11 ms·

There's a growing consensus that most people like having an office to go to (more social, separated from kids/partners, etc.) but hate to commute. As a thought

• RMPR 3y ago
  > I could walk 5 min to my office, would I still want to work from home? I walk 5 min to my office and I still want to work from home most of the time. I like going to the office as well, but I prefer staying home.
• lexandstuff 3y ago
  It's not just the commute. It is so hard to focus in an open-plan office, which most tech companies still insist on.
• Asmilex 3y ago
  I live in a relatively small city of Spain, working for a considerably big consulting company. It takes 30 minutes to walk to the office from my home, and I'm on remote 1-2 days a week. This is a lovely balance. While the vast majority of my team is distributed across the country (and Europe, too), having the flexibility to stay at home or work alongside colleagues from other projects is great. Need to focus on development one day? I'll stay at home, since it is more peaceful and my equipment is better (long live big screens with high refresh rates). Want to not worry about cooking and have lunch with other people? I'll go to the office. I'm also quite active too. It can be a bit tedious, but walking at least 6km everyday does wonders for your health. Specially since I'm a type 1 diabetic. Nevertheless, my contractor is far from perfect (I could rant for hours about how absolutely crap our company laptops are for developers). But it seems like these kinds of situations can only happen in small, compact cities; which is usually the case for Europeans and rarely for US cities. I'd highly recommend hybrid to anyone who can afford it, but, as always, your mileage may vary
  • intelthrow6 3y ago
    Off-topic: but do you know how the college/university situation is in Spain vis-a-vis Americans and PhDs? I’m going to be doing one in mainland Europe, and a friend has recommended Spain and Portugal.
• newsclues 3y ago
  I had a short (5-10 minutes) commute through a small park/forest and it was perfect. Just enough time to wake up or decompress, but short enough that I could run if late and merely be out of breath. That or an elevator ride to a different floor in a hybrid office/condo tower would be nice.
• fruffy 3y ago
  Yes. My office is about a 10 minute walk away. I work from home when I need to get stuff done. There are simply fewer distractions. I go to the office when I do feel live having some idle chit chat or to be social. If I were 100% remote, I would not miss the office. I do not have a separate office room at home, I work from my bedroom.
• CoastalCoder 3y ago
  I don't know either way about a consensus, but AFAIK there's still a general antipathy to open office plans.
  • ghaff 3y ago
    For some, probably. I'm happy to work in a cafeteria, coffee shop, etc.
    • midoridensha 3y ago
      Coffee shops aren't like open-plan offices. In an open-plan office, you have to listen to all your coworkers, including those on completely different teams, have extremely loud and simultaneous conversations that you can hear from far across the room. In a coffee shop, people generally don't talk, or keep their voices low when they do, so you generally only hear people talking to the staff to make orders and such.
      • HWR_14 3y ago
        Indeed. In a coffee shop, it's considered rude to talk on a phone at full volume. In an open office, it's absolutely "fine" for some reason.
        • msh 3y ago
          Blame management who puts people whos job it is to talk on the phone all the time in the same open office as people who need to concentrate.
        • WirelessGigabit 3y ago
          There was a group of people in a meeting room working on separate parts of some larger project. I had to call one of them. You think that guy would get off his ass to walk away and talk to me in private? I spend the time helping you out and you don't even offer me that? No, I had to hear 3 other people having a conversation louder than his call with me.
        • 3y ago
• ghaff 3y ago
  Some people do have very specific demands of company office environments because they don't like working in more open settings with ambient noise. For me, if I could walk 5-10 minutes to an office (especially with people I actually worked with, which wouldn't be the case if I drove 30 minutes to the nearest office) I'd probably do so pretty regularly. For me, it's definitely mostly about the commute which would be 30+ minutes to the closest office and then I wouldn't know anyone there.
  • shmel 3y ago
    I like how not wanting to do complex intellectual work requiring focus in a noisy environment has become a very specific demand.
  • throwaway5959 3y ago
    I mean, offices used to have cubicles and the noise wasn’t nearly as bad. Maybe we could bring those back. Oh wait, that much sq ft per person was “too expensive” so I guess we’re all going back to open plan hell.
    • adrr 3y ago
      Used to be offices not cubicles.
      • ghaff 3y ago
        Not really for most people. When I interviewed with Boeing in the 80s, it was a room full of desks and no partitions with managers around the outside in offices. I did, at the time, have a job with another company where I had an office (though I spent most of my time on job sites) but offices for IC engineers were never the norm at most companies.
    • midoridensha 3y ago
      Cubicles are bad for collaboration: you can't easily hear all the conversations around you that have absolutely nothing to do with whatever you're working on. Corporate executives know that being constantly exposed to conversations on topics outside your expertise is great for collaboration and productivity.
• RcouF1uZ4gsC 3y ago
  Would you rather be 5 minutes from your office or your kids’ school? Or 5 minutes from your office or 5 minutes from your extended family? Or 5 minutes from the beach? Or 5 minutes from the ski slopes? There are a lot of locations that really benefit me being close to them than being close to the office. Also, 5 minutes from the office is not very far. If a lot of people work at the office, living spaces 5 minutes from the office will either end up really expensive or really small.
  • andyferris 3y ago
    Oh man, when I was in Europe I was 5 minutes from my office, my kids school AND the beach. Definitely a happy time! (OTOH I was about as far on Earth that I could possibly get from from my extended family, so that was a bummer).
    • akie 3y ago
      Where were you? That's definitely not the norm in Europe.
  • orwin 3y ago
    I'm 5 minutes from the beach (walking), 5 from my gym (biking), max 10 from my friends (both) and 15 from my family (biking). Also have a school nearby. Now I just have to find an office, or create my own.
• rajamaka 3y ago
  Totally agree. Working from the office is a dealbreaker for me yet I prefer working in an office compared to home. I just hate wasting a portion of my day to commuting or turning a 8 hour work day into a 10 hour workday for the same pay. In my experience it seems like the people who make the decisions on returning to the office are those who can afford to live close to the office.
  • SketchySeaBeast 3y ago
    > In my experience it seems like the people who make the decisions on returning to the office are those who can afford to live close to the office. I firmly believe that those behind the RTO push don't realize their 24 hours are very different than the average workers.
  • philipov 3y ago
    We need a law that mandates commute time be counted as billable hours. Those two hours of commute should come out of the 8 the employer gets.
    • midoridensha 3y ago
      Here in Japan, employers have to pay for the employee's public transit commuting costs (but not time). So people living very far away (i.e. outside the city's transit service area) are unlikely to get an offer.
    • ouEight12 3y ago
      ... and now there's an HR mandate that managers need to give extra preference to applicants who are located closer to the office.
      • bearmode 3y ago
        Is that so bad? The other way of looking at it is that employers would be more likely to allow WFH, since they don't have to pay for your commute costs anymore
      • 3y ago
• bsnnkv 3y ago
  When my company still had WeWork passes, I would go to the WeWork just across from my gym sometimes, which I go to (the gym) every day around lunch anyway. 10 minute walk there downhill, maybe a 15 minute walk back uphill. It was pretty nice. The main downsides were the hot-desking and not having dedicated hardware there. My home office is kitted out with an ultrawide monitor, a nice webcam lighting setup, a great mic with a nice low-profile arm that slides under the monitor, a powerful desktop tower, etc. The downside to working in an office, even when there is dedicated hardware that stays there, is that the hardware is usually not gonna be as good as what I have at home, and that I will not be able to have my own office room to work from without distractions.
• rektide 3y ago
  Both Google and Facebook were in the process of building little company towns, mixed-ish residential/office zones, is my understanding. Both on pause indefinitely. On the one hand, I makes sense to pause. On the other hand, making vibrant light urban spaces feels like something they could pull off & really build on. Become a destination company.
  • akomtu 3y ago
    In those wonderful towns, residents not only get fired for wrongthink, they also get evicted by the corporate police. The omnipresent cctv cameras help residents stay in line with the community standards of inclusive speech and behavior.
    • amrocha 3y ago
      Why do you have a persecution complex?
      • shrimp_emoji 3y ago
        Because they don't live in China
      • CoastalCoder 3y ago
        I don't know if GP has any examples to back up the claim, but it does seem plausible to me. I.e., if: (1) living in the company town is contingent on being an employee, (2) being accused of politically incorrect speech can end one's employment, and (3) eviction is ultimately backed by state-sanctioned violence, then I can see the logic. I'm just not aware of any examples of this actually happening. OTOH, I have no idea if the plans for those company towns involved behavior standards for conduct in the residential areas, outside of working hours. The overall setup sounds really dystopian, so hopefully this is the last we'll ever think about it.
        • amrocha 3y ago
          >I'm just not aware of any examples if this actually happening That's the point. Google by and large treats its employees really well. There's no reason to think it would push this dystopian version of employee housing, instead of something a lot more tame. The only explanation I can think of is that some people just like thinking of themselves as the little guy against the world.
• midoridensha 3y ago
  >There's a growing consensus that most people like having an office to go to (more social, separated from kids/partners, etc.) but hate to commute. This is what they get for adopting a car-centric lifestyle. >As a thought experiment, people should ask themselves: if I could walk 5 min to my office, would I still want to work from home? I live in Tokyo, and it's about 10 minutes to walk to my office, and it's extremely safe. No, I don't want to work from home much, except maybe the days when there's a typhoon or I'm just not feeling well.
• wiseowise 3y ago
  > if I could walk 5 min to my office, would I still want to work from home? Absolutely, yes. Don’t know how it’s in Google, but offices in our company don’t supply nice equipment like Herman Miller chairs with high quality desk and constant distractions from other people make any kind of deep state of work impossible. Add on top of that having a house with a nice garden (if you’re one of those lucky people!) and the clear winner is obvious.
  • User23 3y ago
    Offices don't even supply offices anymore and haven't for decades. They're clearly not fit for purpose. There's a reason why 10x engineers inevitably work evenings and weekends, and, if they have any social acumen, manage to get themselves excused from most workday time wasting rituals, including showing up at the office.
  • fragmede 3y ago
    What's better than a nice garden at home is a professionally managed arboretum
    • bearmode 3y ago
      The garden I crafted myself at home is better than any arboretum. For me. It's also nice and private.
    • theodric 3y ago
      Tell me you're not a gardener without telling me you're not a gardener
    • fullspectrumdev 3y ago
      Nah. Prefer the DIY version where I have to put the work in myself. I can appreciate professionally managed green spaces, and do enjoy them, but they have nothing on the space that I myself get to experiment with.
  • CoastalCoder 3y ago
    > Add on top of that having a house with a nice garden Do you mean "garden" in the American sense (an area for growing food and/or decorative plants), or in the British sense (what American's would call a "lawn" or "yard")?
• mint2 3y ago
  It’s not just commute, I’d like an office but not my current employers office so I work from home. I would love to go into a decent office, except they cheaped out so much on the work equipment. The beige and drab decor is okay, it’s the way the monitors are so cheap and outdated. And the way the mouse and keyboard are the cheapest possible. Giving people doing knowledge work on computers all day the cheapest possible interface just don’t make sense. It’s penny wise pound foolish. And The office neighborhood is also very unfriendly for pedestrians and bikers. it’s clear planners believed there was zero chance of people actually walking anywhere. I’d much prefer an office with decent equipment and a better setting. it’s a reason why I am considering switching jobs. To have a decent office to go to.
  • 3D30497420 3y ago
    Agreed on this. It is partly the commute, but also the environment you end up in. I used to work for a FAANG in “cube-ville USA”. It was dark and demoralizing. There were great views out of the windows, but you couldn’t see them through your cubicle walls. A bunch of us took the top panels down so we could enjoy the sunlight and view, but quickly got in trouble with facilities. It was fairly miserable. Until they moved us to a team room with zero windows. That was worse. I left soon after.
    • theonlybutlet 3y ago
      That sounds grim, like something out of Severance.
      • endtime 3y ago
        I worked at Google for 10 years and I always tried to make myself a cubicle by getting a corner desk and then getting soundproof barriers. Cubicles got a bad rap but open plan offices are way worse.
• Fire-Dragon-DoL 3y ago
  Nope. Love my home, we set our entire life to be remote. See my child every minute (except for school) and see my wife every minute. I would need to be forced to the office, never going there. Happy to go on an occasional trip though, love my colleagues, but family first
  • kerabatsos 3y ago
    I’m in agreement. Summers are challenging to have the kids (7 and 10) around, but it’s a challenge worth having. They are young once and I’d like to be there for them. even if the office is five miles away, I’m more productive as a programmer and a dad. Seems like a win/win.
    • prmoustache 3y ago
      This summer over the course of 9 weeks, my daughters will spend 5 weeks abroads. 3 weeks at my parents place in one country, 2 weeks at their other grandfather house in another country. The 2 remaining weeks we will have family visit and can spare taking a few days between me and their mother. With a bit of organization it is not that challenging to have kids. Also there are a number of possible summer activities with school like schedules for those who have less family around + possibility to hire a student to take care of kids while you are working during summer.
      • satyrnein 3y ago
        With a bit of organization and tons of family support, you mean. Other people are taking care of their parents in addition to their children!
        • prmoustache 3y ago
          As I said previously, even without family support there are tons of summer activities your kids can take part in. At least in my part of the world.
• irrational 3y ago
  My work is about an easy 15 minute bike ride through a forest on paved paths. Very nice. I hate it. I hate having to get ready. I hate the time going there and back. I hate everything about commuting, even for an easy commute like mine.
  • mjhagen 3y ago
    I'm the exact opposite, I love having a 5k bike ride as my commute. It helps clear my head and it keeps me healthy. During COVID I even rented my own office away from my home just to have an excuse for a daily ride.
    • theonlybutlet 3y ago
      You could've just gone for a morning and evening cycle. When I started working from home I went for a walk before and after, it initially helped me maintain the mental work/life balance.
      • mjhagen 3y ago
        I'm extremely lazy, the commute "forced" me to do some exercise and I promptly stopped when the WFH lock downs started.
  • kanbara 3y ago
    that's crazy, because biking 10 min to work was my favourite part of going to work.i loved biking thru my city, and having the flexibility to leave when i want, get home fast, and take public transit if i wanted to. tho tbf i don't work well from home, i need social interaction and less distraction. the bike ride was great to wake up, jam, or think about problems for the day
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• zeroonetwothree 3y ago
  I would go every day if it was 5 min. Even if it was 15 min. But right now my commute is 1 hour+ unless I go off peak but that makes the scheduling awkward. Still I do that pretty often because I find the collaboration far superior in person. One day in person produces more good ideas than two months remote
• bombolo 3y ago
  > if I could walk 5 min to my office, would I still want to work from home? I'd still want the office to be nice. If it's some concrete monstrosity where I can't get them to buy a decent chair and I have to sit in an open plan… home still wins.
• rebeccaskinner 3y ago
  > if I could walk 5 min to my office, would I still want to work from home? Yes, because I don't want to get covid.
• fullspectrumdev 3y ago
  Nope. I lived 5 mins from my office for ages - I specifically moved to the area to avoid a commute, save money on transport, etc. Still preferred to work from home.
• scarface_74 3y ago
  Yes. Why wouldn’t I? When I first started working from home after Covid, I had a separate bedroom that was converted to an office and across the hall I had a home gym fully equipped with cardio equipment. I had no distractions from a loud open office and I could block time off for deep work and shut everything down - Slack, Outlook etc. I said “had” because admittedly now I’m a corner case. My wife and I nomad around the US 7 months a year staying in mostly extended stay hotels and the other 5 months (October-March) we “snowbird” in our home in Florida that’s rented out when we aren’t there to cover the mortgage.
  • leptons 3y ago
    Before covid, my coworkers would get half the office sick, including me, about 4 or 5 times a year. Back then it was just taken for granted that getting sick was a part of life. Well I haven't been sick in 3 and a half years since working from home, and masking, hand sanitizing, etc. Covid changed me, and I don't regret any of it. I've lived the excesses of over-funded startups - I don't need the catered breakfasts and lunches, I don't need the endless snacks and drinks, I don't need the fancy desk chairs or fancy desks - I need to not get deathly ill several times a year. That's the absolute #1 top reason why I won't go back to an office. It's not just about covid - it's about all viruses and illnesses that coworkers spread around the office. Heck no I don't want any of that in my life anymore. No thank you.
    • rightbyte 3y ago
      I have worked in open offices and private ones and there is maybe a factor 4 of more sick days in the open office according to my guesstimation. It is mainly the long air sharing I believe that can be a difference. You still go to the same toilettes and touch the same doorhandles.
    • tomcam 3y ago
      > Before covid, my coworkers would get half the office sick, including me, about 4 or 5 times a year. Back then it was just taken for granted that getting sick was a part of life. Any thoughts on how this happened? Did not have this experience in a diverse 40-year job history
• jedberg 3y ago
  Probably not, or at least not much. At home I have my own office, a window that looks out on trees and provides ample natural light, and my family. And I don't have to wear pants or shoes. At the office I share an office with someone. It has no windows, so it's stuffy and lit only by harsh florescent lights. We have to take turns using the office because we just sit on video calls all day. I basically just sit in this torture box on video calls all day. If it were five minutes walk, I would consider walking over there after dropping the kids off at school and walking back before they got home so I could greet them.
• dmitrygr 3y ago
  > There's a growing consensus [[citation needed]]
• jjav 3y ago
  > As a thought experiment, people should ask themselves: if I could walk 5 min to my office, would I still want to work from home? Not enough information to answer that. Is it an open office layout or a real office? If it is an open office, I will still need to work from home even if it's a 1 minute walk because it is impossible to get any work done in an open office. But give me a real office with a closing door and I'll happily commute 30 minutes every day to use it.
• jillesvangurp 3y ago
  We're a social species. So, many people actually enjoy meeting with and mingling with their colleagues. During Covid, a local co working space here in Berlin was one of the few places I could still go to. It's a five minute walk from my door and I did go there quite often. So, yes, I would and I have. And I don't even have a family to escape from. I've been working remotely in various settings for close to a decade. But I've done so from various offices for most of that time. I've also been to the US on business travel a few times and got to spend some time in a few offices. There's a real difference between the US and Europe and it isn't good. The average US office with it's cubicles, air conditioning, lack of a view, and typical dreary locale is just miserable. Google is of course famous for making an effort to make their offices nice. But from what I've seen it's still a cubicle hell. So, I can imagine that enduring a lengthy commute for the privilege of being miserable there is a bit of a hard sell. On the other hand, they do pay a premium for their people. So asking them to show up is maybe not that unreasonable. And of course they have to justify maintaining offices in a places with epic real estate pricing. If people stop showing up, you might legitimately wonder what the point of being in such expensive areas is to begin with.
• jskrablin 3y ago
  I am a 5 min bicycle ride from my office yet I still WFH 3-4 days per week. And if a daily office presence would be required at some point I'd just switch job.
• midasuni 3y ago
  At home I have dedicated desk, equipment, monitors, decent connectivity, a view of birds and squirrels and whatever In an office I hotdesk on a laptop and if I’m lucky I get. A desk for a few hours.
• alkonaut 3y ago
  It's 90% the commute (and the time lost in commuting, especially if you need to set up your gear), and only 10% actually being in an office. I have been fully remote 10+ years now while everyone else was at the office in a city I moved from, so that's the worst of both worlds: people don't need to be social on Teams/Slack, they are social by the coffee machine. But I'm not at the coffee machine. The pandemic was a huge improvement. Suddenly everyone was remote. So it's definitely improved. In a perfect world I'd be very happy to go to an office one or two days per week and have meetings, be social. If the commute was 5 minutes rather than an hour, then I'd be happy to do it 3-4 days a week. But I don't think I'd want it to be 5 days even if I could walk there in two minutes.
• robryan 3y ago
  I go into the office once a fortnight and the commute takes 2 hours out of my day. If it was 5 mins away I'd maybe have a preference to up that to once a week, maybe a bit more of it wasnt open plan. I think there is certainly benefit in being in the same physical space as the rest of the team on occasion. I don't think it has to be often though, even the kind of once every 6 months to a year thing some fully remote companies do might be enough to make a difference with team building.
• bearmode 3y ago
  > if I could walk 5 min to my office, would I still want to work from home? I have my own kitchen, my own bathroom, I can do housework things like putting the laundry in while I'm on a break, I can be in for deliveries, etc. I'd be most happy with a fully remote job, that has an option to go in to the office whenever I like. Some face time is valuable, but absolutely not 5 days of face time a week.