of people had a taste of the advantages of work from home and a lot of companies had to work hard at facilitating that, so for a huge amount of jobs this is technically possible now. Working from an office isn't the only option any more and employers should understand that. Forcing people to come back into the office is a huge warning sign. It means that there are actually no convincing reasons, or the employees wouldn't have to be pressured. Which of course raises the questions, why did spend Apple 5 billion on that fancy new headquarter and didn't put emphasis onto making this a place people want to go to? In the contrary, it was designed with open office spaces, which especially software engineers just hate. It was unpopular even before the pandemic. Instead, they should have asked groups and single employees how an office attractive for their line of work should look. It couldn't possibly have been a problem of the budget :).
peoplefromibiza 4y ago
My personal hot take: I genuinely believe many people who prefer working at home are very young and have not developed social awareness and/or don't feel the need to separate life and work, because their life is their work and vice versa. Most people that do not want to return to office are still in that phase of their life where they need to rebel to authority to feel alive and will end up being those "middle managers" that they critique today. Also: WFH as the only possible option is not different from office as the only option. I don't like going to the office when it rains, but I enjoy going out of my house when the Sun shines or meet my colleagues to have an informal chat on how to progress with some project, it makes everything smoother and a lot of the underground tensions generated by only communicating through video and voice disappear. The truth is the majority of the workplaces are not "for coders only" and trying to find a balance with other people's needs, for example those people that have to work in presence, it's sign of and good willing and maturity. You can decide to quit to WFH, IMO that doesn't mean you're standing up for yourself, it only means you're not willing to change your habits.
- boo-ga-ga 4y ago
  But if you want to separate life from work, you can work in whatever place you'd like. Coworking space, cafe, personal office etc. Then you don't need to live near your company's office, and can choose the best possible place to live and work for you and your family.
  - peoplefromibiza 4y ago
    > Coworking space, cafe, personal office etc. or you can chose to work for a company whose offices are not two hours away. coworking, cafes, etc are not really suited to actually work, especially of your work requires some kind of concentration or secrecy (an NDA for example) Personal office in house is the worst combination of them all IMO. Not that I do not work from home, I did it for good part of my life, it's just not for everybody. You have also to consider that having their parents around all day could be the worst possible way to live for teenagers, it makes more sense only when they are small kids, but in my country we have parental leaves and specific holidays to take care of that.
JimBlackwood 4y ago
I never understand this or any hot take related to WFH. Why is it necessary to assume something negative about another person simply because you’re different? It’s nonsense. It truly doesn’t matter. WFH can be great, working from the office can be great. Find a company where the social and work culture fit with what you prefer.
- IshKebab 4y ago
  Yeah people seem to be incapable of understanding that people have different preferences! It's like everyone is arguing that red is the best colour, no blue is clearly the best...
- twayt 4y ago
  You really don't understand the incentive people have here? It is the same as politics. The more polarized you can make things and the more you point out the flaws of the opposing perspective, the easier it is to influence public opinion. In situations where policy needs to be determined, the decision made will benefit one side and harm the other side. In an ideal world, companies will allow employees to do whatever they want and pay them the same as long as they are productive. However, companies want to actively reduce chaos and this means making consistent rules for everyone and measuring how this affects productivity in aggregate. So the rules become "fully remote" or "hybrid work" instead of allowing people to do what makes them optimally productive. > Find a company where the social and work culture fit with what you prefer. You say this presuming that people don't care about what they are working on or the prestige of the company they are working at. A lot of people have a fairly good setup and would rather influence their own company (or by proxy the industry at large) than simply move to a different potentially suboptimal company that allows remote work.
montalbano 4y ago
You've skipped over an important group of people here: in any healthy workplace, new starters, graduates and other junior developers benefit massively from being in the same office as their more senior colleagues. The amount they learn from accumulated small interactions that would not happen in remote working cannot be overstated.
- twayt 4y ago
  What exactly do you learn from your coworkers? It isn't like you are pair programming constantly with senior devs all the time. I've learnt way more reading papers and documentation than being in the same physical space as more senior colleagues. People sometimes bring this point up re: onboarding but I don't quite understand what people learn that they can't do otherwise remotely.
  - matt89 4y ago
    Different people absorb knowledge in different ways. Just because you learned the most by reading articles doesn't mean that is true for everyone. I believe there is value in newcomers/junior devs begin in close proximity with their more experienced coworkers because this greatly improves the chance to talk about important work-related topics. Many times in my live I have started a casual conversation with someone at work and this lead to discussion about current work-related software topics and I was able to share some opinions with someone. These things happen much more rarely when they are scheduled slack calls, and people seldomly just slack to talk about random things.
    - twayt 4y ago
      > Different people absorb knowledge in different ways. Just because you learned the most by reading articles doesn't mean that is true for everyone. ...and that's precisely the reason I asked the question > Many times in my live I have started a casual conversation with someone at work and this lead to discussion about current work-related software topics and I was able to share some opinions with someone. This sounds like general information sharing amongst coworkers. The way you phrased the comment made it seem like there was something specific you were referring to pertaining to newcomers/junior devs. I agree with your point that you have less airtime to share your general thoughts about interesting things in a remote setting. I do agree with your general point and have experienced that too. Just observing more certain people equivocate about a topic is inspiring and that helps to learn more.
bluescrn 4y ago
It's not about the office, it's about the commuting, which can often increase the length of the working day by 25% or more, and can add a thoroughly miserable start and end to that day (stuck in traffic, or on delayed/overcrowded trains), and make life seem much worse even if you're doing enjoyable work with great people in a really nice office. Offices have their pros and cons (WFH can be a horribly lonely experience for anyone who lives alone, for example). But it's removing the commuting that makes WFH such a massive win for most people. And a big win for the environment (which should be reason enough to try and keep it going)
- mickotron 4y ago
  For me it’s both. I love having control over my work environment and equipment.
- nmfisher 4y ago
  Exactly this for me. I actually think an office environment is much better for many (if not most) aspects, but it’s difficult to argue with eliminating 1-2 hours of daily commute.
- nedt 4y ago
  I just went back to the office and commute is one of the reason. The walk or bike ride is what I have been missing the last months. Of course that means you need to work and life in some city that doesn't force you to have a long train ride or even worse take a car.
- Zanneth 4y ago
  Commuting is not the only part of work life that has an impact on the environment. It is dramatically less efficient to heat/cool thousands of separate homes throughout the day as opposed to one large office building. Remote work could actually be much worse for the environment.
COM2323 4y ago
> I genuinely believe many people who prefer working in an office versus at home have unfulfilling social lives or bad home lives. Feels like you are mixing a lot of stuff together. My desire to interact with my collegues about our field of work has nothing to do with my social live outside of work. It's not like I'm going to talk about new C# 11 features during our Sunday barbecue or at soccer practise. Of course I can go to a meetup or invite friends from tech to a pub, but that's not gonna replace 40 hours a week of "random interaction" with my colleagues. Maybe I'm just lucky and have great colleagues that are fun to interact with? Hard to say ...
trentgreene 4y ago
I kind of fall into this category, but it's a little more nuanced. I have a very fulfilling social life / hobbies outside of work, and have taken sabbaticals before to great success. WFH was great because I could exercise a lot more, hangout with friends, etc. But I am excited to be back in office on some hybrid schedule, because there was a social component to work that I very much missed. I enjoyed the work part of the work the same, but missed the occasional coffee with a coworker, full-fledged in person brainstorming session, off hand conversations about zany ideas, lunch at the cafe, etc. It's not that my social fulfillment declined at all overall with WFH -- other social activities filled the time -- but the specific social activity of bonding in person with folks I worked with definitely decreased, and it's nice to have that come back. That's not a reason to force folks back in the office (this is at no-one's expense, as I've seen it suggested), but it's a nice benefit.
arinlen 4y ago
> I genuinely believe many people who prefer working in an office versus at home have unfulfilling social lives or bad home lives. The social dynamics, competition, in physical offices fills the void in their lives. Also seems like most of the people clamoring for a return to the office are also climbers & middle managers. This. I've recently switched officially to a de-facto full remote position after years of full remote due to COVID, as did most of my team, and I also see this pattern among the coworkers who decided to go to the office. The return-to-office cases boiled down to: * Rented a tiny apartment to maximize disposable income but it's very unpleasant to live in, let alone work, * Share a 3-bedroom flat with 3 or 4 newly-graduated and yet-to-graduate buddies, * A young upwardly-mobile professional who wants to maximize his presence around the senior manager to fulfill his career-growth plans. I dare say that in two dozen team members, only 5 or 6 want to return to the office, and about half of them need it because they can't afford a decent apartment.
tsukikage 4y ago
It doesn't take being socially unfulfilled to prefer working in an office. It just takes not having adequate work space at home; e.g. if you have kids and not a mansion.
wfhordie 4y ago
I’m not sure what you’re trying to imply with the first paragraph, but let me tell you how it sounds to me: “Hot take: people who have a different work style preference than me are inferior and damaged, and/or have motives which I despise or work a job I think is useless.” Rethink this. These are your colleagues. Compassion for people who are different from you improves your own humanity and makes working with you more enjoyable.
nvarsj 4y ago
Maybe not paint people with such broad strokes? Humans are complicated, and the reasons we have for wanting to go to the office vs WFH are varied. For example - some people don't like work bleeding into their home life, which is a lot harder when you WFH.
holoduke 4y ago
I am a very social person. I want to be around people. My home is good. But too noisy, too many kids :) I love meeting people in my work field and I love to have a real conversation in which I can read body and speech. Not just speech. For me the whole working from home thing sucks. I don't like it.
activitypea 4y ago
Despite the horrendous tone and attitude, you're 100% right. I prefer working from the office because I get to be less lonely for a third of my waking life, probably in part because I can rarely get that kind of social fullfillment from my private life. I'm just not quite sure what's so bad about not wanting to be unconditionally alone 8 hours a day, 5 days a week.
dmatech 4y ago
Understandable. Some of us actually want team cohesion and collaboration instead of working on Jira tickets in isolation. Others want a purely asynchronous communication style that keeps the chit-chat to an absolute minimum. I personally want to know what's going on in far-flung corners of the company, because I'm fundamentally a generalist who wants to understand the big picture. I don't just want to put in my 8 hours and clock out, although I can see why people just trying to put their kids through school might want to do that. Personality types and home situations matter a great deal in these situations.
synicalx 4y ago
I can't say that's true for me personally, and I greatly prefer working in the office. In my case I mostly like the office because it allows me to keep work physically compartmentalised from real life - I don't have work things invading my personal space (and using it for free, I might add).
nedt 4y ago
Some of us just have kids and finding a flat with enough rooms for everyone plus an office room is almost impossible. So it's good to have the option to also go to the office in addition to WFH.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

mjan22640 4y ago

In my experience, young man at the start of their carrier are willing to go to great lengths to work from home. After they marry and get kids, they become willing to go great lengths to work from the office.

cteiosanu 4y ago
Exactly the opposite from my experience.
jstx1 4y ago
This sounds entirely backwards based on talking to many different people about it in the past couple of years.
alex_suzuki 4y ago
Other way round for me. Having more time for family/kids because I don’t have to commute is great. Also, starting out in a completely remote setting sounds a bit daunting to me.

jstx1 4y ago

Glavnokoman 4y ago
No. I do not think he's implying it is a bad thing by itself. Instead he explicitly says that those are the people who try to solve their problems at expense of others.
- jstx1 4y ago
  The expense of others is a point that works both ways. You could equally say that someone who insists on being remote because it's better for their family life is preventing/slowing down the return to office, and that's at the expense of people who prefer to be in the office. But I wouldn't put it that way because I don't think it makes for a productive conversation - office or remote, people like what they like and they have their reasons for it.
  - nsotelo 4y ago
    These are not morally equivalent. The office-worker wants others to modify everyone's behaviour to support them, whereas the remote worker just wants to control their own behaviour. The remote worker is completely ambivalent to where others want to work.
    - TheSpiceIsLife 4y ago
      It's entirely possible that at least some of those who prefer to work at the office are equally ambivalent about what others what to do.
    - jstx1 4y ago
      I'm not buying this. - In a big team if everyone is in-office and 1 person is remote, that person certainly cares about being the only remote person. Maybe some people would be okay with it, but being the only remote person has been known to be a not-so-great working arrangement even before the pandemic. So you can't say that remote people don't care where others work. - If enough people choose remote, they're forcing everyone else to be remote too (whether they attend the office or not) because the communication model for the whole team has to be different now. <<< This is remote people modifying everyone else's behaviour to support them.

sinsterizme 4y ago

I definitely fall into this camp. I’m introverted, so the forced social interaction at work was perfect for me and sufficient to keep me socially gratified. I’ve tried to make up for it in the pandemic by being more socially active but it hasn’t been working. I’ll definitely be looking for an in-office position soon since some companies are returning. I think my mental health will greatly recover.

odessacubbage 4y ago
have you tried looking for a co-working space? i've known freelancers who pooled together for a shared studio space for similar reasons.
- sinsterizme 4y ago
  I’ve tried it out, it’s not the same but it helps a bit. I appreciate the suggestion!
twayt 4y ago
Forcing yourself to get your social interaction requirements met at work isn't ideal. It is like trying to get your protein requirements met from potatoes. Yes, you can if you force yourself and try really hard. However, it is much more efficient and pain-free to get it from a protein shake. In this context, it means using the time you save with working from home and using it to meet people interested in the things you care about.
- sinsterizme 4y ago
  I don’t see what’s so bad about it. Half of my waking hours are spent working, a lot of the other half are spent eating, working out, and relaxing. Am I supposed to spend an hour a day hanging out with people after work? Not only does that sound exhausting, it doesn’t seem like enough if that’s my main social interaction. At work, there is a shared goal and a community that I can be a part of, and it’s there for me for most of my waking hours during the week.

jxramos 4y ago

My friend joined Coinbase who he recommended to me. They are highly remote or very remote friendly. The CEO has a great vision too, I enjoyed some of the talks he gave eg with Gary Tan, etc.

curiousgal 4y ago

> fills the void in their lives Why is that a bad thing? We have a problem and this is a solution.

justinclift 4y ago

Alternatively, some of us (well, me at least) view "in the office" work as a way to help achieve work/personal-life separation. Saying this after many, many years of remote working, where the boundaries between work and personal life blurred so far they became practically indistinguishable. (yay 24/7 "DevOps" culture :/)

coffeeblack 4y ago
I close my work laptop and that’s it for the day. Simple.
- vladvasiliu 4y ago
  Exactly. I even use the same monitor and everything, but when I'm done for the day, the laptop goes in the drawer and whoever wants something from me will have to wait for the next business day. I find the same kind of creep can happen at the office, too. Many colleagues end up leaving at 8 PM or later [0] because they have to do this one more thing or someone shows up with just a quick question to ask. However, I realize that for some people, who have a harder time saying no for whatever reason, it's easier to have a hard, external excuse. "Sorry, I need to catch my train, so I don't have to sleep here" works less well when you're already home. But I think that in both cases it's very important to set boundaries and stick to them. --- [0] Our workdays are normally 9 AM to 6 PM.
- civilized 4y ago
  Seriously! Why do people think that working remotely entitles their boss to 24/7 access? Come on, set some boundaries!
  - givemeethekeys 4y ago
    They make the mistake of installing Slack on their phone.
    - civilized 4y ago

Closi 4y ago

> Warning: Hot Take. I genuinely believe many people who prefer working in an office versus at home have unfulfilling social lives or bad home lives. The social dynamics, competition, in physical offices fills the void in their lives. Warning: Hot Take. I have similar logic, but reach an almost opposite conclusion. I genuinely believe many people who prefer working at home rather than an office have unfulfilling work lives and struggle to form meaningful friendships/relationships with colleagues. I genuinely enjoy interactions with my colleagues during a work day, and wouldn't want to replace that with staring at a screen for 7.5 hours of my day or only talking to them via Slack. I have a great social group outside of work, but that doesn't diminish the value of enjoying the company of people I work with too. Sure, it might technically be more productive if I just locked myself in a room and worked intensely on my own for my whole career and only communicated through a webcam, but that doesn't seem particularly enjoyable to me personally.

chrisan 4y ago
> I genuinely believe many people who prefer working at home rather than an office have unfulfilling work lives and struggle to form meaningful friendships/relationships with colleagues. Absolutely not true. I've been WFH since 2008. Many followed overtime and the company went full WFH in 2015 closing our office. We have a video call 3x a week and shoot the shit learn about each others lives just the same before we talk about work. I don't feel any less connected to my coworkers than my physical friends. I also am part of a telegram group with ~10 old college buddies who live all over the country where we chat everyday and hop on voice to play video games or a monthly poker. This obviously isn't the same since we started out as physical friends and went to chat groups after going out separate ways, but again I haven't lost touch with any of them or felt less connected/meaningful because we are now remote only. Not only that but with all the various video games we have added random people we connected with to that group, I don't even know what their face looks like but I know just as much about them as my physical friends. They are just part of the daily discussions about sports, politics, movies/tv, whatever. I think if you are not connecting with someone you maybe aren't trying enough because it is totally possible. What exactly can't you talk about remotely that you can in person? I've yet to find a topic myself

aaron695 4y ago

lordnacho 4y ago

For devs, it's hard to debate this point. It's even hard to explain to others what the value of the flow state is, where you're just one with the code and you feel like you're making progress. You really need to not be interrupted, and you need comforts like your own chair, food, and clothes. I'm mostly coding these days so 100% WFH suits me just fine. Yesterday I talked to some people I used to face, ie they were taking the phone at another business years ago when I was trading with them. They are all against working from home, having continued to go to the office during the lockdowns. The point they made was that some things really benefit from being interruptible. Some things even benefit from not being recorded. Immediacy really matters for certain things like gauging who you should approach with some deal. What also matters is being able to weigh the mood. A lot of what we call political decisions depend on this kind of weighing of what the team wants to do, and is hard through zoom. Finally there's the problem of juniors. In finance you'd learn stuff when there was a quiet moment and someone more experienced seemed like they had a second to explain something to you. Unscheduled but valuable training. These folks basically took the opposite view of what you seem to have, and decided that people who like WFH are basically not productive and are just phoning it in, knowing that it has gotten harder to hire people willing to be in the office all day. It's kinda interesting the take that people on opposite ends of the spectrum have of each others motivations.

ZephyrBlu 4y ago

I think I would prefer to work in an office over remote solely because it's harder to meet new people in the company and make good connections remotely. I'd like to have some professional connections that carry over from my current company.

_ph_ 4y ago

You are categorizing it way to one sided in an offensive way. "Bad home lives" can be as simple as having too much social interaction e.g. by having children at home, which can be quite distracting. And of course, a lot of people don't have a separate room set aside at home for work. Real estate in many places is prohibitively expensive. And even if there is one, with full home office, both partners might compete for that working space and on many days even need 2 office rooms. Also, the "social interactions" at the office are usually not about replacing private social life, but well, interacting with your colleagues about work related topics which go beyond the range of scheduled meetings. There is a lot of value in meeting random people over a coffee without a set agenda. No surprise, that during the pandemic there were a lot of meetings schedule with no agenda set, just to keep conversation between people alive, the more so as they don't work directly together. On the one side I certainly appreciated the ability to work undisturbed at home for certain tasks, on the other side, I am working in a large organization (and I don't mean by large just a large headcount but a lot of people on joint or related projects), which mostly are not software engineers (but engineers of other disciplines). A lot of that goes online too - and as our organization is spread across large distances, always has been online - but I am aware of the benefits of direct interaction. At minimum, I like to have had some direct interactions with people I am working online with. But of course, one cannot (and should not) just turn back the clock. The pandemic happened, and a lot of people had a taste of the advantages of work from home and a lot of companies had to work hard at facilitating that, so for a huge amount of jobs this is technically possible now. Working from an office isn't the only option any more and employers should understand that. Forcing people to come back into the office is a huge warning sign. It means that there are actually no convincing reasons, or the employees wouldn't have to be pressured. Which of course raises the questions, why did spend Apple 5 billion on that fancy new headquarter and didn't put emphasis onto making this a place people want to go to? In the contrary, it was designed with open office spaces, which especially software engineers just hate. It was unpopular even before the pandemic. Instead, they should have asked groups and single employees how an office attractive for their line of work should look. It couldn't possibly have been a problem of the budget :).

peoplefromibiza 4y ago

My personal hot take: I genuinely believe many people who prefer working at home are very young and have not developed social awareness and/or don't feel the need to separate life and work, because their life is their work and vice versa. Most people that do not want to return to office are still in that phase of their life where they need to rebel to authority to feel alive and will end up being those "middle managers" that they critique today. Also: WFH as the only possible option is not different from office as the only option. I don't like going to the office when it rains, but I enjoy going out of my house when the Sun shines or meet my colleagues to have an informal chat on how to progress with some project, it makes everything smoother and a lot of the underground tensions generated by only communicating through video and voice disappear. The truth is the majority of the workplaces are not "for coders only" and trying to find a balance with other people's needs, for example those people that have to work in presence, it's sign of and good willing and maturity. You can decide to quit to WFH, IMO that doesn't mean you're standing up for yourself, it only means you're not willing to change your habits.

boo-ga-ga 4y ago
But if you want to separate life from work, you can work in whatever place you'd like. Coworking space, cafe, personal office etc. Then you don't need to live near your company's office, and can choose the best possible place to live and work for you and your family.
- peoplefromibiza 4y ago
  > Coworking space, cafe, personal office etc. or you can chose to work for a company whose offices are not two hours away. coworking, cafes, etc are not really suited to actually work, especially of your work requires some kind of concentration or secrecy (an NDA for example) Personal office in house is the worst combination of them all IMO. Not that I do not work from home, I did it for good part of my life, it's just not for everybody. You have also to consider that having their parents around all day could be the worst possible way to live for teenagers, it makes more sense only when they are small kids, but in my country we have parental leaves and specific holidays to take care of that.

JimBlackwood 4y ago

I never understand this or any hot take related to WFH. Why is it necessary to assume something negative about another person simply because you’re different? It’s nonsense. It truly doesn’t matter. WFH can be great, working from the office can be great. Find a company where the social and work culture fit with what you prefer.

IshKebab 4y ago
Yeah people seem to be incapable of understanding that people have different preferences! It's like everyone is arguing that red is the best colour, no blue is clearly the best...
twayt 4y ago
You really don't understand the incentive people have here? It is the same as politics. The more polarized you can make things and the more you point out the flaws of the opposing perspective, the easier it is to influence public opinion. In situations where policy needs to be determined, the decision made will benefit one side and harm the other side. In an ideal world, companies will allow employees to do whatever they want and pay them the same as long as they are productive. However, companies want to actively reduce chaos and this means making consistent rules for everyone and measuring how this affects productivity in aggregate. So the rules become "fully remote" or "hybrid work" instead of allowing people to do what makes them optimally productive. > Find a company where the social and work culture fit with what you prefer. You say this presuming that people don't care about what they are working on or the prestige of the company they are working at. A lot of people have a fairly good setup and would rather influence their own company (or by proxy the industry at large) than simply move to a different potentially suboptimal company that allows remote work.

montalbano 4y ago

You've skipped over an important group of people here: in any healthy workplace, new starters, graduates and other junior developers benefit massively from being in the same office as their more senior colleagues. The amount they learn from accumulated small interactions that would not happen in remote working cannot be overstated.

twayt 4y ago
What exactly do you learn from your coworkers? It isn't like you are pair programming constantly with senior devs all the time. I've learnt way more reading papers and documentation than being in the same physical space as more senior colleagues. People sometimes bring this point up re: onboarding but I don't quite understand what people learn that they can't do otherwise remotely.
- matt89 4y ago
  Different people absorb knowledge in different ways. Just because you learned the most by reading articles doesn't mean that is true for everyone. I believe there is value in newcomers/junior devs begin in close proximity with their more experienced coworkers because this greatly improves the chance to talk about important work-related topics. Many times in my live I have started a casual conversation with someone at work and this lead to discussion about current work-related software topics and I was able to share some opinions with someone. These things happen much more rarely when they are scheduled slack calls, and people seldomly just slack to talk about random things.
  - twayt 4y ago
    > Different people absorb knowledge in different ways. Just because you learned the most by reading articles doesn't mean that is true for everyone. ...and that's precisely the reason I asked the question > Many times in my live I have started a casual conversation with someone at work and this lead to discussion about current work-related software topics and I was able to share some opinions with someone. This sounds like general information sharing amongst coworkers. The way you phrased the comment made it seem like there was something specific you were referring to pertaining to newcomers/junior devs. I agree with your point that you have less airtime to share your general thoughts about interesting things in a remote setting. I do agree with your general point and have experienced that too. Just observing more certain people equivocate about a topic is inspiring and that helps to learn more.

bluescrn 4y ago

It's not about the office, it's about the commuting, which can often increase the length of the working day by 25% or more, and can add a thoroughly miserable start and end to that day (stuck in traffic, or on delayed/overcrowded trains), and make life seem much worse even if you're doing enjoyable work with great people in a really nice office. Offices have their pros and cons (WFH can be a horribly lonely experience for anyone who lives alone, for example). But it's removing the commuting that makes WFH such a massive win for most people. And a big win for the environment (which should be reason enough to try and keep it going)

mickotron 4y ago
For me it’s both. I love having control over my work environment and equipment.
nmfisher 4y ago
Exactly this for me. I actually think an office environment is much better for many (if not most) aspects, but it’s difficult to argue with eliminating 1-2 hours of daily commute.
nedt 4y ago
I just went back to the office and commute is one of the reason. The walk or bike ride is what I have been missing the last months. Of course that means you need to work and life in some city that doesn't force you to have a long train ride or even worse take a car.
Zanneth 4y ago
Commuting is not the only part of work life that has an impact on the environment. It is dramatically less efficient to heat/cool thousands of separate homes throughout the day as opposed to one large office building. Remote work could actually be much worse for the environment.

COM2323 4y ago

> I genuinely believe many people who prefer working in an office versus at home have unfulfilling social lives or bad home lives. Feels like you are mixing a lot of stuff together. My desire to interact with my collegues about our field of work has nothing to do with my social live outside of work. It's not like I'm going to talk about new C# 11 features during our Sunday barbecue or at soccer practise. Of course I can go to a meetup or invite friends from tech to a pub, but that's not gonna replace 40 hours a week of "random interaction" with my colleagues. Maybe I'm just lucky and have great colleagues that are fun to interact with? Hard to say ...

trentgreene 4y ago

I kind of fall into this category, but it's a little more nuanced. I have a very fulfilling social life / hobbies outside of work, and have taken sabbaticals before to great success. WFH was great because I could exercise a lot more, hangout with friends, etc. But I am excited to be back in office on some hybrid schedule, because there was a social component to work that I very much missed. I enjoyed the work part of the work the same, but missed the occasional coffee with a coworker, full-fledged in person brainstorming session, off hand conversations about zany ideas, lunch at the cafe, etc. It's not that my social fulfillment declined at all overall with WFH -- other social activities filled the time -- but the specific social activity of bonding in person with folks I worked with definitely decreased, and it's nice to have that come back. That's not a reason to force folks back in the office (this is at no-one's expense, as I've seen it suggested), but it's a nice benefit.

arinlen 4y ago

> I genuinely believe many people who prefer working in an office versus at home have unfulfilling social lives or bad home lives. The social dynamics, competition, in physical offices fills the void in their lives. Also seems like most of the people clamoring for a return to the office are also climbers & middle managers. This. I've recently switched officially to a de-facto full remote position after years of full remote due to COVID, as did most of my team, and I also see this pattern among the coworkers who decided to go to the office. The return-to-office cases boiled down to: * Rented a tiny apartment to maximize disposable income but it's very unpleasant to live in, let alone work, * Share a 3-bedroom flat with 3 or 4 newly-graduated and yet-to-graduate buddies, * A young upwardly-mobile professional who wants to maximize his presence around the senior manager to fulfill his career-growth plans. I dare say that in two dozen team members, only 5 or 6 want to return to the office, and about half of them need it because they can't afford a decent apartment.

tsukikage 4y ago

It doesn't take being socially unfulfilled to prefer working in an office. It just takes not having adequate work space at home; e.g. if you have kids and not a mansion.

wfhordie 4y ago

I’m not sure what you’re trying to imply with the first paragraph, but let me tell you how it sounds to me: “Hot take: people who have a different work style preference than me are inferior and damaged, and/or have motives which I despise or work a job I think is useless.” Rethink this. These are your colleagues. Compassion for people who are different from you improves your own humanity and makes working with you more enjoyable.

nvarsj 4y ago

Maybe not paint people with such broad strokes? Humans are complicated, and the reasons we have for wanting to go to the office vs WFH are varied. For example - some people don't like work bleeding into their home life, which is a lot harder when you WFH.

holoduke 4y ago

I am a very social person. I want to be around people. My home is good. But too noisy, too many kids :) I love meeting people in my work field and I love to have a real conversation in which I can read body and speech. Not just speech. For me the whole working from home thing sucks. I don't like it.

activitypea 4y ago

Despite the horrendous tone and attitude, you're 100% right. I prefer working from the office because I get to be less lonely for a third of my waking life, probably in part because I can rarely get that kind of social fullfillment from my private life. I'm just not quite sure what's so bad about not wanting to be unconditionally alone 8 hours a day, 5 days a week.

dmatech 4y ago

Understandable. Some of us actually want team cohesion and collaboration instead of working on Jira tickets in isolation. Others want a purely asynchronous communication style that keeps the chit-chat to an absolute minimum. I personally want to know what's going on in far-flung corners of the company, because I'm fundamentally a generalist who wants to understand the big picture. I don't just want to put in my 8 hours and clock out, although I can see why people just trying to put their kids through school might want to do that. Personality types and home situations matter a great deal in these situations.

synicalx 4y ago

I can't say that's true for me personally, and I greatly prefer working in the office. In my case I mostly like the office because it allows me to keep work physically compartmentalised from real life - I don't have work things invading my personal space (and using it for free, I might add).

nedt 4y ago

Some of us just have kids and finding a flat with enough rooms for everyone plus an office room is almost impossible. So it's good to have the option to also go to the office in addition to WFH.