9 ms·

Remote work changed their lives. They’re not going back to the office

80 points by pcl 4y ago

treis 4y ago
For all the doom and gloom in the world it is remarkable the ways life is better than for previous generations.
- Bakary 4y ago
  It depends on your social class. The people interviewed in the article are all highly-paid software workers who can negotiate good working conditions. Meanwhile, people who don't have the funds to move around have to deal not only with the local inflation and decrease in living standards but also with the gentrification that comes from the nomads. In places like Portugal, it's approaching dire proportions already. They can no longer aspire to own a home or have a living standard equal to that of their parents. You could then ask why workers don't just learn to code, but the quality of life of digital nomads also depends on others not having the possibility, aptitude, or natural interest for doing those jobs. I agree that in many ways life is better, but there are also multiple indicators for it getting worse and more feudalistic due to the accretion of wealth.
  - saiya-jin 4y ago
    Its also lifestyle when you are young and alone, not when you ie want to start family. For me I preferred (before starting family) to have 3-4 far away backpacking vacations and come back to green mild climate civilized safety and mountains. Now with family, it would be incredibly selfish from me to do this to them (although I know few parents who do it... not much respect there)
    - ThalesX 4y ago
      > Now with family, it would be incredibly selfish from me to do this to them (although I know few parents who do it... not much respect there) Growing up, my dad would take me one month before school ended for the year, travel the world with me while mum stayed at home, then came back one month after school year started. This was met with a lot of 'not much respect', by both family members and broader society, but as an adult, those were the best moments of my life and I am grateful my father was never one for taking society's judgement to heart.
- tenpies 4y ago
  I suspect if you ask any of the "essential" workers, they would disagree. The divide that has been created between essential workers and the pyjama class is extreme. In some cases, pyjama classes were being paid to just stay home and not do anything because their work could not be done remotely or the systems were not in place. Meanwhile, nurses, grocery store workers, and pharmacist techs were all killing themselves working insane hours for virtually no pay increases, all in the back drop of a "deadly pandemic". It should be no surprise that the labour shortage is affecting the jobs that "essentials" perform, and meanwhile we have a surplus of pyjama class.
  - treis 4y ago
    Nothing draws negativity like saying something positive
    - hotpotamus 4y ago
      Flying in a private jet is awesome.
caminante 4y ago
> [Atlassian] had to adjust salaries based on location... I'd really like to know their calculus for adjusting based on location. The whole cost-benefit offset of remote work conditions stem from minimizing office space costs and attracting talent for less than a relocation hire. I'm skeptical most talent management departments are staying disciplined.
- Bakary 4y ago
  You are paid based on how difficult you are to replace. Hence the location based pay
  - mont 4y ago
    > You are paid based on how difficult you are to replace May be true in general but definitely is unrelated to location based pay (wouldn't it be easier to higher another faceless IC in the bay area than in OKC?)
    - Bakary 4y ago
      There are many reasons to hire people locally, even if they do work remote. This factors into the replace-ability aspect.
  - chrisseaton 4y ago
    By this logic pay would be lowest in for example San Francisco because there are tons of engineers with diverse skill sets there they can hire. Obviously not the case.
    - Bakary 4y ago
      Companies still want to hire local, non-remote talents for all sorts of reasons, from timezones to regulations to just internal/external culture. This will take a long time to change, if it ever does. Technically, a company could chose to hire only foreigners in cheaper countries, and I'm not talking about unreliable hires from developing nations but other competent Westerners whose biggest QoL mistake was not being born with a US visa. If you are an American who wants to be a nomad, the company will rarely fire you on the spot in favor of a more manageable new employee of your country of residence, because it already has a relationship with you and hiring is expensive and lengthy. What they can do however, is decrease your salary because they are no longer beholden to American anchor prices. You are no longer part of the contingent of local talent that they hire for various reasons, and will concede the decrease because the company still offers you the perspective of being a highly paid nomad. Think of it another way: how come it is nearly universally the case that junior American devs are paid salaries that are equal or higher to that of non-American devs working outside of America but within the same company?
greatpostman 4y ago
Being chained to an office is not that far from indentured servitude
- formerkrogemp 4y ago
  Try working in fast food.
  - hw 4y ago
    Precisely. Tech workers are for the most part spoilt. Being paid more than the average worker, having the option to work from home, lots of job benefits - and yet the thought of going back to the office brings comparisons to indentured servitude? Come on…
- bin_bash 4y ago
  I desperately hope this is sarcasm
- samatman 4y ago
  Practically identical: one gets a wage, rather than credit against a debt, one can quit, and the boss can't beat you. But other than that
malux85 4y ago
Instead of my commute I have used the time to exercise every day. I’ve never been in better shape, and that has translated to me being a better programmer. I am never going back to the office
- WirelessGigabit 4y ago
  Me too. And I only had a 30 minute commute. But I moved. How I walk 40 minutes in the morning and 120 minutes in the evening. Because I can. I’m not in a city where there is constant construction on sidewalks.
citizenpaul 4y ago
The pandemic really outed lots of toxic managers. I was at a law office my friend worked at where one of the upper guys was walking around chanting "BUTTS IN SEATS, BUTTS IN SEATS" at the beginning of the pandemic in reference to WFH as a possibility.
sfvegandude 4y ago
When the recession hits they'll be the first with the pink slips.
- iso1631 4y ago
  The people unwilling to work from home, and thus require extra costs for the company like rent for the office
  - sfvegandude 4y ago
    The WFH crowd wishes. Corporations are not logical in this way. They are far more concerned with enforcing their own culture than they are with the expense of their real estate which is, after all, both an investment and a tax write-off.
    - iso1631 4y ago
      Over time in a perfectly spherical market, companies outsourcing their office costs to employees will be able to charge less and thus win more custom thanks to the invisible hand. Of course large companies have further inefficiencies, where middle manager incentives are not aligned with those of the board, which are not aligned with those of the owners (all of which boils down to management layers being unable to reliably measure the worth of the layer they manage)
davidg109 4y ago
Was just told to start prepping for work travel for our “special” clients who want to see us in person. No thanks. Getting ready to search elsewhere. Working remotely works, I’m going by my own outcomes not some scientific study. I’m not going back, ever.
- pkrotich 4y ago
  You don’t want travel but that has nothing to do with remote work tho. I actually look forward to work travel from time to time now since we went fully remote. I’m never going back to office setting as well but occasional meet up is awesome in my experience thus far.
  - b112 4y ago
    I can see occasional traveling as fun, and a break in routine. But I wonder if parent meant, "remote work from a hotel forever".
    - culturestate 4y ago
      > I wonder if parent meant, "remote work from a hotel forever" I ended up doing this unintentionally for the last ~1.5 years and...I have to be honest, I didn't hate it. Maybe it was just pent-up energy from being stuck on a small island (Singapore) for the first two years of covid - and it probably helped that I was mostly in major European capitals - but once I got back into the swing of traveling again it was frankly delightful.
    - CoastalCoder 4y ago
      I've found air travel for business to be increasingly unpleasant in past years, mostly due to shrinking seat space. (I'm about 6'3".) For that reason alone I try pretty hard to avoid it, unless there's a compelling reason.
      - QuercusMax 4y ago
        I'm actually a little surprised there hasn't been a class action discrimination lawsuit by tall people against airlines. I'm only 6' with shoes on, and it's getting tight for me.
andreygrehov 4y ago
I don't want to get back to the office. Ever. However, I'm not against offices. I'm against living next to the office, because the majority of them are in the center of the universe (eg, Broadway in New York, Market Street in SF, etc). Real estate prices there are in the stratosphere. So you either live in a shoebox sacrificing your kids childhood or commute to the office 2-3h daily. Why not to open many small offices _outside_ major cities so that people could A/ afford real estate B/ enjoy outdoor space C/ minimize their commute time?
- chrisseaton 4y ago
  > Why not to open many small offices _outside_ major cities so that people could A/ afford real estate B/ enjoy outdoor space C/ minimize their commute time? Wasn't this the idea behind the suburban office-building hellscape that people absolutely hated? We thought we were escaping that with our nice city-centre offices!
  - pharmakom 4y ago
    The mistake there was making it car centric. Fundamentally it wasn’t such a bad idea.
    - notacoward 4y ago
      The problem is that making it anything else in the (US) suburbs is damn near impossible. So you have your nice little suburban office park ... and what else? If you want to replicate the feel of a city, even at small scale, you're reliant on restaurants and other kinds of stores and entertainment venues being nearby. Unfortunately, they won't see your office park as a draw. They'll still cluster near the big roads. Your choice in the suburbs is to be in Car Hell or to be isolated. The closest compromise I've seen is the area around a local mall. There are tons of restaurants - everything from brewpubs to fast food to a Brazilian steakhouse to coffee shops and my favorite bubble-tea shop. Groceries of all kinds and levels, all sorts of clothing, hardware, housewares, a movie complex, you name it. And there are a couple of semi-decent-looking apartment buildings in the area. It's still very car-centric, crossing the eight-lane road between the apartments and the mall wouldn't be fun, but if I were single and worked in one of the nearby office parks I could see living there and hardly needing to drive anywhere.
candiddevmike 4y ago
In my opinion, it's not fair for jobs that cannot be WFH. There should be some kind of percent over minimum wage pay or tax breaks for jobs that cannot be done remotely. While the market seems to be heading this direction, I think the government should step in to ensure those that will dedicate their time to being somewhere else are rewarded as much as those that get to sit in their pajamas and work from the comfort of their homes. I say this as someone who has worked remote for years. Folks that have to be onsite (like tradesmen) see the inequality and it is furthering division within our country. Or the prophecies of remote jobs being outsourced will come true and the onsite folks with their job security will have the last laugh.
- sh4un 4y ago
- vladvasiliu 4y ago
  I can see some consequences of people taking up WFH that could be good for the people who have to commute: fewer people on the roads / in public transit is a clear win: it's more comfortable. People working from home full-time could move further away and lessen the pressure on housing and child care. Prices could go down and allow those who commute to move closer and further improve their commute. In the city where I live, there are ridiculous traffic jams every day during rush hour, and the metros and busses are bursting at the seams with people. Most people are "service industry workers", sitting in an office in front of a computer all day. Why on earth would we, as a society, want to not encourage the people who can to WFH? Even if nobody were working from home, there would still be significant differences between jobs. I hate my commute and greatly prefer working from home. But even if I had to sit my butt in the company's chair, working in an air-conditioned office is leagues above having to work, say, construction under a scorching sun or in the freezing cold. Should the government mandate that I carry a 50 pound sack of cement up the stairs twice a day and blow a heater in my face during the summer? It's true that some (most?) "lower-end jobs" that "keep society working" are under-paid, but I doubt that some people working from home makes the difference between positions significantly worse. Trying to somehow "tax" people who work from home just sounds like a bitter "since I can't have it, neither can you".
- 4y ago
i_like_apis 4y ago
I started going back in to the office every day and I love it. I was too lazy being at home all the time, both professionally and personally. Seeing people in person is so much better than via chat. Of course, this works because my current commute is not awful.
- kaesar14 4y ago
  - CoastalCoder 4y ago
    I think we've had some pretty balanced and constructive discussions about this I'm HN. I'm not worried.
  - csydas 4y ago
    I realize you're being catty, but the stigma towards in-office work isn't towards people who enjoy it, it's towards the idea that everyone _must_ enjoy it. COVID proved that many businesses can survive a hybrid or even remote-only environment easily. Being told that employees must come back to office or altering the salaries/benefits of employees who chose remote work is what people are against. If people want to be in office, let them. And for those who remote is more convenient, let them.
    - spoonjim 4y ago
      The thing is that in-office work only meets the needs of the in-office people if everyone else is there. So instead of every company feeling like they need to support remote work, there should be some companies that are all in-office and some that are all-remote rather than each company feeling that they need to support both. I am not the kind of high performer that companies fall over themselves to hire, but I prefer an employer with no remote work (other than full remote teams like a Europe office) and I’m sure some high performers feel the way I do.
      - KerrAvon 4y ago
steve76 4y ago
mwattsun 4y ago
My experience may be illustrative of why you should let some employees WFH. Out of the Navy, I got hired as a programming intern assigned to work on the database for "Mouse Works" for the Macintosh, which became "Microsoft Works" after Microsoft decided to publish it. I wrote the database and more. I also managed all three releases from 1984 to 1993 as the build engineer. I did this all while working from home in Santa Cruz. Our small team all worked from home because the owner didn't want to spend money on an office. We got together every few weeks to compare notes and integrate our work. After Works, I went to work for companies that required me to be in the office, which was the rule for the time. I found I couldn't perform in an office because there were too many distractions. I need peace and quiet to think, and never found that in the many office settings I worked at. I produced some passable work, but nothing like I had been able to do at home. If your employees tell you they need to work at home to produce their best work, believe them.
- bkuehl 4y ago
  From my experience so far with pandemic WFH that turned into permanent WFH for our company, if the employee was generally good or performed pretty well they are performing even better working remotely. However, if the employee was just average or needed some oversight, productivity is not very good remotely. Fortunately, I have a solid team (at least for now) so I'm seeing the benefits and things are going very well overall. However, a colleague's team's overall productivity is abysmal. Btw, we also don't have long hours. Rarely work over 40.
  - KerrAvon 4y ago
    This might be is an indictment of your colleague’s manager. Not that the team individual contributors don’t have agency, but it’s the managers job to corral them and make sure they’re performing. This can certainly be done even if the manager is remote; it’s been done for decades at multiple companies. Managers have a strong role in shaping the team’s ability to perform and they need to use it. You’ve got to talk to your IC’s. If they’re really incapable of performing, get them help. You can manage remote workers! It’s a thing that can be done.
KronisLV 4y ago
I actually wrote about this divide that I was seeing in regards to remote work a while back: https://blog.kronis.dev/articles/remote-working-and-the-elephant-in-the-room https://blog.kronis.dev/articles/remote-working-and-the-elep... Since then, it just seems even more noticeable. I guess there are just different people with different preferences and life circumstances to deal with, but personally I just wish that most would be able to whatever feels suitable for themselves. Claiming that we should do X because everyone else is doing it feels harmful (outside of external factors that force your hand), as does pigeonholing people who don't prosper in a certain mode of work into it due to others feeling comfortable with it. In those situations, it just feels like people might be better off just finding a mode of work that suits themselves, rather than sticking around in an environment where they'll be miserable.
- cortesoft 4y ago
  The problem with “let everyone work wherever they want” is that there are a lot of real challenges with having some people working remote and some not. I remember a saying my old boss told me when we were hiring remote workers; “if one team member is remote, everyone is remote”. In order for the team to work well, you have to move almost all interactions online or the remote worker is going to miss out. If decisions are made in person, the remote worker won’t be part of them. You have to have the discussions online anyway, even if most of the people are in office. Plus, most companies aren’t going to want to maintain an office, with all the expenses that entails, if most people aren’t going to be there.
  - KronisLV 4y ago
    > I remember a saying my old boss told me when we were hiring remote workers; “if one team member is remote, everyone is remote”. In order for the team to work well, you have to move almost all interactions online or the remote worker is going to miss out. If decisions are made in person, the remote worker won’t be part of them. You have to have the discussions online anyway, even if most of the people are in office. This is a good observation and probably sometimes the decision to have everyone work remotely vs in office will be made at an org level. Some will be okay with that, some will resign because it's not their preferred mode of work and others will remain working there but will be miserable for some time, which is unfortunate. Also, I've seen some try to do remote work while still trying to work primarily with sync communication, which actually urged me to create this site: https://quick-answers.kronis.dev/ https://quick-answers.kronis.dev/ Of course, in regards to remote work in particular, there are also guides like GitLab had, it's just that not everyone will mesh well with such a culture, ergo needing to find a good fit: https://about.gitlab.com/blog/2015/04/08/the-remote-manifesto/ https://about.gitlab.com/blog/2015/04/08/the-remote-manifest... > Plus, most companies aren’t going to want to maintain an office, with all the expenses that entails, if most people aren’t going to be there. I'm not sure about this, I've heard some explain that orgs want to maintain their property value, which isn't as nice if the buildings are completely empty and thus are urging workers to come back into the offices. That didn't make an awful lot of sense to me, or maybe I misunderstood the argument, but I can also see some benefits of having an office location. Of course, some try to have offices that have the capacity smaller than the total workforce, accounting for not everyone being in office 100% of the time, which has the benefit of being such a location without being overly expensive, but some have described a setup with no assigned seating kind of sub-optimal. There's lots of details to be explored in regards to the whole topic, it seems!
pdimitar 4y ago
Here we go again! Let's have another 500+ comments thread full of subjective opinions. I am sure this time everyone will agree on one universal truth and we'll all hold hands. /s Companies are free to try and enforce whatever they like. The job market will respond accordingly and a new balance will be found. That being said, such measures are only leading to more and more segregation (tinfoil hat: maybe that's the actual goal here?). I don't enjoy the idea of a society even further segregated but hey, I am not judging either side for preferring to work in an office or at home. Work where you like, as long as you actually have a choice and your livelihood is not threatened. And that is the key element that always flies out the window even at the start of every WFH / WFO discussion: give people a choice. If you can't do that then you're more or less declaring war on one of the sides and then don't get surprised at the repercussions (whatever they might be; I am not implying anything in particular).
- bradlys 4y ago
  I despise remote/wfh articles for this reason on HN. At this point - some ML script could do a better job creating new comments than what people on HN could. Everyone has to share their 10,000th anecdote about why work from office killed their pa and remote work - in the particular version they are experiencing - is the messiah.
  - pdimitar 4y ago
    There are extremists on both ends of the spectrum, sadly. I work from home ever since the start of 2011 and I don't feel the need to bash the people who prefer to work onsite. I do take issue with those who want to remove the choice however. Even with that I know I'll not change their minds with pixels on a screen so 95% of the time I just abstain.
aspiring_pigeon 4y ago
From my experience, there are broadly speaking two types of people. They are often grouped into introverts and extroverts, but one aspect of this grouping is their differing response to external stimuli. In this context I'm suggesting that there are people who require external stimuli to maintain concentration/creativity; and people who require serenity. Personally, I require being around a lot of external stimuli to maintain focus and work/study; and am therefore better suited to working in the office; however, I have developed strategies for becoming productive when working from home. I have found that when working from home my best work happens when I am in a room with flashing disco lights and driving metal/house music, where the lyrics are in a language I don't understand. I need this stimuli inorder to be creative, and If I don't have this I become very lethargic and unproductive.
rr808 4y ago
Who would want to be a real worker now? Teachers, Nurses, construction workers, factory workers have to be at work every day. Either their wages need rising or WFH office workers need a big pay cut.

80 points by pcl 4y ago

treis 4y ago

For all the doom and gloom in the world it is remarkable the ways life is better than for previous generations.

Bakary 4y ago
It depends on your social class. The people interviewed in the article are all highly-paid software workers who can negotiate good working conditions. Meanwhile, people who don't have the funds to move around have to deal not only with the local inflation and decrease in living standards but also with the gentrification that comes from the nomads. In places like Portugal, it's approaching dire proportions already. They can no longer aspire to own a home or have a living standard equal to that of their parents. You could then ask why workers don't just learn to code, but the quality of life of digital nomads also depends on others not having the possibility, aptitude, or natural interest for doing those jobs. I agree that in many ways life is better, but there are also multiple indicators for it getting worse and more feudalistic due to the accretion of wealth.
- saiya-jin 4y ago
  Its also lifestyle when you are young and alone, not when you ie want to start family. For me I preferred (before starting family) to have 3-4 far away backpacking vacations and come back to green mild climate civilized safety and mountains. Now with family, it would be incredibly selfish from me to do this to them (although I know few parents who do it... not much respect there)
  - ThalesX 4y ago
    > Now with family, it would be incredibly selfish from me to do this to them (although I know few parents who do it... not much respect there) Growing up, my dad would take me one month before school ended for the year, travel the world with me while mum stayed at home, then came back one month after school year started. This was met with a lot of 'not much respect', by both family members and broader society, but as an adult, those were the best moments of my life and I am grateful my father was never one for taking society's judgement to heart.
tenpies 4y ago
I suspect if you ask any of the "essential" workers, they would disagree. The divide that has been created between essential workers and the pyjama class is extreme. In some cases, pyjama classes were being paid to just stay home and not do anything because their work could not be done remotely or the systems were not in place. Meanwhile, nurses, grocery store workers, and pharmacist techs were all killing themselves working insane hours for virtually no pay increases, all in the back drop of a "deadly pandemic". It should be no surprise that the labour shortage is affecting the jobs that "essentials" perform, and meanwhile we have a surplus of pyjama class.
- treis 4y ago
  Nothing draws negativity like saying something positive
  - hotpotamus 4y ago
    Flying in a private jet is awesome.

caminante 4y ago

> [Atlassian] had to adjust salaries based on location... I'd really like to know their calculus for adjusting based on location. The whole cost-benefit offset of remote work conditions stem from minimizing office space costs and attracting talent for less than a relocation hire. I'm skeptical most talent management departments are staying disciplined.

Bakary 4y ago
You are paid based on how difficult you are to replace. Hence the location based pay
- mont 4y ago
  > You are paid based on how difficult you are to replace May be true in general but definitely is unrelated to location based pay (wouldn't it be easier to higher another faceless IC in the bay area than in OKC?)
  - Bakary 4y ago
    There are many reasons to hire people locally, even if they do work remote. This factors into the replace-ability aspect.
- chrisseaton 4y ago
  By this logic pay would be lowest in for example San Francisco because there are tons of engineers with diverse skill sets there they can hire. Obviously not the case.
  - Bakary 4y ago
    Companies still want to hire local, non-remote talents for all sorts of reasons, from timezones to regulations to just internal/external culture. This will take a long time to change, if it ever does. Technically, a company could chose to hire only foreigners in cheaper countries, and I'm not talking about unreliable hires from developing nations but other competent Westerners whose biggest QoL mistake was not being born with a US visa. If you are an American who wants to be a nomad, the company will rarely fire you on the spot in favor of a more manageable new employee of your country of residence, because it already has a relationship with you and hiring is expensive and lengthy. What they can do however, is decrease your salary because they are no longer beholden to American anchor prices. You are no longer part of the contingent of local talent that they hire for various reasons, and will concede the decrease because the company still offers you the perspective of being a highly paid nomad. Think of it another way: how come it is nearly universally the case that junior American devs are paid salaries that are equal or higher to that of non-American devs working outside of America but within the same company?

greatpostman 4y ago

Being chained to an office is not that far from indentured servitude

formerkrogemp 4y ago
Try working in fast food.
- hw 4y ago
  Precisely. Tech workers are for the most part spoilt. Being paid more than the average worker, having the option to work from home, lots of job benefits - and yet the thought of going back to the office brings comparisons to indentured servitude? Come on…
bin_bash 4y ago
I desperately hope this is sarcasm
samatman 4y ago
Practically identical: one gets a wage, rather than credit against a debt, one can quit, and the boss can't beat you. But other than that

malux85 4y ago

Instead of my commute I have used the time to exercise every day. I’ve never been in better shape, and that has translated to me being a better programmer. I am never going back to the office

WirelessGigabit 4y ago
Me too. And I only had a 30 minute commute. But I moved. How I walk 40 minutes in the morning and 120 minutes in the evening. Because I can. I’m not in a city where there is constant construction on sidewalks.

citizenpaul 4y ago

The pandemic really outed lots of toxic managers. I was at a law office my friend worked at where one of the upper guys was walking around chanting "BUTTS IN SEATS, BUTTS IN SEATS" at the beginning of the pandemic in reference to WFH as a possibility.

sfvegandude 4y ago

When the recession hits they'll be the first with the pink slips.

iso1631 4y ago
The people unwilling to work from home, and thus require extra costs for the company like rent for the office
- sfvegandude 4y ago
  The WFH crowd wishes. Corporations are not logical in this way. They are far more concerned with enforcing their own culture than they are with the expense of their real estate which is, after all, both an investment and a tax write-off.
  - iso1631 4y ago
    Over time in a perfectly spherical market, companies outsourcing their office costs to employees will be able to charge less and thus win more custom thanks to the invisible hand. Of course large companies have further inefficiencies, where middle manager incentives are not aligned with those of the board, which are not aligned with those of the owners (all of which boils down to management layers being unable to reliably measure the worth of the layer they manage)

davidg109 4y ago

Was just told to start prepping for work travel for our “special” clients who want to see us in person. No thanks. Getting ready to search elsewhere. Working remotely works, I’m going by my own outcomes not some scientific study. I’m not going back, ever.

pkrotich 4y ago
You don’t want travel but that has nothing to do with remote work tho. I actually look forward to work travel from time to time now since we went fully remote. I’m never going back to office setting as well but occasional meet up is awesome in my experience thus far.
- b112 4y ago
  I can see occasional traveling as fun, and a break in routine. But I wonder if parent meant, "remote work from a hotel forever".
  - culturestate 4y ago
    > I wonder if parent meant, "remote work from a hotel forever" I ended up doing this unintentionally for the last ~1.5 years and...I have to be honest, I didn't hate it. Maybe it was just pent-up energy from being stuck on a small island (Singapore) for the first two years of covid - and it probably helped that I was mostly in major European capitals - but once I got back into the swing of traveling again it was frankly delightful.
  - CoastalCoder 4y ago
    I've found air travel for business to be increasingly unpleasant in past years, mostly due to shrinking seat space. (I'm about 6'3".) For that reason alone I try pretty hard to avoid it, unless there's a compelling reason.
    - QuercusMax 4y ago
      I'm actually a little surprised there hasn't been a class action discrimination lawsuit by tall people against airlines. I'm only 6' with shoes on, and it's getting tight for me.

andreygrehov 4y ago

I don't want to get back to the office. Ever. However, I'm not against offices. I'm against living next to the office, because the majority of them are in the center of the universe (eg, Broadway in New York, Market Street in SF, etc). Real estate prices there are in the stratosphere. So you either live in a shoebox sacrificing your kids childhood or commute to the office 2-3h daily. Why not to open many small offices _outside_ major cities so that people could A/ afford real estate B/ enjoy outdoor space C/ minimize their commute time?

chrisseaton 4y ago
> Why not to open many small offices _outside_ major cities so that people could A/ afford real estate B/ enjoy outdoor space C/ minimize their commute time? Wasn't this the idea behind the suburban office-building hellscape that people absolutely hated? We thought we were escaping that with our nice city-centre offices!
- pharmakom 4y ago
  The mistake there was making it car centric. Fundamentally it wasn’t such a bad idea.
  - notacoward 4y ago
    The problem is that making it anything else in the (US) suburbs is damn near impossible. So you have your nice little suburban office park ... and what else? If you want to replicate the feel of a city, even at small scale, you're reliant on restaurants and other kinds of stores and entertainment venues being nearby. Unfortunately, they won't see your office park as a draw. They'll still cluster near the big roads. Your choice in the suburbs is to be in Car Hell or to be isolated. The closest compromise I've seen is the area around a local mall. There are tons of restaurants - everything from brewpubs to fast food to a Brazilian steakhouse to coffee shops and my favorite bubble-tea shop. Groceries of all kinds and levels, all sorts of clothing, hardware, housewares, a movie complex, you name it. And there are a couple of semi-decent-looking apartment buildings in the area. It's still very car-centric, crossing the eight-lane road between the apartments and the mall wouldn't be fun, but if I were single and worked in one of the nearby office parks I could see living there and hardly needing to drive anywhere.

candiddevmike 4y ago

In my opinion, it's not fair for jobs that cannot be WFH. There should be some kind of percent over minimum wage pay or tax breaks for jobs that cannot be done remotely. While the market seems to be heading this direction, I think the government should step in to ensure those that will dedicate their time to being somewhere else are rewarded as much as those that get to sit in their pajamas and work from the comfort of their homes. I say this as someone who has worked remote for years. Folks that have to be onsite (like tradesmen) see the inequality and it is furthering division within our country. Or the prophecies of remote jobs being outsourced will come true and the onsite folks with their job security will have the last laugh.

sh4un 4y ago
vladvasiliu 4y ago
I can see some consequences of people taking up WFH that could be good for the people who have to commute: fewer people on the roads / in public transit is a clear win: it's more comfortable. People working from home full-time could move further away and lessen the pressure on housing and child care. Prices could go down and allow those who commute to move closer and further improve their commute. In the city where I live, there are ridiculous traffic jams every day during rush hour, and the metros and busses are bursting at the seams with people. Most people are "service industry workers", sitting in an office in front of a computer all day. Why on earth would we, as a society, want to not encourage the people who can to WFH? Even if nobody were working from home, there would still be significant differences between jobs. I hate my commute and greatly prefer working from home. But even if I had to sit my butt in the company's chair, working in an air-conditioned office is leagues above having to work, say, construction under a scorching sun or in the freezing cold. Should the government mandate that I carry a 50 pound sack of cement up the stairs twice a day and blow a heater in my face during the summer? It's true that some (most?) "lower-end jobs" that "keep society working" are under-paid, but I doubt that some people working from home makes the difference between positions significantly worse. Trying to somehow "tax" people who work from home just sounds like a bitter "since I can't have it, neither can you".
4y ago

i_like_apis 4y ago

I started going back in to the office every day and I love it. I was too lazy being at home all the time, both professionally and personally. Seeing people in person is so much better than via chat. Of course, this works because my current commute is not awful.

kaesar14 4y ago
- CoastalCoder 4y ago
  I think we've had some pretty balanced and constructive discussions about this I'm HN. I'm not worried.
- csydas 4y ago
  I realize you're being catty, but the stigma towards in-office work isn't towards people who enjoy it, it's towards the idea that everyone _must_ enjoy it. COVID proved that many businesses can survive a hybrid or even remote-only environment easily. Being told that employees must come back to office or altering the salaries/benefits of employees who chose remote work is what people are against. If people want to be in office, let them. And for those who remote is more convenient, let them.
  - spoonjim 4y ago
    The thing is that in-office work only meets the needs of the in-office people if everyone else is there. So instead of every company feeling like they need to support remote work, there should be some companies that are all in-office and some that are all-remote rather than each company feeling that they need to support both. I am not the kind of high performer that companies fall over themselves to hire, but I prefer an employer with no remote work (other than full remote teams like a Europe office) and I’m sure some high performers feel the way I do.
    - KerrAvon 4y ago

steve76 4y ago

mwattsun 4y ago

My experience may be illustrative of why you should let some employees WFH. Out of the Navy, I got hired as a programming intern assigned to work on the database for "Mouse Works" for the Macintosh, which became "Microsoft Works" after Microsoft decided to publish it. I wrote the database and more. I also managed all three releases from 1984 to 1993 as the build engineer. I did this all while working from home in Santa Cruz. Our small team all worked from home because the owner didn't want to spend money on an office. We got together every few weeks to compare notes and integrate our work. After Works, I went to work for companies that required me to be in the office, which was the rule for the time. I found I couldn't perform in an office because there were too many distractions. I need peace and quiet to think, and never found that in the many office settings I worked at. I produced some passable work, but nothing like I had been able to do at home. If your employees tell you they need to work at home to produce their best work, believe them.

bkuehl 4y ago
From my experience so far with pandemic WFH that turned into permanent WFH for our company, if the employee was generally good or performed pretty well they are performing even better working remotely. However, if the employee was just average or needed some oversight, productivity is not very good remotely. Fortunately, I have a solid team (at least for now) so I'm seeing the benefits and things are going very well overall. However, a colleague's team's overall productivity is abysmal. Btw, we also don't have long hours. Rarely work over 40.
- KerrAvon 4y ago
  This might be is an indictment of your colleague’s manager. Not that the team individual contributors don’t have agency, but it’s the managers job to corral them and make sure they’re performing. This can certainly be done even if the manager is remote; it’s been done for decades at multiple companies. Managers have a strong role in shaping the team’s ability to perform and they need to use it. You’ve got to talk to your IC’s. If they’re really incapable of performing, get them help. You can manage remote workers! It’s a thing that can be done.

KronisLV 4y ago

I actually wrote about this divide that I was seeing in regards to remote work a while back: https://blog.kronis.dev/articles/remote-working-and-the-elephant-in-the-room https://blog.kronis.dev/articles/remote-working-and-the-elep... Since then, it just seems even more noticeable. I guess there are just different people with different preferences and life circumstances to deal with, but personally I just wish that most would be able to whatever feels suitable for themselves. Claiming that we should do X because everyone else is doing it feels harmful (outside of external factors that force your hand), as does pigeonholing people who don't prosper in a certain mode of work into it due to others feeling comfortable with it. In those situations, it just feels like people might be better off just finding a mode of work that suits themselves, rather than sticking around in an environment where they'll be miserable.

cortesoft 4y ago
The problem with “let everyone work wherever they want” is that there are a lot of real challenges with having some people working remote and some not. I remember a saying my old boss told me when we were hiring remote workers; “if one team member is remote, everyone is remote”. In order for the team to work well, you have to move almost all interactions online or the remote worker is going to miss out. If decisions are made in person, the remote worker won’t be part of them. You have to have the discussions online anyway, even if most of the people are in office. Plus, most companies aren’t going to want to maintain an office, with all the expenses that entails, if most people aren’t going to be there.
- KronisLV 4y ago
  > I remember a saying my old boss told me when we were hiring remote workers; “if one team member is remote, everyone is remote”. In order for the team to work well, you have to move almost all interactions online or the remote worker is going to miss out. If decisions are made in person, the remote worker won’t be part of them. You have to have the discussions online anyway, even if most of the people are in office. This is a good observation and probably sometimes the decision to have everyone work remotely vs in office will be made at an org level. Some will be okay with that, some will resign because it's not their preferred mode of work and others will remain working there but will be miserable for some time, which is unfortunate. Also, I've seen some try to do remote work while still trying to work primarily with sync communication, which actually urged me to create this site: https://quick-answers.kronis.dev/ https://quick-answers.kronis.dev/ Of course, in regards to remote work in particular, there are also guides like GitLab had, it's just that not everyone will mesh well with such a culture, ergo needing to find a good fit: https://about.gitlab.com/blog/2015/04/08/the-remote-manifesto/ https://about.gitlab.com/blog/2015/04/08/the-remote-manifest... > Plus, most companies aren’t going to want to maintain an office, with all the expenses that entails, if most people aren’t going to be there. I'm not sure about this, I've heard some explain that orgs want to maintain their property value, which isn't as nice if the buildings are completely empty and thus are urging workers to come back into the offices. That didn't make an awful lot of sense to me, or maybe I misunderstood the argument, but I can also see some benefits of having an office location. Of course, some try to have offices that have the capacity smaller than the total workforce, accounting for not everyone being in office 100% of the time, which has the benefit of being such a location without being overly expensive, but some have described a setup with no assigned seating kind of sub-optimal. There's lots of details to be explored in regards to the whole topic, it seems!

pdimitar 4y ago

Here we go again! Let's have another 500+ comments thread full of subjective opinions. I am sure this time everyone will agree on one universal truth and we'll all hold hands. /s Companies are free to try and enforce whatever they like. The job market will respond accordingly and a new balance will be found. That being said, such measures are only leading to more and more segregation (tinfoil hat: maybe that's the actual goal here?). I don't enjoy the idea of a society even further segregated but hey, I am not judging either side for preferring to work in an office or at home. Work where you like, as long as you actually have a choice and your livelihood is not threatened. And that is the key element that always flies out the window even at the start of every WFH / WFO discussion: give people a choice. If you can't do that then you're more or less declaring war on one of the sides and then don't get surprised at the repercussions (whatever they might be; I am not implying anything in particular).

bradlys 4y ago
I despise remote/wfh articles for this reason on HN. At this point - some ML script could do a better job creating new comments than what people on HN could. Everyone has to share their 10,000th anecdote about why work from office killed their pa and remote work - in the particular version they are experiencing - is the messiah.
- pdimitar 4y ago
  There are extremists on both ends of the spectrum, sadly. I work from home ever since the start of 2011 and I don't feel the need to bash the people who prefer to work onsite. I do take issue with those who want to remove the choice however. Even with that I know I'll not change their minds with pixels on a screen so 95% of the time I just abstain.

aspiring_pigeon 4y ago

From my experience, there are broadly speaking two types of people. They are often grouped into introverts and extroverts, but one aspect of this grouping is their differing response to external stimuli. In this context I'm suggesting that there are people who require external stimuli to maintain concentration/creativity; and people who require serenity. Personally, I require being around a lot of external stimuli to maintain focus and work/study; and am therefore better suited to working in the office; however, I have developed strategies for becoming productive when working from home. I have found that when working from home my best work happens when I am in a room with flashing disco lights and driving metal/house music, where the lyrics are in a language I don't understand. I need this stimuli inorder to be creative, and If I don't have this I become very lethargic and unproductive.

rr808 4y ago

Who would want to be a real worker now? Teachers, Nurses, construction workers, factory workers have to be at work every day. Either their wages need rising or WFH office workers need a big pay cut.