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I have never encountered this supposed inefficiency of working from home, especially when you add in the many hours wasted commuting. I get that many people us
by olliej 4y ago
I have never encountered this supposed inefficiency of working from home, especially when you add in the many hours wasted commuting.
I get that many people use the office as a primary source of socialization, others aren't able to communicate online effectively, and yet others like wasting time in meetings instead of working.
It's obnoxious that those folk get priority, and the rest of us are forced to lose hours and hours our lives to needless commuting, and forced to have much worse working environments - the many varying approaches to "employees are livestock"/"open plan" have been demonstrated in every single study to be aggressively bad for productivity.
Finally, by not having to go to the office I'm not being exposed constantly to asshole coworkers who come into the office while sick, or when they have clearly sick family members. One of the greatest things in the work from home experience of the few years is not catching various plagues from coworkers. I went multiple years without so much as a cold.
Now I get to have forced exposure to those same coworkers that came in while sick in the past, so I have no trust that those who get covid won't come to the office to spread that plague around either.
Seriously I'm fine if you want to waste time commuting and getting sick if you need the office to socialize, or if you aren't able to communicate effectively online. I just don't understand why everyone else should have their lives made worse just to support you.
- jterrys 4y agoThe single genuine inefficiency of working from home is that it exposes a person's lack of discipline. They become more productive when all distractions are removed so they're forced to focus on one task at the detriment of everything else. This turns into a form of self torture though, since the office is ripe with distractions that they have to power through to get their tasks done. But because they're not afforded the luxury of getting distracted by things they'd like, and they hate the office distractions, they'd rather be doing work. The overall experience is shitty in the end but at least they're getting some work done. It sucks for the rest of us though, because now the self flagellation needs to be extended and we're all victims of presumption. "Since I can't get work done at home, then surely others can't as well! They're just sitting at home doing nothing, like I would be doing! Everyone needs to come back to the office now!" Other than that, WFH was genuinely sucky for people with small children, because daycares were also closed during peak covid.
- Apocryphon 4y agoOne wonders if that’s why there’s seemingly been an explosion on ADHD (self-)diagnoses lately. Not even saying those diagnoses are wrong. It’s just the additional self-discipline requirements imposed by WFH exposed what was already there.
- olliej 4y agoI suspect the explosion of ADHD, is an explosion of people complaining about how the DEA has decided that while mass over prescription of Oxy is fine, ADHD meds should be heavily restricted because that isn't profitable. Seriously: every person I have learned has ADHD recently, I have learned because the DEA screwing with the availability of their prescribed medication.
- Apocryphon 4y agoWhile I do think more attention needs to be paid towards overmedication, I think plenty of people now are experiencing ADHD-like symptoms, whether from having the disorder itself, or perhaps continuous digital stimulation coupled with UX patterns designed to drive further stimulation will inherently create ADHD-like behavior.
- bluefirebrand 4y ago> The single genuine inefficiency of working from home is that it exposes a person's lack of discipline. They become more productive when all distractions are removed so they're forced to focus on one task at the detriment of everything else. If offices surround people with distractions that pull them away from their work, isn't that the fault of the office? People shouldn't have to have monk-like discipline to focus on a task while everyone around them is trying to pull them away from it. It's not a discipline failure that offices are not set up to be productive in.