19 ms·

Once you’ve tasted the fruits of WFH and you like the taste, you’ll never go back. It’s like going from a black and white TV to a color one, from a dummy phone

Once you’ve tasted the fruits of WFH and you like the taste, you’ll never go back. It’s like going from a black and white TV to a color one, from a dummy phone to a smartphone, from dialup internet to fiber to the home. You never go the other way round, unless there is a very strong reason and personal decision. People like to improve their lives in whatever way is best for them and will strongly object to a “downgrade” imposed by others, unless it’s something they’ve decided on their own and on purpose.

benjaminwootton 3y ago
Needing to eat and have a roof over your head is a fairly strong reason. The number of people who need to work already vastly outnumbers the number of WFH positions.
- NKosmatos 3y ago
  Exactly, that's what the big "bad" companies use to force us to do things we don't want, our need for food, housing and a normal life. We're discussing about the majority of people and not for the HN "elite" that have the privilege/luxury of earning hundreds of thousands, thus affording to be picky with their next work positions. I'm working fully remote the last few years and I'm troubled on what is going to happen when the hybrid or RTO call arrives. I'm not in a position to be very picky and for sure I'll try to find another remote job, but as you correctly state: num of people seeking WFH > num of WFH positions
- randomdata 3y ago
  > Needing to eat and have a roof over your head is a fairly strong reason. Producing food and shelter are quite well suited to being done at home. Once upon a time that was the norm. > The number of people who need to work already vastly outnumbers the number of WFH positions. There is no limit on WFH positions. It is technically possible for everyone to find one. However, you will often be entering uncharted territory to explore them. Commuting to a restaurant to flip burgers, or whatever, is much more well understood and thus carries far less risk. Indeed, the worker will prefer low risk opportunities in the vast majority of cases.
flakeoil 3y ago
We will most likely see that jobs that cannot be done by working from home will see an increase in salary and WFH jobs will see a decrease. I'm thinking about jobs like nurses, electricians, factory workers, teachers etc.
- zem 3y ago
  I really hope so! though historically this has not been the case due to the whole "unskilled/low skilled jobs" framing
  - sokoloff 3y ago
    Is it due to that framing, or due to the balance of supply and demand for that labor and that framing is just an explanation of the supply?
- Extasia785 3y ago
  Depends on the region. The big advantage of WFH is the global job market. I live pretty rural in Germany and salaries are quite a bit lower than in the city. And they are far lower than remote US-jobs. So I easily eclipse all my friends and neighbors with my salary, it's pretty much impossible for them to catch up. They would need to straight-up double or triple their salary, which is unlikely when salary has been pretty stagnant the past decades. I can see WFH jobs decreasing your salary if you lived in a big city with high wages before, but for anyone else the advantages of global competition pay a massive premium right now. Maybe that changes at some point, but looking at the massive shortage of software experts my country is facing right now, this point is still decades away.
ensocode 3y ago
True. Maybe it is even the other way around. A farmer lives on his farm. He works there, he raises his family there, grows his food there, lives there, has his friends around there. For my perspective it is more back to the roots than progressive. If you can work from the place were you live then this is more natural than commuting into the office block every day. Technology here gave us a opportunity to live a more natural live. It tastes so good because it is a very natural human desire. Technology fixed that for us. So why would we give that up?
- pvdoom 3y ago
  I think it's both. A farmer could do that, because they tend to own their farm. A worker usually has no ownership in the business. They're more like farmhands ...
  - jaclaz 3y ago
    If we go back in time it wasn't the case always. A common form of agricultural contract in many countries, up to the WWII and in some countries even after was a form of rent where the owner provided the farm, and the tenant worked on it and they divided the crop (or whatever the farm produced), in English it is called sharecropping: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharecropping https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharecropping
    - pvdoom 3y ago
      Which is very interesting to consider how it relates to capitalism today, and how in essence you are paying some amount of rent to your employer, in the form of the profits of the work - the leftover after salaries are paid and expenses covered.
      - jaclaz 3y ago
        I am not getting it. In sharecropping (with a lot of nuances depending on the specific countries and even different regions in a same country) the landowner and the tenant were some sort of partners, both had all the interest in having a better/larger crop (or raise more cattle, etc.). In a normal capitalistic employer/employee relationship, the employees have no particular interest in the final outcome, they are only scared of being fired if they don't meet some (often arbitrarily set) "productivity goals".
apexalpha 3y ago
For me, the suggestion of going back to work in an office 5 days a week is as ludicrous as the suggestion we go back to a 6 day workweek.
pvdoom 3y ago
Yes. And a big reason why working in the office was a thing is pretty much legacy from the dawn of industry... and of course the fundamental power imbalance from having to sell your time to someone.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
nottorp 3y ago
> and you like the taste Orthogonal to the productivity argument, have there been any studies trying to find the motivation for people preferring/hating WFH? My guess is you tend to prefer it if you have a social circle that's not your co workers and hate it if you don't.
- Lewton 3y ago
  I prefer going to the office, not because of the social aspect, but because I strongly prefer separating my work from my personal life I really enjoyed back when working from the office was optional and I was the only one showing up!
  - mikrotikker 3y ago
    I'm lucky in that I converted a rather fancy woodshed into an office/lab with lots of Ethernet ports so my work can stay in there. When I was I the house it wasn't as good since I could still hear the slack and email noises from the lounge etc.
    - nottorp 3y ago
      > I could still hear the slack and email noises from the lounge Holy Ahura Mazda! You have intrusive notifications enabled? That's not a good idea even when working in the office...
    - ryandrake 3y ago
      This helps A LOT. I am also extremely lucky enough to have a separate structure on my property that acts as my WFH office. It's got a window, a closing door, two desks, enough room for plenty of monitors, gigabit ethernet, and is totally separate from the chaos of a home with kids. That 10 second walk from home to office is sufficient to get me from "home mode" to "work mode".
- christophilus 3y ago
  For me, it’s a combination of flexibility, avoiding a daily commute, and having my own private, focus-enhancing office as opposed to the interruption fest that is modern offices.
querez 3y ago
To each their own. I find that WFH makes me incredibly unproductive, I'm glad I'm able to return to to the office. I think there are a lot of factors that affect this (e.g. I have a family with small children at home, and my commute is <15 minutes by bike).
- bbkane 3y ago
  Yes, I'm in a similar situation- small kid at home, easy walking commute to a nice office with friendly coworkers, a gym, and free lunch
  - cpursley 3y ago
    I’m hard core work from home but that actually sounds awesome now that we have a toddler.
    - mikrotikker 3y ago
      Hey man you do the crime you gotta do the time hehehe
      - Titanicpryk 3y ago
        Don't want to be bothered by coworkers then work from home. Don't want to be bothered by a baby then go back to the office.
- ddevault 3y ago
  Really done with this take. Show some solidarity for your peers. So you like working from the office -- good for you! Do that! But also stand up for your colleagues who don't want that. When your colleagues have fewer choices, when things like this are imposed on them, well, your preferences are not far behind from being managed themselves.
  - ac2u 3y ago
    Where did the person you’re replying to imply they didn’t have solidarity or wanted office work imposed on everyone? The parent poster simply said “Once you’ve tasted the fruits of WFH and you like the taste, you’ll never go back.” And the reply was essentially “to each their own but my WFH experience was different “ and you’re ready to jump down their throat with accusations of lack of solidarity.
secondcoming 3y ago
Not so sure. My sample size is tiny but when interviewing people today it's not uncommon for candidates to request/hope for at least some office time during the week. I think people are beginning to miss the social aspect of being physically close to their colleagues.
5e92cb50239222b 3y ago
I upgraded from a decent smartphone back to an old Nokia dummy phone with a black-and-white display, and have been using that for 3-4 years now. To each their own.
valleyjo 3y ago
Not universally true. I strongly prefer work from office. I hate commuting but prefer the office so that’s a paradox I struggle with. I’ve been thinking terrible commutes are a symptom of how we’ve built society. If everyone lived within 20 minutes by public transit or bike or walk from the office would there still be as much pushback?
- jen20 3y ago
  Per the root post of the thread: > _and you like the taste_ If you don’t, that’s fine, and your preferences need not be imposed on your peers.
- drewcsillag 3y ago
  Would there still be as much pushback? Yes. Open office environments are terrible for productivity, stress, health, etc. — the science is pretty well settled here.
- danaris 3y ago
  I live 20 minutes' walk from my workplace. I've been working from home almost exclusively since lockdowns started, and it's hugely beneficial to me, while adding minimal burden to the actual work. Being in my own space, with my cats nearby, my own kitchen just a few steps away, and my family doing their own work in other rooms... And this is as compared to my own spacious office, with a decent minifridge and a back room I can sit in if I need to be more clearly "unavailable". Thinking back to my previous job, where I worked in a cube farm, I just shudder inside. There is no way in hell I'm ever going back to that soul-destroying atmosphere, and by far the most reliable way to ensure that is to only take full-remote jobs from now on.
ggm 3y ago
Black and white TV had higher fidelity in pixel terms to colour TV. Just sayin' I know what you mean, but once you've had true greyscale, nothing really comes close. There's a reason people watch uncoloured movies.
tetromino_ 3y ago
> Once you’ve tasted the fruits of WFH and you like the taste, you’ll never go back. Let me guess, you are in a low cost of living area (at least relative to your income) and have a big house? I live in NYC. Residential floor space is very expensive here. My wife and I on two tech salaries can afford a fairly large place by the standards of our area, but it's definitely not large enough for 2 adults to comfortably work from home with a toddler also running around. For us, the optimal solution is hybrid with a schedule where on any given day one of us is wfh and one in the office. When both of us were forced to work from home full time, we managed, but it was suboptimal and a drag on productivity. The "fruits of WFH" turned out somewhat bitter.
- Cymrukicks 3y ago
  Or you could keep your jobs and move to a lower cost of living area making us of more space?
  - tetromino_ 3y ago
    Irrespective of lack of space, NYC is the only place in the US where I have enjoyed living.
    - sanderjd 3y ago
      Yeah people always miss this: Job availability is not the only reason people don't all move to rural Kentucky. People like living in expensive cities! That's why so many people live there!
    - muttled 3y ago
      Not that they'd do this, but if the company offered what it was paying for office space for you as a stipend for your home office, would that change your mind? Some quick Google math suggests an average of $80/sqft/year for NYC office space and suggests 100 sqft per-person for an open-office worker which comes out to $600-700 a month. Again, cursory Google search, but it looks like that's right about the price increase to go from a 2BR to a 3BR and have a home office.
technofiend 3y ago
I work in an office for a company that's headquartered in another state, so even when in the office it's often been a "remote work" experience for me. What we have today is a natural and logical progression from all the improvements meant to make it easier for people to work together, regardless of location. You have to remember at one time people actually left their desks to go to a conference room and meet. The first iteration of bringing in remote workers to that was often speakerphone systems maybe with multiple microphones if you were lucky. You'd literally have twenty people in a room all talking to each other. It was nearly impossible to keep up if multiple conversations broke out and often it was work to be heard. There was no view of the whiteboard and people had to remember to share any materials and be explicit as they advanced through it. Cisco's telepresence system that tried to create an experience mirroring sitting across from each other at a table was a huge step up, but still it was a large hardware investment and the rooms were a scarce resource. Fast forward to today and everyone has the "Tandberg" equivalent of a single person telepresence device that was limited to senior management. In fact everyone has a better experience at their desktop with universal access to web-hosted whiteboard and collaborative tools, and (assuming broadband network speeds are home) all those things work equally well at home or in the office. So the progression of making it easier and easier for remote offices to collaborate has reached its logical conclusion. At least where I work it was pitched as a way to cut travel costs. And if I'm being cynical it's worked in that the senior staff are still free to travel while small departments now share travel budget that was previously available on a per-person basis. My personal corporate card has a credit line that's nearly what my boss' travel budget is for fourteen people. So with no need to travel and no local staff or coworkers, it's frankly better to work from home: same zoom calls, same excalidraw, same figma, confluence, teams, etc. And no scheduling a desk for the day. No loud coworkers yelling on their headset when they get excited. I can have my preferred mouse and un-office-friendly mechanical keyboard. I can wear a lapel microphone and use my also un-office-friendly speakers instead of being forced to wear a headset or earbuds. I can have a wide screen monitor and a better camera. In short: productivity-wise my experience is the same or better, but comfort-wise it is materially better in every way. When every other coworker is already in another state, for me and a lot of people like me there's literally no downside. And there's zero sympathy for corporations that worked so hard to make it easy to work from any other office only to discover it's just as easy to work from home.
packetlost 3y ago
Idk, I'm firmly in the "hybrid works best" camp. Face-to-face collaboration has no alternative, sorry. In jobs where you have to actually engineer instead of build CRUD web-app #2,000,001, it's very hard to be effective without in-person communication. Most people are not great at the async types of comms that are necessary for that to scale to remote work.
- red-iron-pine 3y ago
  hybrid works for some, but often means abandoning patterns that are required to make 100% remote work. It's also a huge PITA since it requires people to live near their office -- can't move to rural Kentucky, still stuck in the burbs -- while simultaneously requiring them to maintain a at-home office AND work office. Honestly if it's not 100% in person then make it 100% remote and learn to structure it that way. Otherwise it's the worst of both worlds.
  - sanderjd 3y ago
    I disagree, hybrid is flexible. If you're doing work that benefits from in-person interaction, coordinate a time to be together in the office. If you're doing work that you'd rather be remote for, do that. I do think the geographical agnosticism of 100% remote is an enormous advantage, but there is no correspondingly enormous advantage of 100% in-office. If you've already taken the hit to give up the advantages of 100% remote, you can at least keep the advantages of flexibility by going hybrid.
- mostlysimilar 3y ago
  > In jobs where you have to actually engineer instead of build CRUD web-app #2,000,001, it's very hard to be effective without in-person communication. Trivializing the work of others isn't making your point any stronger. There's plenty of complexity in delivering software via the web that benefits from in person collaboration.
sanderjd 3y ago
I've been working solely remotely by choice for a little over a year now, and except for a couple weird months during a lurching back-to-office push in early 2022, I've been working remotely for nearly 3.5 years now. I've begun to really miss having an office to go to. I've increasingly been getting out of the house every day, but it's expensive to go to coffee shops, and I don't really like the feel of "coworking" offices where everyone is cloistered away working on something different. It seems to me that the hybrid model of two or three days in office and two or three days at home is quickly gaining mindshare, and I've frankly become envious of that.

benjaminwootton 3y ago

Needing to eat and have a roof over your head is a fairly strong reason. The number of people who need to work already vastly outnumbers the number of WFH positions.

NKosmatos 3y ago
Exactly, that's what the big "bad" companies use to force us to do things we don't want, our need for food, housing and a normal life. We're discussing about the majority of people and not for the HN "elite" that have the privilege/luxury of earning hundreds of thousands, thus affording to be picky with their next work positions. I'm working fully remote the last few years and I'm troubled on what is going to happen when the hybrid or RTO call arrives. I'm not in a position to be very picky and for sure I'll try to find another remote job, but as you correctly state: num of people seeking WFH > num of WFH positions
randomdata 3y ago
> Needing to eat and have a roof over your head is a fairly strong reason. Producing food and shelter are quite well suited to being done at home. Once upon a time that was the norm. > The number of people who need to work already vastly outnumbers the number of WFH positions. There is no limit on WFH positions. It is technically possible for everyone to find one. However, you will often be entering uncharted territory to explore them. Commuting to a restaurant to flip burgers, or whatever, is much more well understood and thus carries far less risk. Indeed, the worker will prefer low risk opportunities in the vast majority of cases.

flakeoil 3y ago

We will most likely see that jobs that cannot be done by working from home will see an increase in salary and WFH jobs will see a decrease. I'm thinking about jobs like nurses, electricians, factory workers, teachers etc.

zem 3y ago
I really hope so! though historically this has not been the case due to the whole "unskilled/low skilled jobs" framing
- sokoloff 3y ago
  Is it due to that framing, or due to the balance of supply and demand for that labor and that framing is just an explanation of the supply?
Extasia785 3y ago
Depends on the region. The big advantage of WFH is the global job market. I live pretty rural in Germany and salaries are quite a bit lower than in the city. And they are far lower than remote US-jobs. So I easily eclipse all my friends and neighbors with my salary, it's pretty much impossible for them to catch up. They would need to straight-up double or triple their salary, which is unlikely when salary has been pretty stagnant the past decades. I can see WFH jobs decreasing your salary if you lived in a big city with high wages before, but for anyone else the advantages of global competition pay a massive premium right now. Maybe that changes at some point, but looking at the massive shortage of software experts my country is facing right now, this point is still decades away.

ensocode 3y ago

True. Maybe it is even the other way around. A farmer lives on his farm. He works there, he raises his family there, grows his food there, lives there, has his friends around there. For my perspective it is more back to the roots than progressive. If you can work from the place were you live then this is more natural than commuting into the office block every day. Technology here gave us a opportunity to live a more natural live. It tastes so good because it is a very natural human desire. Technology fixed that for us. So why would we give that up?

pvdoom 3y ago
I think it's both. A farmer could do that, because they tend to own their farm. A worker usually has no ownership in the business. They're more like farmhands ...
- jaclaz 3y ago
  If we go back in time it wasn't the case always. A common form of agricultural contract in many countries, up to the WWII and in some countries even after was a form of rent where the owner provided the farm, and the tenant worked on it and they divided the crop (or whatever the farm produced), in English it is called sharecropping: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharecropping https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharecropping
  - pvdoom 3y ago
    Which is very interesting to consider how it relates to capitalism today, and how in essence you are paying some amount of rent to your employer, in the form of the profits of the work - the leftover after salaries are paid and expenses covered.
    - jaclaz 3y ago
      I am not getting it. In sharecropping (with a lot of nuances depending on the specific countries and even different regions in a same country) the landowner and the tenant were some sort of partners, both had all the interest in having a better/larger crop (or raise more cattle, etc.). In a normal capitalistic employer/employee relationship, the employees have no particular interest in the final outcome, they are only scared of being fired if they don't meet some (often arbitrarily set) "productivity goals".

apexalpha 3y ago

For me, the suggestion of going back to work in an office 5 days a week is as ludicrous as the suggestion we go back to a 6 day workweek.

pvdoom 3y ago

Yes. And a big reason why working in the office was a thing is pretty much legacy from the dawn of industry... and of course the fundamental power imbalance from having to sell your time to someone.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

nottorp 3y ago

> and you like the taste Orthogonal to the productivity argument, have there been any studies trying to find the motivation for people preferring/hating WFH? My guess is you tend to prefer it if you have a social circle that's not your co workers and hate it if you don't.

Lewton 3y ago
I prefer going to the office, not because of the social aspect, but because I strongly prefer separating my work from my personal life I really enjoyed back when working from the office was optional and I was the only one showing up!
- mikrotikker 3y ago
  I'm lucky in that I converted a rather fancy woodshed into an office/lab with lots of Ethernet ports so my work can stay in there. When I was I the house it wasn't as good since I could still hear the slack and email noises from the lounge etc.
  - nottorp 3y ago
    > I could still hear the slack and email noises from the lounge Holy Ahura Mazda! You have intrusive notifications enabled? That's not a good idea even when working in the office...
  - ryandrake 3y ago
    This helps A LOT. I am also extremely lucky enough to have a separate structure on my property that acts as my WFH office. It's got a window, a closing door, two desks, enough room for plenty of monitors, gigabit ethernet, and is totally separate from the chaos of a home with kids. That 10 second walk from home to office is sufficient to get me from "home mode" to "work mode".
christophilus 3y ago
For me, it’s a combination of flexibility, avoiding a daily commute, and having my own private, focus-enhancing office as opposed to the interruption fest that is modern offices.

querez 3y ago

To each their own. I find that WFH makes me incredibly unproductive, I'm glad I'm able to return to to the office. I think there are a lot of factors that affect this (e.g. I have a family with small children at home, and my commute is <15 minutes by bike).

bbkane 3y ago
Yes, I'm in a similar situation- small kid at home, easy walking commute to a nice office with friendly coworkers, a gym, and free lunch
- cpursley 3y ago
  I’m hard core work from home but that actually sounds awesome now that we have a toddler.
  - mikrotikker 3y ago
    Hey man you do the crime you gotta do the time hehehe
    - Titanicpryk 3y ago
      Don't want to be bothered by coworkers then work from home. Don't want to be bothered by a baby then go back to the office.
ddevault 3y ago
Really done with this take. Show some solidarity for your peers. So you like working from the office -- good for you! Do that! But also stand up for your colleagues who don't want that. When your colleagues have fewer choices, when things like this are imposed on them, well, your preferences are not far behind from being managed themselves.
- ac2u 3y ago
  Where did the person you’re replying to imply they didn’t have solidarity or wanted office work imposed on everyone? The parent poster simply said “Once you’ve tasted the fruits of WFH and you like the taste, you’ll never go back.” And the reply was essentially “to each their own but my WFH experience was different “ and you’re ready to jump down their throat with accusations of lack of solidarity.

secondcoming 3y ago

Not so sure. My sample size is tiny but when interviewing people today it's not uncommon for candidates to request/hope for at least some office time during the week. I think people are beginning to miss the social aspect of being physically close to their colleagues.

5e92cb50239222b 3y ago

I upgraded from a decent smartphone back to an old Nokia dummy phone with a black-and-white display, and have been using that for 3-4 years now. To each their own.

valleyjo 3y ago

Not universally true. I strongly prefer work from office. I hate commuting but prefer the office so that’s a paradox I struggle with. I’ve been thinking terrible commutes are a symptom of how we’ve built society. If everyone lived within 20 minutes by public transit or bike or walk from the office would there still be as much pushback?

jen20 3y ago
Per the root post of the thread: > _and you like the taste_ If you don’t, that’s fine, and your preferences need not be imposed on your peers.
drewcsillag 3y ago
Would there still be as much pushback? Yes. Open office environments are terrible for productivity, stress, health, etc. — the science is pretty well settled here.
danaris 3y ago
I live 20 minutes' walk from my workplace. I've been working from home almost exclusively since lockdowns started, and it's hugely beneficial to me, while adding minimal burden to the actual work. Being in my own space, with my cats nearby, my own kitchen just a few steps away, and my family doing their own work in other rooms... And this is as compared to my own spacious office, with a decent minifridge and a back room I can sit in if I need to be more clearly "unavailable". Thinking back to my previous job, where I worked in a cube farm, I just shudder inside. There is no way in hell I'm ever going back to that soul-destroying atmosphere, and by far the most reliable way to ensure that is to only take full-remote jobs from now on.

ggm 3y ago

Black and white TV had higher fidelity in pixel terms to colour TV. Just sayin' I know what you mean, but once you've had true greyscale, nothing really comes close. There's a reason people watch uncoloured movies.

tetromino_ 3y ago

> Once you’ve tasted the fruits of WFH and you like the taste, you’ll never go back. Let me guess, you are in a low cost of living area (at least relative to your income) and have a big house? I live in NYC. Residential floor space is very expensive here. My wife and I on two tech salaries can afford a fairly large place by the standards of our area, but it's definitely not large enough for 2 adults to comfortably work from home with a toddler also running around. For us, the optimal solution is hybrid with a schedule where on any given day one of us is wfh and one in the office. When both of us were forced to work from home full time, we managed, but it was suboptimal and a drag on productivity. The "fruits of WFH" turned out somewhat bitter.

Cymrukicks 3y ago
Or you could keep your jobs and move to a lower cost of living area making us of more space?
- tetromino_ 3y ago
  Irrespective of lack of space, NYC is the only place in the US where I have enjoyed living.
  - sanderjd 3y ago
    Yeah people always miss this: Job availability is not the only reason people don't all move to rural Kentucky. People like living in expensive cities! That's why so many people live there!
  - muttled 3y ago
    Not that they'd do this, but if the company offered what it was paying for office space for you as a stipend for your home office, would that change your mind? Some quick Google math suggests an average of $80/sqft/year for NYC office space and suggests 100 sqft per-person for an open-office worker which comes out to $600-700 a month. Again, cursory Google search, but it looks like that's right about the price increase to go from a 2BR to a 3BR and have a home office.

technofiend 3y ago

I work in an office for a company that's headquartered in another state, so even when in the office it's often been a "remote work" experience for me. What we have today is a natural and logical progression from all the improvements meant to make it easier for people to work together, regardless of location. You have to remember at one time people actually left their desks to go to a conference room and meet. The first iteration of bringing in remote workers to that was often speakerphone systems maybe with multiple microphones if you were lucky. You'd literally have twenty people in a room all talking to each other. It was nearly impossible to keep up if multiple conversations broke out and often it was work to be heard. There was no view of the whiteboard and people had to remember to share any materials and be explicit as they advanced through it. Cisco's telepresence system that tried to create an experience mirroring sitting across from each other at a table was a huge step up, but still it was a large hardware investment and the rooms were a scarce resource. Fast forward to today and everyone has the "Tandberg" equivalent of a single person telepresence device that was limited to senior management. In fact everyone has a better experience at their desktop with universal access to web-hosted whiteboard and collaborative tools, and (assuming broadband network speeds are home) all those things work equally well at home or in the office. So the progression of making it easier and easier for remote offices to collaborate has reached its logical conclusion. At least where I work it was pitched as a way to cut travel costs. And if I'm being cynical it's worked in that the senior staff are still free to travel while small departments now share travel budget that was previously available on a per-person basis. My personal corporate card has a credit line that's nearly what my boss' travel budget is for fourteen people. So with no need to travel and no local staff or coworkers, it's frankly better to work from home: same zoom calls, same excalidraw, same figma, confluence, teams, etc. And no scheduling a desk for the day. No loud coworkers yelling on their headset when they get excited. I can have my preferred mouse and un-office-friendly mechanical keyboard. I can wear a lapel microphone and use my also un-office-friendly speakers instead of being forced to wear a headset or earbuds. I can have a wide screen monitor and a better camera. In short: productivity-wise my experience is the same or better, but comfort-wise it is materially better in every way. When every other coworker is already in another state, for me and a lot of people like me there's literally no downside. And there's zero sympathy for corporations that worked so hard to make it easy to work from any other office only to discover it's just as easy to work from home.

packetlost 3y ago

Idk, I'm firmly in the "hybrid works best" camp. Face-to-face collaboration has no alternative, sorry. In jobs where you have to actually engineer instead of build CRUD web-app #2,000,001, it's very hard to be effective without in-person communication. Most people are not great at the async types of comms that are necessary for that to scale to remote work.

red-iron-pine 3y ago
hybrid works for some, but often means abandoning patterns that are required to make 100% remote work. It's also a huge PITA since it requires people to live near their office -- can't move to rural Kentucky, still stuck in the burbs -- while simultaneously requiring them to maintain a at-home office AND work office. Honestly if it's not 100% in person then make it 100% remote and learn to structure it that way. Otherwise it's the worst of both worlds.
- sanderjd 3y ago
  I disagree, hybrid is flexible. If you're doing work that benefits from in-person interaction, coordinate a time to be together in the office. If you're doing work that you'd rather be remote for, do that. I do think the geographical agnosticism of 100% remote is an enormous advantage, but there is no correspondingly enormous advantage of 100% in-office. If you've already taken the hit to give up the advantages of 100% remote, you can at least keep the advantages of flexibility by going hybrid.
mostlysimilar 3y ago
> In jobs where you have to actually engineer instead of build CRUD web-app #2,000,001, it's very hard to be effective without in-person communication. Trivializing the work of others isn't making your point any stronger. There's plenty of complexity in delivering software via the web that benefits from in person collaboration.

sanderjd 3y ago

I've been working solely remotely by choice for a little over a year now, and except for a couple weird months during a lurching back-to-office push in early 2022, I've been working remotely for nearly 3.5 years now. I've begun to really miss having an office to go to. I've increasingly been getting out of the house every day, but it's expensive to go to coffee shops, and I don't really like the feel of "coworking" offices where everyone is cloistered away working on something different. It seems to me that the hybrid model of two or three days in office and two or three days at home is quickly gaining mindshare, and I've frankly become envious of that.