30 ms·

Early Remote Work Impacts on Family Formation

259 points by RickJWagner 4y ago

noelwelsh 4y ago
My kids were born well before the pandemic, but, as remote worker, being able to hang out at home with them has been great[^1] I'm much more involved in their life than I would be if I was getting home at 6pm+ every evening. [^1]: Once they were old enough they didn't need constant supervision. Trying to work from home with a toddler was a nightmare.
- iso1631 4y ago
  > Once they were old enough they didn't need constant supervision. Trying to work from home with a toddler was a nightmare. That's odd, I had no problem with working from home with toddlers, but I wasn't trying to do two full time jobs, on any given day either I was dedicated to looking after the kids or my partner was. Looking after a toddler is a full time job.
  - xyzzy123 4y ago
    Setup matters a lot, eg if you have a separate room to go to or a standalone unit in the back yard. Kids are "sticky" (once they get into your office for any reason it can be difficult to get them out again). Number of kids matters, their ages matter, their needs matter, sometimes they "get loose" while carer is busy with one (e.g. putting to sleep), and carers need breaks too. For my particular situation, I can get noticeably more done on days when all the kids are out, even when someone else is ostensibly caring for them "full time".
    - eequah9L 4y ago
      Plus kids are generally noisy, in a way that's optimized to get your attention as a grown-up. I had to move out to an external office. There were more reasons than just noise -- we were also expecting a second one, and this was a two-bedroom apartment, it wouldn't work one way or another. But noise and attention were what pushed me over the edge to start looking for a nearby office for rent. I can't imagine getting much done with a toddler in the corner of my eye, as another commenter here puts it. Though I suppose work substance matters, too. If you are in meetings all day, sure, I guess that could work.
    - organsnyder 4y ago
      > Setup matters a lot, eg if you have a separate room to go to or a standalone unit in the back yard. We built a garage with an accessory dwelling unit (ADU) that I use for my office. My kids are aged 5-12, and It's great to have some separation. Though now two of the kids have their own computers in the room next to my office, so I've had to teach them that a Minecraft "emergency" doesn't mean they can interrupt me working.
  - tyoma 4y ago
    Every child and office setup is different. Like the OP I find it incredibly difficult to work from home with kids around. It is actually more difficult when they are more independent, as they can show up at your office area and demand to be entertained and find new and innovative ways to get your attention.
- AndrewDucker 4y ago
  Seconded. I got to spend a lot more time with my second kid because I was at home.
Lolaccount 4y ago
Elon Musk: "Get back to the office, we're going to prove we're badass by going through productivity hell!" Elon Musk: "Population rates are collapsing and it's a crisis we need to address!" EIG: https://eig.org/remote-work-family-formation/ https://eig.org/remote-work-family-formation/ Billionaires should be banned from speaking on anything other than their areas of expertise. They get an outsized platform to spout absolute nonsense on topics outside their core expertise.
- stuaxo 4y ago
  Just ban them full stop. Huge amounts of people don't have enough money to participate in the economy at the same time as billionaires show themselves to be useless or worse, ban them and have a decent basic income - let's say current min wage + some %
  - peepeepoopoo3 4y ago
    I agree. Let's start with Bill Gates and Larry Fink.
  - baq 4y ago
    That’s what taxes are supposed to be for, except billionaires are the best positioned to not pay them
  - logicallee 4y ago
    Your proposal is interesting, though I think you may not have thought it through completely. I have some honest questions about it. Under your proposal are millionaires okay? Or should society ban millionaires too? If so why are they okay. If they are not okay, what should the wealth cap be? Is it okay for anyone to have any private wealth? Your proposal sounds similar to socialism wherein everyone has a certain fixed income close to minimum wage and no one may accumulate wealth. What are the differences between your suggestion and socialism as practiced historically?
  - jstx1 4y ago
    This is really naive. It's a very arbitrary threshold and since most of that wealth is in equity, you're essentially asking for the government to appropriate and run all large companies. Maybe you actually think this should happen (I don't) but it's a much more disruptive change than it sounds like on the surface. You're flipping over the entire economic model to a different one, and this affects everyone not just the super rich. And even if hypothetically the government takes most of Musk's and Bezos' money, doesn't mean that you'll get the basic income you're asking for. What you actually need is progressive taxation on extremely high incomes of any kind, and fewer loopholes to avoid that taxation.
drekipus 4y ago
I had my firstborn from my new fully WFH job, in the middle/tailend of the pandemic. It has totally been a blast having the little one around. I work in my living area which is open plan into my kitchen, so I get to see her learning how to eat out of the corner of my eyes when I'm in work meetings, etc. My personal suggestion: if you're working from home with children, don't try and seperate and go into the study; do the opposite, being out work and make it a part of every day. It's like the photos of your family you have on your desk, but in real life. YMMV.
- ideamotor 4y ago
  What's funny is that when my wife became pregnant I had a near panic to find a place so I could have a dedicated area to focus. And we closed on that very house last week. Our baby is only one month old, but I can already feel what you are talking about. Where we are now is basically one giant room, and I actually like it so far. Whoops. Well, at least the "study" in the new house is a large converted garage that has room for office and an extra living room. I've struggled with remote work with the concept of sleeping where I work, so at least this will fix that, and when the time comes we'll have a dang bedroom for her. Not sure we need three living rooms though, that'll be a lot of play areas!
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - lotsofpulp 4y ago
    Enjoy that peaceful phase, it will not last long.
- saiya-jin 4y ago
  Very similar situation (had first one 3 months before covid, second one during), our flat back then made me work from our living room, where they played. Absolutely amazing for bonding and I am sure they are better off due to it, but I can't say it has been beneficial for my work. But then again the same can be said about most others. We have tons of global conf calls, its harder to do that with kids screaming in the background or demanding your attention. Good luck focusing on that hard task where it takes you some time to even get to mental model of given problem. The thing is, when choosing priorities, I would have to be really messed up piece of sh*t of a human being to prioritize work over my own kids. So all good on that front. Now I work from my own study room as they are a bit older (and we moved to bigger flat) and its nice to have some privacy too
christkv 4y ago
Besides remote work I think more flexibility for part time work would be helpful.
- Thlom 4y ago
  What about paid parental leave, cheap child care and more flexible work schedules? I manage fine to be involved in my kids life even though I'm working from the office most of the time. Only have 20 min commute though. If I need to follow the kids to the doctor or dentist or meeting with their teacher or whatever during the work day that is no problem (I work from home most of the times when that is needed though). I leave home 7:30 and I'm back home around 16:30, well in time to play with them or follow them to football practice or whatever. It seems to me like many Americans work-life balance is skewed work (combined with long commutes) in such a way that WFH is much more tempting than it is in many other parts of the world.
  - nextlevelwizard 4y ago
    Always need to remember that most vocal people about WFH are Americans who have hours and hours of commute time with very strict office times and just plain expectation of doing 9 to 10 hours of work per day. Taking remote days was never an issue for me and spending 15 minutes commuting to the office isn't a big deal and around these parts people always looked me funny if I was in the office past 15:00. So the expectations of what "office work" means is wildly different.
    - balfirevic 4y ago
      > Americans who have hours and hours of commute time Europeans, on average, have longer commutes than Americans: https://transportgeography.org/contents/chapter8/urban-transport-challenges/average-commuting-time/ https://transportgeography.org/contents/chapter8/urban-trans...
      - nextlevelwizard 4y ago
        What is your point? That America has more people in mega cities who live close to their work?
jossclimb 4y ago
I have been remote for 11 years now and have two children 9 and 12. I can't imagine what it would have been like if I had spent the week out commuting between the hours of 7am to 7pm, we would have lost out on so much bonding time with their daddy being an integral part of their life. I managed to be highly productive, build a career, yet be there for bath times, tucking into bed, school plays / sports days, nursing when ill, impromptu dancing to toddlers programs on the TV.
- Simon_O_Rourke 4y ago
  Well said! Did you ever in that time get any pushback from an overzealous boss about going back to the office?
  - VBprogrammer 4y ago
    I've been remote since our youngest turned 1 year old due to the pandemic. I honestly can't imagine what life would have been like otherwise. The year I spent before that I was lucky to see her at all during a day. She wasn't awake before I left (except for the inevitable screaming during the night) and we kept her up late so I could feed her a bottle before she went to bed. I think it's a huge win for equality and family life. Any boss will have to wrestle WFH out of my cold dead hands.
    - isoprophlex 4y ago
      I'm kind of sad about missing so much when our first child was born. Why did I commute so much, wasting time stuck in a car? Why didn't I challenge the status quo? Our second kid was born a month before the pandemic hit. I was there for so many beautiful moments. With #3 on the way, you can indeed wrestle WFH from my cold dead hands.
    - brabel 4y ago
      > I think it's a huge win for equality and family life Hm, where I live, both parents take roughly the same amount of parent leave (around 240 working days each in total - minimum 90 days for each) from work regardless of whether they work at home or anything else. That's what I would call equality.
CalRobert 4y ago
I got a full-remote job in 2018 and think it's a big part of why we ended up having two kids (one was born 2017, one 2019) - we were on the fence before. It also allowed us to move somewhere more affordable.
agomez314 4y ago
Found my wife and got married during the pandemic, have a 4-month old now and working from home 3x a week gives me the chance to see her grow. I would not be as happy if I had to commute everyday to work, even though i'm more of an extrovert and like to hang out with others. Being at home more also means I get to do more house chores. But the joy of seeing my baby grow is incredible! Yes, if you are at the office 24 hours a day like Elon it's likely you'll do incredible things, but to me it's worth sacrificing some of that success in exchange for a family life.
- lotsofpulp 4y ago
  >Yes, if you are at the office 24 hours a day like Elon it's likely you'll do incredible things That is a very optimistic outlook. Or the bar for incredible is lower than I think.
- lmarcos 4y ago
  There are countless of people like Elon (overworked) who have never achieved anything incredible in life, and will never achieve anything remarkable.
  - j45 4y ago
    Maybe it’s the journey for some and not the destination. Reframing things can be as positive as negative or self enabling or sabolaging as one likes.
- j45 4y ago
  The thing is becoming a parent in pandemic introduced a different kind of prioritization and focus to be present in the best ways and not just duration. Increasing hours before effectiveness can cap out per quick. As my spouse reminds me the people who will most care when I’m dead grad my kids and spouse if I’m lucky. Everything else is how much good will, memories and moments you can experience with others. What kind of memory do we want to be? Preparing for and around that for the next many decades allows me to plan and execute in decades and not be obsessed with maximizing work hours now all the time. Outsized impact gets easier with each wave of tech that does more with less. Big changes go very slow and then very suddenly. Raising kids is passing too quick but experiencing existence together is far beyond that.
t344344 4y ago
Nice paper. Now I can just point that return-to-office is sexist!
- yosito 4y ago
  You're not wrong!
- humanrebar 4y ago
  Anyone who thinks it doesn't have disparate impact probably never had to pump and store breast milk at work just to commute it back to a child at the end of the day. And it also has disparate impact for people with disabilities. I promise you that people on chemo or with IBS are more productive not having to badge into the office several times per week.
rob74 4y ago
Well, this article only underscores what we all have seen in the past years: remote working is better for employees (and potentially society as a whole, and the environment). Unfortunately companies prefer to have their employees less happy, but under tighter control, so tendencies to restrict remote work are getting stronger. Let's see if they manage to put the genie back into the bottle...
- nextlevelwizard 4y ago
  Just like with everything else nothing is universal. My team and I are again dipping our toes to office and our office day is by far most productive day of the week for us. Only problem is that we transitioned to "open smart office" over the pandemic, so we no longer have personal desks. However that too should be resolved by Q4 as renovations come to and end and hopefully we can carve out our own space again.
  - rob74 4y ago
    That's all good, as long as you are free to choose the way of working that is best for you and your team. What I am talking about is companies mandating e.g. 3 office days per week for everyone, even if for some it makes no sense at all (neither business-wise nor personally).
    - nextlevelwizard 4y ago
      I personally do not see an issue with 3 office day mandate. Your job probably isn't so solitary that you don't need other people at all and at the office you get a lot of micro interactions that you wouldn't get otherwise. Just think when was the last time you randomly ran into a guy from the next department while getting coffee and you were just chit-chatting and one of you brought up a topic that helped the other? Yes, that doesn't happen daily to every one, but it happens quite often when you have 100+ people under same roof. You still have 2 days a week you can spend at home. EDIT: As a bit tangential question: would you be willing to take a pay cut to keep 100% remote? If not would you be fine with people receiving a "office worker bonus" based on days worked at the office?
4ndrewl 4y ago
"affects"
lynx23 4y ago
If the pandemic has demonstrated one thing, it is that I don't want to work in an environment where almost everyone is remote. It has become very clear that WFH workers take extra time off at random intervals during a day, and are typically hard to reach if you need to talk to them. Also, the smaller the children, the more likely it is they are subtly unavailable during work time. This is not acceptable, even though I totally understand these people like that. Some even have a 40 h job and admit openly that since they are doing WFH, they effectively have the whole day for their personal endeavors. Although in the story I am thinking about, there were no children involved. To the contrary, it is about a person 5 years away from retirement, and their boss has apparently given up wanting to legally fire them and trying to make them do meaningful work. So the solution was to push them off to WFH, and not think about the topic anymore.
- dreadnip 4y ago
  > This is not acceptable Why? I'm a software engineer working in an agency and I work exactly like you're describing. If I feel like going on a run, I'll mark myself as AFK and go on a run. If I feel like closing my laptop at 3 and go shopping, I'll work later in the day when I'm not busy. I still deliver on my deadlines and contribute more to the company than most colleagues. If you ping me on my phone I'll probably reply at any given time, and I put emphasis on written communication about issues I'm handling. Ideally, I've already written down all of the information you'd want to talk to me about. This "style" works really well for me.
  - lynx23 4y ago
    I am not a dev. I need to coordinate with my coworkers during the day. And since we dont have documentation for every miniscule step a team mate performs, we need to actually talk to each other from time to time. I am sure as a dev, with sufficiently large work packages, WFH is just a breeze. But not in my job.
    - ZephyrBlu 4y ago
      What's your job and why can't you co-ordinate async? "remote but still sync" feels like a major failure mode of being remote to me. Being able to work and communicate async is important for productivity in a remote environment.
gampleman 4y ago
This is mildly good news, although I suspect that more evidence might be needed to nail the causality here. > Remote work has the biggest effects on fertility for women who already have several children, and no effect on the fertility intentions of women who have no or one child. This is the bigger concern though. I suppose no effect is better than a possibly negative effect which one may predict (intuitively you may meet your partner at work and that may not work so well when remote), but it is the more crucial segment to address.
- cjmcqueen 4y ago
  My opinion is that people that already have kids and aren't afraid of managing/parenting children while WingFH have more availability and less stress. Less affluent and people with no kids are using their time elsewhere, which sounds like people are doing more of what they want and less time traffic.
teekert 4y ago
Damn I love wfh. At some point my manager told me to not express my positive emotions so much because many people hated it, but man I loved it. My wife was studying so she was also at home, with the kids (then 4 and 8). Suddenly I could have breakfast with them, lunch, dinner, go for a walk with the kids and the dog in the middle of the day for an hour. And now I still mostly wfh. Still loving it. Going to office 1-2 days a week, also loving that btw. Just, overall, loving the new balance. It feels so natural. Have to say, my commute of 1.5 hrs one way was killing me and I was, just before 2020, looking for other jobs, closer to home because of it. Sure the ease of it all is enable by my wife being at home mostly, but she loves that. And she has the time to properly manange the restructuring of the old house we bought, and to do some handwork herself (applying insulation, arranging/negotiating with contractors etc.) Tbh, I think if my wife as as work focused as me, it wouldn't be so nice for both of us, so I get the struggles some people experience, but they were mostly when the kids were at home as well.
- ghaff 4y ago
  At one point, I had about a 1.5 hr. commute each way on maybe 50% of days on average. Even though I could generally take the train for most of the commute, that just wasn't sustainable long-term. Too much time out of the day.
  - RandallBrown 4y ago
    I moved to one of the farthest flung suburbs of NYC when my wife went to grad school. My best option for work was in Manhattan. The commute was about 2 hours each way by train with a 5-10 minute walk on both ends. I hoped it might not be that bad, especially working from home a few days a week. Even then it was soul crushing and I only lasted a year.
omnibrain 4y ago
I switched our whole company switched to remote back in march 2020; I became a father in 2022 and have no intention to ever switch back to the daily commute. I was there for everything so far. But it's not only what I would have missed out on, but also there are so many situations with a baby where it is useful to have a second set of hands. I don't want to imagine what my wife would have had to endure, if I left her alone the whole day.
- lotsofpulp 4y ago
  >but also there are so many situations with a baby where it is useful to have a second set of hands. I don't want to imagine what my wife would have had to endure, if I left her alone the whole day. The idea of even just two adults raising a baby/toddler all by themselves is a very modern phenomena, in only certain parts of the world. The norm was probably a village like setting where many families are raising many kids all at the same time, and the 1:1 intense mother/child coverage was only during the first year. Otherwise, there would be grandparents, aunts, uncles, neighbors, and a chain of children from young to old who could help with raising the child.
  - Thlom 4y ago
    We have paid parental leave split between mother and father, in total about one year. Add in some vacation time and unpaid leave and you can stretch it a a few months. After that most kids attend day care from around year 1 or 2 and both parents go back to work. Many families let one of the parents work reduced hours so the kids can be picked up earlier or stay home one day of the week or whatever. I feel this is close to perfect for both kids and parents.
yosito 4y ago
I've been working remotely for 10 years. Don't have anything that looks remotely like a traditional family. But I have a nomadic extended family of friends and lovers who meet my social and intimacy needs far better than anything I was getting way back when I used to work in a cube. It would be interesting to see some research about the effect of remote work not just on families in a traditional sense, but also how it impacts societal organization and the concept of a "family" at all. Industrial society was pretty organized around the concept of a nuclear family, but that's not always been the norm in human societies, and from my perspective it looks like new societal norms are emerging.
meindnoch 4y ago
*positive impacts
passwordoops 4y ago
This is all true, and I do feel very lucky to have a WFH arrangement, but I always think of the people who have jobs that cannot be remote - hospital, care takers, teachers (right now). Most are carried out by women, earning low wages, doing what's been termed "essential" work. There is a definite bifurcation between the (generally upper) laptop class and the (generally lower) caretaker class. I'm not sure what the solution is (shorter work weeks, flexible scheduling, etc), but everytime we pat ourselves on the back for pulling off remote work this comes to of mind to me
- lotsofpulp 4y ago
  >I'm not sure what the solution is (shorter work weeks, flexible scheduling, etc), Solution is more people becoming qualified to work in the “upper”, laptop class, hence decreasing supply of labor for the “lower” caretaker class, resulting in increasing prices for caretaking labor, leading to changes in caretaking labor environments such as shorter work weeks and flexible scheduling. I.e. wealth redistribution from laptop class to caretaker class. Or automation to obviate caretaker class.
  - passwordoops 4y ago
    Makes sense on paper, but so far the solution has been importing cheap foreign labor from overseas (0). Automation is probably the route we'll end up taking. (0) https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2022/01/06/1069369625/short-staffed-and-covid-battered-u-s-hospitals-are-hiring-more-foreign-nurses https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2022/01/06/1069369...
- meindnoch 4y ago
  Don't worry, the laptop class is on its way to become the unemployed class due to ChatGPT. Or so I was told...
  - j45 4y ago
    Maybe the talkers and bsers
- 4y ago
Tade0 4y ago
Almost every parent of 4+ that I know follows the same pattern: they live in the middle of buttfuck nowhere in a detached house in a low cost of living area and work remotely, while their spouse is a homemaker. Our whole team is remote so toddlers sometimes participate in standups and that is fine - they lose interest after a few minutes anyway. I can't imagine going somewhere every day and not participating in my child's development to the extent I am now. This is the way - the more we push people to live in cramped, high-cost places, the less children they will have and the sooner we'll run out of people able to work, much less care for the aging population.
- antisthenes 4y ago
  > Our whole team is remote so toddlers sometimes participate in standups and that is fine - they lose interest after a few minutes anyway. The toddlers or the team? Standups should only be a few minutes anyway.
  - francisofascii 4y ago
    In theory, sure. But it reality, 20-30 minutes. Especially if you have non-developers as part of the standup. The first few minutes are eaten up by pleasantries.
thoughtsbykean 4y ago
The question of 'WFH impact on family formation' is fairly obvious considering time saved from commuting and 'parent-work hybrid' mode at home. However, since this is a study on working class woman, is the overall trend of increased birthrates true if we consider non-working e.g. jobs lost from covid?
dumpster_fire 4y ago
During the 2 years of COVID WFH, I got to see my baby grow up and be there for all the milestones. For the next baby, it's full RTO and I've been feeling guilty this whole time that I'm not able to give the same amount of attention to him. His sister learnt extremely fast because I would be there every other hour just playing and asking questions for just a few minutes. Sorry second kid, you'll have the same attention that I was given when growing up. On the other hand, people who claim to be more productive with kids running and screaming around them, I think your brains are special. There's no way in hell I can figure out why a dependent service 3 levels deep is OOMing while my kid is tugging at my pants screaming "read to me!!!!!!" And it showed in my performance reviews. I gave presentations with a crying baby in hand, causing me to just totally blank out. Win some lose some.
- ljf 4y ago
  Same here - I feel so lucky to have a 'shed/office' in the garden - means I can be around with 10 seconds notice if I've needed, but generally I am 'somewhere else' and everyone know I'm working and busy. My old manager could confidently and happily conduct snr level meetings with her kids not only in the room but climbing on her - I just don't have that mental power to work like that.
- lampshades 4y ago
  Yeah, I don’t know how these other people are acting like this is such a walk in the park. WFH with young children has been rough for me. While I wouldn’t have had it any other way and am very blessed to be able to see my children grow up, I’m going to go back to an office. I’m not productive here.
rainytuesday 4y ago
I was recently thinking about how the US is structurally against family formation with the miserable cost of rent, medical and tuition relative to wages. Nice to see a small counter-force.
johnwheeler 4y ago
Thank (insert higher power here) for remote work!
Robotbeat 4y ago
I’m a big remote work skeptic, but this is persuasive to me. Part of the reason I don’t remote work is because I’m unable to focus very well on remote work in a crowded household with small children… I would inevitably be doing more parenting when I should be working. But while that might be bad for work, it’s good for family… (my commute is only 15 minutes, so a lot of the other arguments here don’t really apply. It takes a couple minutes just to log in into the VPN…)
- tra3 4y ago
  That's a fair criticism. I have the same problem when my kids are home and not at school. Are you able to focus in the office? I feel like most offices are very similar to being at home with small kids in terms of noise levels and interruptions.
  - Robotbeat 4y ago
    My office has dedicated offices but also common work areas, so it’s the best of both worlds and you can choose whatever is feeling the best at the moment.
web3-is-a-scam 4y ago
being able to trade commuting for time with my toddler is the best thing to come out of the pandemic for me
andrewcamel 4y ago
Would be incredible if the lab leak in China was intentional and they ended up saving the US by increasing the birth rate!
mariojv 4y ago
I've been suspicious that the post-pandemic era will yield a new baby boom of sorts. It's probably too soon to see it in broad demographic data, but just in my group of friends, it seems like almost all married couples except those who had previously committed to definitively stay child-free are having kids. One third of the people under my direct manager have either taken parental leave since mid-2021 or are planning to take it soon. Maybe this is just an artifact of my age and demographic situation, given I just turned 30 and know a lot of remote workers. It will be interesting to see if there really is a boom or not a few years out. Maybe as the article mentions, it's an artifact of remote work.
- lotsofpulp 4y ago
  I believe the calculation is that if you want a typical 2 child family, and want to avoid a geriatric pregnancy (post age 35), then 30 is basically when you have to start having kids to give your body a couple years of recovery between births (what doctors recommend).
bubbleRefuge 4y ago
Remote since 2016 . 20+ years in software. Single father with full custody of 2 kids who were 13 and 8 when i went 100% Remote. Its a Godsend . When I don't have my kids, I travel and work in exotic places (digital nomading) where I can have a jet set social life. This limits corporate ascension but I think its worth it. Find time to exercise and do projects on the side. Given this, I still pull late nighters to get stuff done at work. Can't imagine giving up this life for a 2 hour commute and becomming a renter in some tech hub. But, I have many contemporaries who have higher status jobs than me in the industry, so I guess there is that.
lo_zamoyski 4y ago
It is worth noting that for much of history, for most people, people did "work from home". Children spent a great deal of time around their parents. The education of children is primarily the responsibility of the parent, and in years past, that is precisely what happened. Furthermore, one's family, extended family, or neighbors/community (depending on your situation) would flexibly step in to care for children in the absence of their parents or when parents were busy with something else. Today, a good deal more falls in the lap of parents without the communal and multi-generational support that used to exist. So WFH gestures in the direction of a return to the historical norm of family-centered life. There is nothing normal about a career-centered life where your family becomes secondary. And because WFH also reduces the need to move, it has the potential to reduce the fragmentation of communities and families. It will be interesting to watch the broader effects of WFH on the broader economy, the culture, and the formation of community life.
ThorsBane 4y ago
This proves remote work is quality software engineering methodology. It results in higher quality, more throughput, and increased investment in Family. I approve. This means any org or management layer that enforce hybrid or in-office on the people who move code, system design, abstractions, product knowledge work, ux work...are contra Family. Those orgs need to collapse and those managers should be fired. This will happen no matter what - the orgs and managers that lean into the disruption and make the most of the new world will survive and increase their scale and scope. The ones who hold on to top-down force and methods of mind-control and mind-enslavement (Agile, Scrum) will no longer exist for long - any value those processes have will be automated into tools that respect engineers.
- rambojohnson 4y ago
  how is agile "mind control" or "mind enslavement" ? care to elaborate?
  - ThorsBane 4y ago
    it is a contagion affecting software development speed and quality by putting non-devs and non-engineers in charge of devs/engineers. it is more okay when someone who codes or engineers is in charge of running agile and how to run agile. when someone non-technical is a scrum master, run for the hills or perform as a 10x engineer until you can automate that person's functions enough that they no longer need to show up at your meetings and just become metrics-readers and team-hype-people for representing your team and not for caring too much about anything that isn't automated metrics and team health surveys from which meaningful ventures forward could be established such as perks and more attention to extracurricular needs if there are any. ayyyy Corporate family??? gotta take care of everyone more and get outta the way baby, we're moving code here and you're not! but yeah, 10000000% respect for hardcore startup engineering mentality where agile actually really does mean agile, and it means lean remote agile these days where it's asynchronous comms and as little live meeting bullshit as possible. Learn how to read and write or don't call it agile. be asynchronous or you're not agile enough for me.
6510 4y ago
To state the obvious, the more successful people are the more unlikely children fit into the schedule. If one is never home, beyond genetics, the success wont rub off onto the next generation. Work form the office seems a terrible long term plan.
burlesona 4y ago
I will offer a contrarian take, not because I think anyone else in the thread is wrong, but because I think there’s more than one opinion here, and it’s not showing in the comments. I have multiple children, and I hate (ok, strongly dislike) working remotely. I dislike the lack of separation between home and work, and how it makes my children feel like I’m “always working.” I love the high-bandwidth communication and collaboration of in-person, as well as the way it naturally fosters empathy and community. It’s a better learning environment for most, and it makes work more fun for most. I have been an outlier, I guess, and have only been able to find remote jobs for most of my decade+ SWE career. I have a dedicated office space and all the gear, so my dislike of remote has nothing to do with not being properly equipped for it. I think people have a lot of valid complaints that are actually orthogonal to in-person work: - Housing is too expensive. True! Not the fault of the office. - Commutes take too long. True! Not the fault of the office. - Housing units close to the office are often too small to be comfortable for families. Subjective, but many people feel this way! Also not the fault of the office. The common theme here is that housing and transportation in America is broken. Utterly broken. There is no technical or economic reason that we couldn’t have the majority of workplaces in neighborhoods where the majority of employees could comfortably live within a ten minute commute. And I submit that there is nothing better than getting to work together in real life while living comfortably within ten minutes of your workplace. There’s nothing _wrong_ with remote work, and I think it’s great for it to be an option for those who want it (including all remote companies for those who want them). But remote isn’t morally superior to in-person work, despite the way many advocates talk about it. And an escape hatch from our broken cities is not the same as a solution. It saddens me that more of us aren’t working seriously on the problem of fixing housing and transportation in the US, and instead are embracing bandaids. FWIW I do what I can via my work with Strong Towns. If this is a cause that interests you I’d encourage you to read our material and consider becoming a member.
- marwatk 4y ago
  Even if we fixed all of the above, changing jobs would still require uprooting your family. In an era where you worked for one company for life it made sense. Today I don't think it's feasible.
tnel77 4y ago
COVID obviously wasn’t great, but I got to watch my first born child take their first steps since we were all home during lockdown. I’m oddly greatful for the pandemic at this point.

259 points by RickJWagner 4y ago

My kids were born well before the pandemic, but, as remote worker, being able to hang out at home with them has been great[^1] I'm much more involved in their life than I would be if I was getting home at 6pm+ every evening. [^1]: Once they were old enough they didn't need constant supervision. Trying to work from home with a toddler was a nightmare.

iso1631 4y ago
> Once they were old enough they didn't need constant supervision. Trying to work from home with a toddler was a nightmare. That's odd, I had no problem with working from home with toddlers, but I wasn't trying to do two full time jobs, on any given day either I was dedicated to looking after the kids or my partner was. Looking after a toddler is a full time job.
- xyzzy123 4y ago
  Setup matters a lot, eg if you have a separate room to go to or a standalone unit in the back yard. Kids are "sticky" (once they get into your office for any reason it can be difficult to get them out again). Number of kids matters, their ages matter, their needs matter, sometimes they "get loose" while carer is busy with one (e.g. putting to sleep), and carers need breaks too. For my particular situation, I can get noticeably more done on days when all the kids are out, even when someone else is ostensibly caring for them "full time".
  - eequah9L 4y ago
    Plus kids are generally noisy, in a way that's optimized to get your attention as a grown-up. I had to move out to an external office. There were more reasons than just noise -- we were also expecting a second one, and this was a two-bedroom apartment, it wouldn't work one way or another. But noise and attention were what pushed me over the edge to start looking for a nearby office for rent. I can't imagine getting much done with a toddler in the corner of my eye, as another commenter here puts it. Though I suppose work substance matters, too. If you are in meetings all day, sure, I guess that could work.
  - organsnyder 4y ago
    > Setup matters a lot, eg if you have a separate room to go to or a standalone unit in the back yard. We built a garage with an accessory dwelling unit (ADU) that I use for my office. My kids are aged 5-12, and It's great to have some separation. Though now two of the kids have their own computers in the room next to my office, so I've had to teach them that a Minecraft "emergency" doesn't mean they can interrupt me working.
- tyoma 4y ago
  Every child and office setup is different. Like the OP I find it incredibly difficult to work from home with kids around. It is actually more difficult when they are more independent, as they can show up at your office area and demand to be entertained and find new and innovative ways to get your attention.
AndrewDucker 4y ago
Seconded. I got to spend a lot more time with my second kid because I was at home.

Lolaccount 4y ago

Elon Musk: "Get back to the office, we're going to prove we're badass by going through productivity hell!" Elon Musk: "Population rates are collapsing and it's a crisis we need to address!" EIG: https://eig.org/remote-work-family-formation/ https://eig.org/remote-work-family-formation/ Billionaires should be banned from speaking on anything other than their areas of expertise. They get an outsized platform to spout absolute nonsense on topics outside their core expertise.

stuaxo 4y ago
Just ban them full stop. Huge amounts of people don't have enough money to participate in the economy at the same time as billionaires show themselves to be useless or worse, ban them and have a decent basic income - let's say current min wage + some %
- peepeepoopoo3 4y ago
  I agree. Let's start with Bill Gates and Larry Fink.
- baq 4y ago
  That’s what taxes are supposed to be for, except billionaires are the best positioned to not pay them
- logicallee 4y ago
  Your proposal is interesting, though I think you may not have thought it through completely. I have some honest questions about it. Under your proposal are millionaires okay? Or should society ban millionaires too? If so why are they okay. If they are not okay, what should the wealth cap be? Is it okay for anyone to have any private wealth? Your proposal sounds similar to socialism wherein everyone has a certain fixed income close to minimum wage and no one may accumulate wealth. What are the differences between your suggestion and socialism as practiced historically?
- jstx1 4y ago
  This is really naive. It's a very arbitrary threshold and since most of that wealth is in equity, you're essentially asking for the government to appropriate and run all large companies. Maybe you actually think this should happen (I don't) but it's a much more disruptive change than it sounds like on the surface. You're flipping over the entire economic model to a different one, and this affects everyone not just the super rich. And even if hypothetically the government takes most of Musk's and Bezos' money, doesn't mean that you'll get the basic income you're asking for. What you actually need is progressive taxation on extremely high incomes of any kind, and fewer loopholes to avoid that taxation.

drekipus 4y ago

I had my firstborn from my new fully WFH job, in the middle/tailend of the pandemic. It has totally been a blast having the little one around. I work in my living area which is open plan into my kitchen, so I get to see her learning how to eat out of the corner of my eyes when I'm in work meetings, etc. My personal suggestion: if you're working from home with children, don't try and seperate and go into the study; do the opposite, being out work and make it a part of every day. It's like the photos of your family you have on your desk, but in real life. YMMV.

ideamotor 4y ago
What's funny is that when my wife became pregnant I had a near panic to find a place so I could have a dedicated area to focus. And we closed on that very house last week. Our baby is only one month old, but I can already feel what you are talking about. Where we are now is basically one giant room, and I actually like it so far. Whoops. Well, at least the "study" in the new house is a large converted garage that has room for office and an extra living room. I've struggled with remote work with the concept of sleeping where I work, so at least this will fix that, and when the time comes we'll have a dang bedroom for her. Not sure we need three living rooms though, that'll be a lot of play areas!
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- lotsofpulp 4y ago
  Enjoy that peaceful phase, it will not last long.
saiya-jin 4y ago
Very similar situation (had first one 3 months before covid, second one during), our flat back then made me work from our living room, where they played. Absolutely amazing for bonding and I am sure they are better off due to it, but I can't say it has been beneficial for my work. But then again the same can be said about most others. We have tons of global conf calls, its harder to do that with kids screaming in the background or demanding your attention. Good luck focusing on that hard task where it takes you some time to even get to mental model of given problem. The thing is, when choosing priorities, I would have to be really messed up piece of sh*t of a human being to prioritize work over my own kids. So all good on that front. Now I work from my own study room as they are a bit older (and we moved to bigger flat) and its nice to have some privacy too

christkv 4y ago

Besides remote work I think more flexibility for part time work would be helpful.

Thlom 4y ago
What about paid parental leave, cheap child care and more flexible work schedules? I manage fine to be involved in my kids life even though I'm working from the office most of the time. Only have 20 min commute though. If I need to follow the kids to the doctor or dentist or meeting with their teacher or whatever during the work day that is no problem (I work from home most of the times when that is needed though). I leave home 7:30 and I'm back home around 16:30, well in time to play with them or follow them to football practice or whatever. It seems to me like many Americans work-life balance is skewed work (combined with long commutes) in such a way that WFH is much more tempting than it is in many other parts of the world.
- nextlevelwizard 4y ago
  Always need to remember that most vocal people about WFH are Americans who have hours and hours of commute time with very strict office times and just plain expectation of doing 9 to 10 hours of work per day. Taking remote days was never an issue for me and spending 15 minutes commuting to the office isn't a big deal and around these parts people always looked me funny if I was in the office past 15:00. So the expectations of what "office work" means is wildly different.
  - balfirevic 4y ago
    > Americans who have hours and hours of commute time Europeans, on average, have longer commutes than Americans: https://transportgeography.org/contents/chapter8/urban-transport-challenges/average-commuting-time/ https://transportgeography.org/contents/chapter8/urban-trans...
    - nextlevelwizard 4y ago
      What is your point? That America has more people in mega cities who live close to their work?

jossclimb 4y ago

I have been remote for 11 years now and have two children 9 and 12. I can't imagine what it would have been like if I had spent the week out commuting between the hours of 7am to 7pm, we would have lost out on so much bonding time with their daddy being an integral part of their life. I managed to be highly productive, build a career, yet be there for bath times, tucking into bed, school plays / sports days, nursing when ill, impromptu dancing to toddlers programs on the TV.

Simon_O_Rourke 4y ago
Well said! Did you ever in that time get any pushback from an overzealous boss about going back to the office?
- VBprogrammer 4y ago
  I've been remote since our youngest turned 1 year old due to the pandemic. I honestly can't imagine what life would have been like otherwise. The year I spent before that I was lucky to see her at all during a day. She wasn't awake before I left (except for the inevitable screaming during the night) and we kept her up late so I could feed her a bottle before she went to bed. I think it's a huge win for equality and family life. Any boss will have to wrestle WFH out of my cold dead hands.
  - isoprophlex 4y ago
    I'm kind of sad about missing so much when our first child was born. Why did I commute so much, wasting time stuck in a car? Why didn't I challenge the status quo? Our second kid was born a month before the pandemic hit. I was there for so many beautiful moments. With #3 on the way, you can indeed wrestle WFH from my cold dead hands.
  - brabel 4y ago
    > I think it's a huge win for equality and family life Hm, where I live, both parents take roughly the same amount of parent leave (around 240 working days each in total - minimum 90 days for each) from work regardless of whether they work at home or anything else. That's what I would call equality.

CalRobert 4y ago

I got a full-remote job in 2018 and think it's a big part of why we ended up having two kids (one was born 2017, one 2019) - we were on the fence before. It also allowed us to move somewhere more affordable.

agomez314 4y ago

Found my wife and got married during the pandemic, have a 4-month old now and working from home 3x a week gives me the chance to see her grow. I would not be as happy if I had to commute everyday to work, even though i'm more of an extrovert and like to hang out with others. Being at home more also means I get to do more house chores. But the joy of seeing my baby grow is incredible! Yes, if you are at the office 24 hours a day like Elon it's likely you'll do incredible things, but to me it's worth sacrificing some of that success in exchange for a family life.

lotsofpulp 4y ago
>Yes, if you are at the office 24 hours a day like Elon it's likely you'll do incredible things That is a very optimistic outlook. Or the bar for incredible is lower than I think.
lmarcos 4y ago
There are countless of people like Elon (overworked) who have never achieved anything incredible in life, and will never achieve anything remarkable.
- j45 4y ago
  Maybe it’s the journey for some and not the destination. Reframing things can be as positive as negative or self enabling or sabolaging as one likes.
j45 4y ago
The thing is becoming a parent in pandemic introduced a different kind of prioritization and focus to be present in the best ways and not just duration. Increasing hours before effectiveness can cap out per quick. As my spouse reminds me the people who will most care when I’m dead grad my kids and spouse if I’m lucky. Everything else is how much good will, memories and moments you can experience with others. What kind of memory do we want to be? Preparing for and around that for the next many decades allows me to plan and execute in decades and not be obsessed with maximizing work hours now all the time. Outsized impact gets easier with each wave of tech that does more with less. Big changes go very slow and then very suddenly. Raising kids is passing too quick but experiencing existence together is far beyond that.

t344344 4y ago

Nice paper. Now I can just point that return-to-office is sexist!

yosito 4y ago
You're not wrong!
humanrebar 4y ago
Anyone who thinks it doesn't have disparate impact probably never had to pump and store breast milk at work just to commute it back to a child at the end of the day. And it also has disparate impact for people with disabilities. I promise you that people on chemo or with IBS are more productive not having to badge into the office several times per week.

rob74 4y ago

Well, this article only underscores what we all have seen in the past years: remote working is better for employees (and potentially society as a whole, and the environment). Unfortunately companies prefer to have their employees less happy, but under tighter control, so tendencies to restrict remote work are getting stronger. Let's see if they manage to put the genie back into the bottle...

nextlevelwizard 4y ago
Just like with everything else nothing is universal. My team and I are again dipping our toes to office and our office day is by far most productive day of the week for us. Only problem is that we transitioned to "open smart office" over the pandemic, so we no longer have personal desks. However that too should be resolved by Q4 as renovations come to and end and hopefully we can carve out our own space again.
- rob74 4y ago
  That's all good, as long as you are free to choose the way of working that is best for you and your team. What I am talking about is companies mandating e.g. 3 office days per week for everyone, even if for some it makes no sense at all (neither business-wise nor personally).
  - nextlevelwizard 4y ago
    I personally do not see an issue with 3 office day mandate. Your job probably isn't so solitary that you don't need other people at all and at the office you get a lot of micro interactions that you wouldn't get otherwise. Just think when was the last time you randomly ran into a guy from the next department while getting coffee and you were just chit-chatting and one of you brought up a topic that helped the other? Yes, that doesn't happen daily to every one, but it happens quite often when you have 100+ people under same roof. You still have 2 days a week you can spend at home. EDIT: As a bit tangential question: would you be willing to take a pay cut to keep 100% remote? If not would you be fine with people receiving a "office worker bonus" based on days worked at the office?

4ndrewl 4y ago

"affects"

lynx23 4y ago

If the pandemic has demonstrated one thing, it is that I don't want to work in an environment where almost everyone is remote. It has become very clear that WFH workers take extra time off at random intervals during a day, and are typically hard to reach if you need to talk to them. Also, the smaller the children, the more likely it is they are subtly unavailable during work time. This is not acceptable, even though I totally understand these people like that. Some even have a 40 h job and admit openly that since they are doing WFH, they effectively have the whole day for their personal endeavors. Although in the story I am thinking about, there were no children involved. To the contrary, it is about a person 5 years away from retirement, and their boss has apparently given up wanting to legally fire them and trying to make them do meaningful work. So the solution was to push them off to WFH, and not think about the topic anymore.

dreadnip 4y ago
> This is not acceptable Why? I'm a software engineer working in an agency and I work exactly like you're describing. If I feel like going on a run, I'll mark myself as AFK and go on a run. If I feel like closing my laptop at 3 and go shopping, I'll work later in the day when I'm not busy. I still deliver on my deadlines and contribute more to the company than most colleagues. If you ping me on my phone I'll probably reply at any given time, and I put emphasis on written communication about issues I'm handling. Ideally, I've already written down all of the information you'd want to talk to me about. This "style" works really well for me.
- lynx23 4y ago
  I am not a dev. I need to coordinate with my coworkers during the day. And since we dont have documentation for every miniscule step a team mate performs, we need to actually talk to each other from time to time. I am sure as a dev, with sufficiently large work packages, WFH is just a breeze. But not in my job.
  - ZephyrBlu 4y ago
    What's your job and why can't you co-ordinate async? "remote but still sync" feels like a major failure mode of being remote to me. Being able to work and communicate async is important for productivity in a remote environment.

gampleman 4y ago

This is mildly good news, although I suspect that more evidence might be needed to nail the causality here. > Remote work has the biggest effects on fertility for women who already have several children, and no effect on the fertility intentions of women who have no or one child. This is the bigger concern though. I suppose no effect is better than a possibly negative effect which one may predict (intuitively you may meet your partner at work and that may not work so well when remote), but it is the more crucial segment to address.

cjmcqueen 4y ago
My opinion is that people that already have kids and aren't afraid of managing/parenting children while WingFH have more availability and less stress. Less affluent and people with no kids are using their time elsewhere, which sounds like people are doing more of what they want and less time traffic.

teekert 4y ago

Damn I love wfh. At some point my manager told me to not express my positive emotions so much because many people hated it, but man I loved it. My wife was studying so she was also at home, with the kids (then 4 and 8). Suddenly I could have breakfast with them, lunch, dinner, go for a walk with the kids and the dog in the middle of the day for an hour. And now I still mostly wfh. Still loving it. Going to office 1-2 days a week, also loving that btw. Just, overall, loving the new balance. It feels so natural. Have to say, my commute of 1.5 hrs one way was killing me and I was, just before 2020, looking for other jobs, closer to home because of it. Sure the ease of it all is enable by my wife being at home mostly, but she loves that. And she has the time to properly manange the restructuring of the old house we bought, and to do some handwork herself (applying insulation, arranging/negotiating with contractors etc.) Tbh, I think if my wife as as work focused as me, it wouldn't be so nice for both of us, so I get the struggles some people experience, but they were mostly when the kids were at home as well.

ghaff 4y ago
At one point, I had about a 1.5 hr. commute each way on maybe 50% of days on average. Even though I could generally take the train for most of the commute, that just wasn't sustainable long-term. Too much time out of the day.
- RandallBrown 4y ago
  I moved to one of the farthest flung suburbs of NYC when my wife went to grad school. My best option for work was in Manhattan. The commute was about 2 hours each way by train with a 5-10 minute walk on both ends. I hoped it might not be that bad, especially working from home a few days a week. Even then it was soul crushing and I only lasted a year.

omnibrain 4y ago

I switched our whole company switched to remote back in march 2020; I became a father in 2022 and have no intention to ever switch back to the daily commute. I was there for everything so far. But it's not only what I would have missed out on, but also there are so many situations with a baby where it is useful to have a second set of hands. I don't want to imagine what my wife would have had to endure, if I left her alone the whole day.

lotsofpulp 4y ago
>but also there are so many situations with a baby where it is useful to have a second set of hands. I don't want to imagine what my wife would have had to endure, if I left her alone the whole day. The idea of even just two adults raising a baby/toddler all by themselves is a very modern phenomena, in only certain parts of the world. The norm was probably a village like setting where many families are raising many kids all at the same time, and the 1:1 intense mother/child coverage was only during the first year. Otherwise, there would be grandparents, aunts, uncles, neighbors, and a chain of children from young to old who could help with raising the child.
- Thlom 4y ago
  We have paid parental leave split between mother and father, in total about one year. Add in some vacation time and unpaid leave and you can stretch it a a few months. After that most kids attend day care from around year 1 or 2 and both parents go back to work. Many families let one of the parents work reduced hours so the kids can be picked up earlier or stay home one day of the week or whatever. I feel this is close to perfect for both kids and parents.

yosito 4y ago

I've been working remotely for 10 years. Don't have anything that looks remotely like a traditional family. But I have a nomadic extended family of friends and lovers who meet my social and intimacy needs far better than anything I was getting way back when I used to work in a cube. It would be interesting to see some research about the effect of remote work not just on families in a traditional sense, but also how it impacts societal organization and the concept of a "family" at all. Industrial society was pretty organized around the concept of a nuclear family, but that's not always been the norm in human societies, and from my perspective it looks like new societal norms are emerging.

meindnoch 4y ago

*positive impacts

passwordoops 4y ago

This is all true, and I do feel very lucky to have a WFH arrangement, but I always think of the people who have jobs that cannot be remote - hospital, care takers, teachers (right now). Most are carried out by women, earning low wages, doing what's been termed "essential" work. There is a definite bifurcation between the (generally upper) laptop class and the (generally lower) caretaker class. I'm not sure what the solution is (shorter work weeks, flexible scheduling, etc), but everytime we pat ourselves on the back for pulling off remote work this comes to of mind to me

lotsofpulp 4y ago
>I'm not sure what the solution is (shorter work weeks, flexible scheduling, etc), Solution is more people becoming qualified to work in the “upper”, laptop class, hence decreasing supply of labor for the “lower” caretaker class, resulting in increasing prices for caretaking labor, leading to changes in caretaking labor environments such as shorter work weeks and flexible scheduling. I.e. wealth redistribution from laptop class to caretaker class. Or automation to obviate caretaker class.
- passwordoops 4y ago
  Makes sense on paper, but so far the solution has been importing cheap foreign labor from overseas (0). Automation is probably the route we'll end up taking. (0) https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2022/01/06/1069369625/short-staffed-and-covid-battered-u-s-hospitals-are-hiring-more-foreign-nurses https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2022/01/06/1069369...
meindnoch 4y ago
Don't worry, the laptop class is on its way to become the unemployed class due to ChatGPT. Or so I was told...
- j45 4y ago
  Maybe the talkers and bsers
4y ago

Tade0 4y ago

Almost every parent of 4+ that I know follows the same pattern: they live in the middle of buttfuck nowhere in a detached house in a low cost of living area and work remotely, while their spouse is a homemaker. Our whole team is remote so toddlers sometimes participate in standups and that is fine - they lose interest after a few minutes anyway. I can't imagine going somewhere every day and not participating in my child's development to the extent I am now. This is the way - the more we push people to live in cramped, high-cost places, the less children they will have and the sooner we'll run out of people able to work, much less care for the aging population.

antisthenes 4y ago
> Our whole team is remote so toddlers sometimes participate in standups and that is fine - they lose interest after a few minutes anyway. The toddlers or the team? Standups should only be a few minutes anyway.
- francisofascii 4y ago
  In theory, sure. But it reality, 20-30 minutes. Especially if you have non-developers as part of the standup. The first few minutes are eaten up by pleasantries.

thoughtsbykean 4y ago

The question of 'WFH impact on family formation' is fairly obvious considering time saved from commuting and 'parent-work hybrid' mode at home. However, since this is a study on working class woman, is the overall trend of increased birthrates true if we consider non-working e.g. jobs lost from covid?

dumpster_fire 4y ago

During the 2 years of COVID WFH, I got to see my baby grow up and be there for all the milestones. For the next baby, it's full RTO and I've been feeling guilty this whole time that I'm not able to give the same amount of attention to him. His sister learnt extremely fast because I would be there every other hour just playing and asking questions for just a few minutes. Sorry second kid, you'll have the same attention that I was given when growing up. On the other hand, people who claim to be more productive with kids running and screaming around them, I think your brains are special. There's no way in hell I can figure out why a dependent service 3 levels deep is OOMing while my kid is tugging at my pants screaming "read to me!!!!!!" And it showed in my performance reviews. I gave presentations with a crying baby in hand, causing me to just totally blank out. Win some lose some.

ljf 4y ago
Same here - I feel so lucky to have a 'shed/office' in the garden - means I can be around with 10 seconds notice if I've needed, but generally I am 'somewhere else' and everyone know I'm working and busy. My old manager could confidently and happily conduct snr level meetings with her kids not only in the room but climbing on her - I just don't have that mental power to work like that.
lampshades 4y ago
Yeah, I don’t know how these other people are acting like this is such a walk in the park. WFH with young children has been rough for me. While I wouldn’t have had it any other way and am very blessed to be able to see my children grow up, I’m going to go back to an office. I’m not productive here.

rainytuesday 4y ago

I was recently thinking about how the US is structurally against family formation with the miserable cost of rent, medical and tuition relative to wages. Nice to see a small counter-force.

johnwheeler 4y ago

Thank (insert higher power here) for remote work!

Robotbeat 4y ago

I’m a big remote work skeptic, but this is persuasive to me. Part of the reason I don’t remote work is because I’m unable to focus very well on remote work in a crowded household with small children… I would inevitably be doing more parenting when I should be working. But while that might be bad for work, it’s good for family… (my commute is only 15 minutes, so a lot of the other arguments here don’t really apply. It takes a couple minutes just to log in into the VPN…)

tra3 4y ago
That's a fair criticism. I have the same problem when my kids are home and not at school. Are you able to focus in the office? I feel like most offices are very similar to being at home with small kids in terms of noise levels and interruptions.
- Robotbeat 4y ago
  My office has dedicated offices but also common work areas, so it’s the best of both worlds and you can choose whatever is feeling the best at the moment.

web3-is-a-scam 4y ago

being able to trade commuting for time with my toddler is the best thing to come out of the pandemic for me

andrewcamel 4y ago

Would be incredible if the lab leak in China was intentional and they ended up saving the US by increasing the birth rate!

mariojv 4y ago

I've been suspicious that the post-pandemic era will yield a new baby boom of sorts. It's probably too soon to see it in broad demographic data, but just in my group of friends, it seems like almost all married couples except those who had previously committed to definitively stay child-free are having kids. One third of the people under my direct manager have either taken parental leave since mid-2021 or are planning to take it soon. Maybe this is just an artifact of my age and demographic situation, given I just turned 30 and know a lot of remote workers. It will be interesting to see if there really is a boom or not a few years out. Maybe as the article mentions, it's an artifact of remote work.

lotsofpulp 4y ago
I believe the calculation is that if you want a typical 2 child family, and want to avoid a geriatric pregnancy (post age 35), then 30 is basically when you have to start having kids to give your body a couple years of recovery between births (what doctors recommend).

bubbleRefuge 4y ago

Remote since 2016 . 20+ years in software. Single father with full custody of 2 kids who were 13 and 8 when i went 100% Remote. Its a Godsend . When I don't have my kids, I travel and work in exotic places (digital nomading) where I can have a jet set social life. This limits corporate ascension but I think its worth it. Find time to exercise and do projects on the side. Given this, I still pull late nighters to get stuff done at work. Can't imagine giving up this life for a 2 hour commute and becomming a renter in some tech hub. But, I have many contemporaries who have higher status jobs than me in the industry, so I guess there is that.

lo_zamoyski 4y ago

It is worth noting that for much of history, for most people, people did "work from home". Children spent a great deal of time around their parents. The education of children is primarily the responsibility of the parent, and in years past, that is precisely what happened. Furthermore, one's family, extended family, or neighbors/community (depending on your situation) would flexibly step in to care for children in the absence of their parents or when parents were busy with something else. Today, a good deal more falls in the lap of parents without the communal and multi-generational support that used to exist. So WFH gestures in the direction of a return to the historical norm of family-centered life. There is nothing normal about a career-centered life where your family becomes secondary. And because WFH also reduces the need to move, it has the potential to reduce the fragmentation of communities and families. It will be interesting to watch the broader effects of WFH on the broader economy, the culture, and the formation of community life.

ThorsBane 4y ago

This proves remote work is quality software engineering methodology. It results in higher quality, more throughput, and increased investment in Family. I approve. This means any org or management layer that enforce hybrid or in-office on the people who move code, system design, abstractions, product knowledge work, ux work...are contra Family. Those orgs need to collapse and those managers should be fired. This will happen no matter what - the orgs and managers that lean into the disruption and make the most of the new world will survive and increase their scale and scope. The ones who hold on to top-down force and methods of mind-control and mind-enslavement (Agile, Scrum) will no longer exist for long - any value those processes have will be automated into tools that respect engineers.

rambojohnson 4y ago
how is agile "mind control" or "mind enslavement" ? care to elaborate?
- ThorsBane 4y ago
  it is a contagion affecting software development speed and quality by putting non-devs and non-engineers in charge of devs/engineers. it is more okay when someone who codes or engineers is in charge of running agile and how to run agile. when someone non-technical is a scrum master, run for the hills or perform as a 10x engineer until you can automate that person's functions enough that they no longer need to show up at your meetings and just become metrics-readers and team-hype-people for representing your team and not for caring too much about anything that isn't automated metrics and team health surveys from which meaningful ventures forward could be established such as perks and more attention to extracurricular needs if there are any. ayyyy Corporate family??? gotta take care of everyone more and get outta the way baby, we're moving code here and you're not! but yeah, 10000000% respect for hardcore startup engineering mentality where agile actually really does mean agile, and it means lean remote agile these days where it's asynchronous comms and as little live meeting bullshit as possible. Learn how to read and write or don't call it agile. be asynchronous or you're not agile enough for me.

6510 4y ago

To state the obvious, the more successful people are the more unlikely children fit into the schedule. If one is never home, beyond genetics, the success wont rub off onto the next generation. Work form the office seems a terrible long term plan.

burlesona 4y ago

I will offer a contrarian take, not because I think anyone else in the thread is wrong, but because I think there’s more than one opinion here, and it’s not showing in the comments. I have multiple children, and I hate (ok, strongly dislike) working remotely. I dislike the lack of separation between home and work, and how it makes my children feel like I’m “always working.” I love the high-bandwidth communication and collaboration of in-person, as well as the way it naturally fosters empathy and community. It’s a better learning environment for most, and it makes work more fun for most. I have been an outlier, I guess, and have only been able to find remote jobs for most of my decade+ SWE career. I have a dedicated office space and all the gear, so my dislike of remote has nothing to do with not being properly equipped for it. I think people have a lot of valid complaints that are actually orthogonal to in-person work: - Housing is too expensive. True! Not the fault of the office. - Commutes take too long. True! Not the fault of the office. - Housing units close to the office are often too small to be comfortable for families. Subjective, but many people feel this way! Also not the fault of the office. The common theme here is that housing and transportation in America is broken. Utterly broken. There is no technical or economic reason that we couldn’t have the majority of workplaces in neighborhoods where the majority of employees could comfortably live within a ten minute commute. And I submit that there is nothing better than getting to work together in real life while living comfortably within ten minutes of your workplace. There’s nothing _wrong_ with remote work, and I think it’s great for it to be an option for those who want it (including all remote companies for those who want them). But remote isn’t morally superior to in-person work, despite the way many advocates talk about it. And an escape hatch from our broken cities is not the same as a solution. It saddens me that more of us aren’t working seriously on the problem of fixing housing and transportation in the US, and instead are embracing bandaids. FWIW I do what I can via my work with Strong Towns. If this is a cause that interests you I’d encourage you to read our material and consider becoming a member.

marwatk 4y ago
Even if we fixed all of the above, changing jobs would still require uprooting your family. In an era where you worked for one company for life it made sense. Today I don't think it's feasible.

tnel77 4y ago

COVID obviously wasn’t great, but I got to watch my first born child take their first steps since we were all home during lockdown. I’m oddly greatful for the pandemic at this point.