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Want employees to return to the office? Then give each one an office

• itpragmatik 3y ago
  Absolutely awful - whoever brought in this trend of "open office floor plan"! Please go back to having mini offices for everyone or at the very least cubicles with decent sized walls to get some privacy!
• JonChesterfield 3y ago
  Private office with a dog bed under my desk is table stakes. Separate offices would go towards driving up the value of commercial real estate which seems to be important to companies.
• tehjoker 3y ago
  I would say the most important factor for me would be to implement COVID-19 mitigations, but I also enjoy wfh now.
  • SonOfKyuss 3y ago
    Corporate America is done with COVID for the most part. I don’t know of any non-medical office still doing any significant COVID mitigations other than possibly retaining enhanced cleaning protocols.
    • tehjoker 3y ago
      They won't be when the rising disability rates (ONS and FRED data show this) shrink the labor pool.
  • opless 3y ago
    Covid hasn't gone away though. Returning to an office is my idea of hell though. Getting I'll because some random employee won't take the time off or WFH because they have a cold/flu/covid is plenty enough reason to say "no"
    • footy 3y ago
      This is how I feel. I know someone whose life was pretty severely impacted by long covid, and I don't want to be her. And I'm a 37 year old woman, which apparently is a higher risk demographic than average. Between that and the benefits of working from home (having lunch with my local friends or eating leftovers, no commute, control over my environment, being able to work from my partner's occasionally), I really don't think there's a realistic amount of money I'd go back to an office for. Onsites are fine, but RTO 5 days a week 48 weeks a year? No thank you.
• 1970-01-01 3y ago
  At home, the benefits are extreme. Full office, private bath, private bed, private kitchen, garaged parking, asset security, and a 30 second commute. The next wave of office workers will want it better than this, or it simply won't work.
  • Zetice 3y ago
    Won’t work? How will these non-workers pay for things? They’ll have no choice but to work.
    • nkozyra 3y ago
      Depends on the timeline. Things are changing very rapidly. Automation seems to be coming at us at an exponential rate. The expectation that it's going to be business as usual is just as short sighted and archaic with regard going into an office as it is with the idea of work in general.
      • missingdays 3y ago
        So far automation helps rich people get richer, and that's about it
        • nkozyra 3y ago
          Is this not true of every watershed technological breakthrough?
      • halgir 3y ago
        Oh boy, I'm excited for the massive wealth creation of this exponential growth to trickle down to workers.
        • welshwelsh 3y ago
          No need to wait, the future is now. I've already seen huge gains in income and work-life balance by spending time automating my workflow. I hope that by "trickle down to the workers" you aren't talking about technically illiterate workers who are not actively contributing to the automation effort. Unfortunately, they will receive some benefits as well, which is completely undeserved.
• pipeline_peak 3y ago
  Nah, I'm not going back to your stupid building to talk about sports in the break room while microwaving Tupperwared leftover chicken breast lol. Gas + commute time + increased likelihood to eat out (leftover chicken breast) = more money out of my pocket. And I could stretch even further with the endless banter, getting yelled at for not understanding things the first time (I'm not an auditory listener), disrespected for how I look, more reasons to waste money on therapy. Obviously that's personal, but you couldn't pay me more to go back to the cattle stall we call an office... I do miss wearing dress shirts and slacks while I eat your free pizza!
  • not_your_vase 3y ago
    > Nah, I'm not going [...] to talk about sports in the break room while microwaving Tupperwared leftover chicken breast lol. Dunno. I do the same during WFH, only with having no pants on.
  • JJMcJ 3y ago
    > commute Not only time but expense and accident risk, especially for an automobile commute.
    • pipeline_peak 3y ago
      Agreed, a daily cross on the beltway isn't something that should be necessary so I can sit at a computer. This isn't 1965, I'm not working at Honeywell as some mainframe engineer.
  • kzrdude 3y ago
    Eating out is a net positive for me. I get better, more varied food and feel better if a professional does the cooking. It's not worth saving money on what I eat - it's so important for health.
    • goodpoint 3y ago
      There is nothing healthy in eating out.
• shagie 3y ago
  Gift link to article: https://wapo.st/3OwA5OG https://wapo.st/3OwA5OG
• Tokkemon 3y ago
  I'm not going to endure an hour's commute and all the expense involved with that to just sit in another box where communication will just marginally improve.
  • gspencley 3y ago
    Does it even improve marginally? I can see this being highly variable for the type of position / work. As a software developer the ability to schedule face time and use messenging for low-priority is way more productive than an unexpected door-knock that demands an immediate response. Apart from that, I was going to comment saying the exact same thing. Not having a commute is non-negotiable for me. That said, I have been working from home long before the pandemic, and for the one year out of 20 that I worked in office (was a once in a lifetime job opportunity) I rented a condo across the street from the office. Life is way too short to waste 1 - 2 hours per day driving. I also finding driving to be one of the most stressful activities in life. Not because I don't enjoy driving itself, but because of traffic and having to share the road. In other words, I am positive that working from home is literally adding years to my life due to drastically reduced stress levels in addition to having more time to actually enjoy life. So no, I will never accept a position where I need to commute for work regularly unless it is temporary and a very special circumstance.
    • declan_roberts 3y ago
      Even if it improves dramatically, so what? The point of life is not to provide your employer with unrestricted access to your time for their convenience.
      • johnnyanmac 3y ago
        >Even if it improves dramatically, so what? depends on your life goals. If you're just minmaxing money and want to retire by 40-50 with time for the family or leisure, sure. You ideally want to minimize time working, and not necessarily maximize efficiency. If your goal is (personal) growth or expertise in a domain, that communication gap can potentially impact your growth, perhaps even cap you without outside study (which turns into work outside of work). There's no right answer, you simply have to be honest about your end game.
• plagiarist 3y ago
  Give me a laundry and dish service to replace how I am able to start appliances during a break.
  • klysm 3y ago
    This is such a huge perk for me, last thing I want to do when getting home from a commute is hit a wall of chores. Much better to spread them out through the day
    • tfandango 3y ago
      I often do dishes or laundry during longer calls. I find it easier to follow the topic when I do this over when I'm on a call AND a computer where I quickly end up working on code and ignoring the call.
      • plagiarist 3y ago
        I haven't considered that, but I could probably concentrate better if I were mindlessly sweeping a floor than if I keep seeing Slack DMs popping up.
  • amf12 3y ago
    Interesting.. laundry/grocery service would be trivial for a lot of employers, and a huge benefit for employees. Why hasn't anyone offered it yet?
    • uxp100 3y ago
      Laundry service was a pretty common perk for Bay Area employers 10 years ago.
    • joncrocks 3y ago
      Money can be exchanged for goods and services.
      • 3y ago
• AvAn12 3y ago
  Joel Spolesky has made this very point many times in the past: "Private offices with doors that close were absolutely required and not open to negotiation." I work on a Data Sci team that moved to an open floor plan in 2018. What happened? Anyone who needed to work intensively on a project would work from home instead of in the office.
  • SnowProblem 3y ago
    Alternatively come in early or stay late. Joel did get it right. Open spaces are fine for light tasks but a huge drain on deep thinking.
    • Tao3300 3y ago
      Don't even suggest that. Someone might see this.
      • mywittyname 3y ago
        Why not both?
        • wombatpm 3y ago
          I had a boss who was a VP in sales. His philosophy was "On the days I go in late, I make up for it by leaving early".
          • pc86 3y ago
            This is pretty consistent with my experience with both salespeople and VPs regardless of department.
          • CoastalCoder 3y ago
            I'm guessing that sales is pretty different from typical software dev, in the sense that sales productivity is very measurable. That probably sidesteps a lot of the guesswork about what makes a person most productive.
• harshaw 3y ago
  I think its fair to say that RTO is not about data, or studies, or about anything really. Leaders across all industries have decided people are coming back. Perhaps there is a secret cabal of commercial office space lenders who are putting pressure as share holders, or some other conspiracy theory. But it's happening - no one can do anything about it (except vote with your feet), and no one is going to get better accommodations in this economy (e.g better offices). I am in the middle of having to tell a top engineer (and team lead) who was hired remote that they can no longer be remote and need to move to one of our office locations (thousands of miles away of course). Just for the privilege of being on a video call with the PMs who of course don't live in the same city anyway. Sadly, it's like people running these companies are drawing inspiration from Vladamir Putin and saying "Fuck it - I want people in the office". This may be off topic from the article - but I think leaders are just going to say fuck it - you are coming in or you are getting fired.
  • whoopsie 3y ago
    Meanwhile, my startup is profitable, hiring, and permanently 100% remote across 7 countries. Hiring is easy.
    • brk 3y ago
      Yes, but you shouldn't extrapolate from that. In many cases "startups" are much much easier to manage remotely. You often have a much smaller, and more focused, employee base. There is much less room for unproductive employees to hide in the shadows.
  • amf12 3y ago
    > I think its fair to say that RTO is not about data, What data do you have to support this, other than a personal anecdote?
    • harshaw 3y ago
      Well - at my massive company no one is willing to share any data about these decisions. That's a huge red flag. And anecdotes about remote working are personal (individual manager) and larger team (100s) to entire orgs (500+). it's been working great.
• lolinder 3y ago
  > If you want to watch your employees work, build glass walls. I hope this is dark humor and not meant to be taken seriously. For me, about half the reason I prefer my home office is that I don't feel like I have to look productive. I can get my stuff done in my way, and as long as my boss is happy with the result it doesn't matter if my way "looked" right.
  • Tempest1981 3y ago
    > glass The acoustics are also terrible, as are the visual distractions of watching people walk past and peek in every 20 seconds.
    • NetOpWibby 3y ago
      Reminds me of working out of a WeWork in South Station Boston. I faced away from the door and kept headphones on.
  • btilly 3y ago
    I worked in a company that had meeting rooms with glass walls. It was great. You could write on the glass like it was a whiteboard. And the knowledge that everyone else could see you were in a meeting was an incentive to only be in meetings when you had a real reason to be.
    • lolinder 3y ago
      Meeting rooms is fine—it has the added benefit of seeing easily if one is empty. Offices would be terrible.
  • TrackerFF 3y ago
    Often it comes down to your boss/manager wanting to get their "moneys worth". In their minds, they don't pay you for results - but rather for your time. If you complete your tasks fast, and deliver the desired results, in let's say 20 hours instead of 40 - that means you have 20 more hours to do something else. It's the "If you have time to lean, you have time to clean" mantra brought to the white-collar world. If you work from home, they can't micromanage or monitor your hours as well as in the office. They don't know if you're a very efficient or average worker. Their fear is that you finish your tasks, and then spend time "slacking" at home - doing house chores, watching tv shows, or whatever, on their time. That was literally the first thing I learned when I entered the workforce. It's always better to do nothing and look like you're doing something, than to do something and look like you're doing nothing. I don't say this often, but I feel blessed to have a remote boss that doesn't give two shits about what I / we do with our time, as long as we deliver results. But so far he seems like an anomaly.
• SnowProblem 3y ago
  What companies today give software engineers offices? Microsoft's used to be fantastic in 00s and early 10s but they also were moving to open spaces when I left so not sure the state today.
  • maverick2007 3y ago
    Epic Systems did as of 5 years ago
    • willcipriano 3y ago
      Epic systems basically has a company town set up. I don't think you ever really leave work when you work for epic.
      • selectodude 3y ago
        Not to mention they've taken to straight up lying on their job descriptions saying they're based in Chicago while having "required to relocate to Madison" in fine print at the end of the ad. Yucky company.
  • nkozyra 3y ago
    Honestly, trying to fix the problems of: 1) expensive office space and 2) people not coming into the office with 3) more _expensive_ office space is just the kind of McKinsey-level thinking we should expect.
    • bee_rider 3y ago
      Making offices bigger and nicer will 1) mean fewer offices (per unit space, since they are bigger) 2) make people more likely to come in (since they are nicer) The point where those cross over seems like a good target, the highest number of happy office workers you can fit.
      • nkozyra 3y ago
• enahs-sf 3y ago
  I’m old enough to remember high wall cubicals.
  • tfandango 3y ago
    Me too. I honestly didn't mind it as much as I thought I would. I much preferred it to the open office I ended up in for 15 years. I had some bookshelves, a whiteboard, some semblance of silence.
  • Lutzb 3y ago
    I still remember two person offices. Real doors, large desks, large whiteboards.
    • enahs-sf 3y ago
      Sounds incredible depending on who your officemate is
• meepmorp 3y ago
  Open plan offices suck, no doubt, but that's not why I don't want to go back to one. WFH means my whole life doesn't center around my job and its schedule. I'm home for when my kids go to and return from school, I can make lunch or dinner while sitting in the kitchen with my laptop, and I don't have to spend a couple hours a day commuting.
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• neosat 3y ago
  No - it may work for some employees but it's not far from what will make people who prefer remotely want to suddenly return to office. More importantly, return to office, as the end goal isn't a good end-goal. Sure it can work reasonably well when everyone is in the office, but the pandemic 'experiment' has clearly shown us that remote, hybrid are also workable models. Each model: all on-site, hybrid, flexible have their pros and cons and the outstanding organizations of the future will be the ones that can create an environment where people who thrive in each model and co-work. The right end-goals should be around more around the lines of productivity, teams hitting/exceeding their goals consistently, employee retention, employee happiness among other things.
• gedy 3y ago
  Even with that, no company has paid me enough in 20 years to live near the office that is safe and family friendly. Sorry not sorry. BTW I keep hearing benefits of "RTO" - but I've never worked for a company that only has a single office, so we end up on video calls with other teams and team members anyways even when the company didn't allow WFH.
  • SketchySeaBeast 3y ago
    Even during our one day a month "mandatory" in office day we for some reason still have a teams call set up with people on the line.
  • JohnFen 3y ago
    > we end up on video calls with other teams and team members anyways even when the company didn't allow WFH. This has been my experience at every company I've been with in the last 15 years. The reason why I don't find these "increases collaboration and teamwork" arguments persuasive is because when everyone has been in the office, the work processes and level of collaboration were not different at all.
• mytailorisrich 3y ago
  People who like WFH will never want to return to the office unless perhaps the office is a 5 minute walk from home (they may be forced to, but they won't want to). For many people the time and cost savings of avoiding a daily commute cannot be offset by a nicer office. Those who are happy to return to the office in general are those who do not like WFH and prefer more contacts and a change of scenery. A nicer office makes things better but it will not change people's minds on WFH.
  • lokar 3y ago
    I had a private office at a large tech firm for many years. It was perfect for me, I would probably go back to the office for that setup. I’ll never go work in an open floor plan.
  • steveBK123 3y ago
    My vaguely populist take is that the pandemic, WFH/remote and hybrid gave the mass white collar class a taste of what the C-suite has had for years.. flexibility. Sure, these guys might go into the office but they do so from their pied-a-terre / 3rd home / whatever within a 5 minute chauffeured drive. They do this while maintaining a nearby suburban/exurban estate and maybe a lake/beach/ski houses where they spend the majority of their actual hours. I was listening to a podcast and they observed that US commuters might have had a boiled frog scenario where you slowly just get used to having a worse & worse commute as you age.. and COVID snapped everyone out of it cold turkey. Now attempting to go back to it is revolting for many.
    • hn_throwaway_99 3y ago
      [flagged]
      • rwmj 3y ago
        He didn't say it wasn't a difficult job, just that the C-suite were always able to work flexibly, and afford to have a second flat next to the office (or in extreme cases, force the office to move near to their homes).
• emu7652 3y ago
  Want people to RTO? threaten them. Constantly remind them they are replaceable, never reward good behavior.
• bluefishinit 3y ago
  I'm not moving to the real-estate market near an office. Poor working conditions are certainly one reason to avoid the office, but being able to live where ever you want is also a huge deal.
• jwestbury 3y ago
  Honestly, I'd even take a cube farm. I've only ever worked at tech companies with fully open offices, or, at best, some cubicle walls up around groups of 10-15 desks.
  • quercusa 3y ago
    I have repented of my bitching about cube farms since discovering there are worse things.
    • xeromal 3y ago
      Aye, same. My first job was a cube farm and it was much better than sitting at a giant wooden table with 5000 chairs.
  • btilly 3y ago
    When I worked for eBay they had a hexagonal version of a cube farm. I thought it was brilliant. Pack more people into a space, and make your distance to your nearest neighbor farther. Plus you naturally had a comfortable place to sit, 2 filing cabinets, and 2 spots for bookshelf, whiteboard, or whatever. And a lot more desk space than you'd expect. I was always puzzled that nobody else ever tried that design.
  • JohnFen 3y ago
    Before cubes were a thing, open office layouts were the norm. When cubes were introduced, office workers hailed than as wonderful things because it meant no more of the hell that is open office layouts. Open offices < cubes < private offices Personally, I will never again work in an open office setting, or even a "pod" setup. I've learned my lesson.
  • goodpoint 3y ago
    How about neither?
• sourcecodeplz 3y ago
  I always performed better in 2-4 person offices. Not alone, but not open space either. The constant noise and people walking by all the time is terrible for concentration.
  • narcindin 3y ago
    +1 my best office was a 15 minute walk through a upscale shopping area, into a cramped room alongside my teammates and boss with a great view of a large pond. All of our desks were pushed together in the middle of the room. The _room_ itself would switch from chat mode to quiet mode. Though I think the quietest member of the team would have preferred a solitary arraignment, I can only speak for myself.
  • xeromal 3y ago
    Yeah, this seems like a fun idea. You get to make a couple of buddies and you can bounce ideas easily without being overwhelmed or treated like cattle. Team rooms.
• slily 3y ago
  My #1 reason for working remotely today has nothing to do with office layouts or benefits, it's that housing costs in large-city tech hubs are insane. Chances are I'd pay at least twice my mortgage in rent for a crappy apartment if I moved back now. The open office plan just might be #2 though. ;)
• WirelessGigabit 3y ago
  I wonder how much of this comes from 'war rooms' that companies like the Big 3 do. They work on a project for 5 months all smashed together in 1 meeting room. And then you need to talk to one of them, they pick up the phone in that room, not even walking out. Absolutely horrible. Is that where this comes from?
  • SpicyLemonZest 3y ago
    Both come from the shared common ancestor of, how do you work when you’re a small scrappy team who’s just gotta get stuff done together? You find a room, you get the equipment you need, and you work out of it until you’re big enough to need more. I can fully understand why people dislike this kind of thing, but the fact that it shows up in multiple contexts suggests it probably does achieve what it’s aiming for.
• flerchin 3y ago
  The argument for me ends at productivity. We went full remote in march 2020, and our velocity metrics went up by 60%. All the other arguments (and they are persuasive) are worth an order of magnitude less.
• irrational 3y ago
  You could give me a 5000sq ft corner off with every amenity imaginable and I still would prefer working from home.
• HeavyStorm 3y ago
  I would be happy with a desk even. I've worked not even with a decent chair.
• spookieboogie 3y ago
  Nope. My previous employer tried this in ~2021 with the intention of demanding a full RTO as soon as they possibly could after decades of being a cubicle farm. I immediately left for a company that adapted to remote-first and never looked back My commute time has turned into workout and cooking time, (as expected I'm in the best shape of my life,) my only coworker is my spouse and best friend, I get to live closer to my family than ever before in a quiet, LCOL town, and the impact on my career and for the company has never been greater You'll have to do a LOT better than my own closet to convince me that wasting my time commuting every day, from a place I don't want to live, to spend time in close proximity to people I might not care for would be a better proposition than the one I have now
  • stemlord 3y ago
    I'm so jealous, I cannot get SHIT done at home. Can't focus nearly as productively without the cold clinical and fully equipped office enviornment.
  • declan_roberts 3y ago
    The employers will understand sooner or later that they've essentially lost leverage with people like you. Now that you're in a LCOL area, you can explore a lot of different jobs at different places. You don't need to make bay area salary to survive because you're not in the bay area. Meanwhile startups who could never compete with FANG on pay are eager to swoop up talent at a discount.
  • johnnyanmac 3y ago
    >my only coworker is my spouse and best friend TBH that's the part that scares me. I feel this is yet another avenue of socialization that is closing down in modern young adult life. People kept saying that the best place post college to meet friends is at work, and now some industries are going the direction where work may not even have coworkers in your area. So where now if you don't drink? Hope to hit it off in some meetup with a person who shows up once? Community service simply so you aren't stuck in the house 24/7?
    • 3y ago
• makingstuffs 3y ago
  People need to stop trying to make things return to the original office model. Employees have realised we are equally as effective working from home and simply do not want to waste 2+ UNPAID hours of every day travelling to a corporate building for the sake of it. Nor do people want to spend £10+ a day on food and drinks which they have in their fridge, at home. Then there is also the social pressure of having to go for after work socials at the local boozer/cafe/restaurant, or be seen as the person who never joins the team for social stuff. There are so many benefits to working from home which reach beyond personal and into society/the environment but very few benefits to going into an office. The one reason which supporters of the original office model tout is ‘collaboration’ but I call BS. With today’s tech we can literally be collaborating in real-time with people from any corner of the planet from the comfort of our home office. How would that change in office? Then you have the whole “oh, but, learning” as if it is simply impossible to part with knowledge via any medium other than a coworker’s breath hitting another’s eardrum.
  • downrightmike 3y ago
    Humans have only been working in offices since the industrial revolution, before that it was nearly all WFH. WFH is our natural state.
    • layer8 3y ago
      This wasn’t true for any kind of collaborative work requiring physical presence.
      • kjkjadksj 3y ago
        Well to be fair, peasants helping eachother to raise a barn is technically working from home. This idea of commuting has only been possible with a means to move labor from one region to another versus having cottage industries ran out of the home. That came with the horsedrawn streetcar.
        • charcircuit 3y ago
• DragonStrength 3y ago
  Nah, I had a personal office and still quit in order to leave the Bay Area because commuting >30 minutes to mostly work with people in offices hours away when I don't love where I am doesn't make sense. Middle management at large companies spent years building distributed teams without the executives noticing, and now they're learning about it too late. Having hour long commutes to sit on video calls all day in one of the most expensive real estate markets in the country isn't a life.
• toddmorey 3y ago
  Years ago I worked for a company in a huge windowless, wall-less open plan building that was supposed to be fun because they put a slide in it. You had to have headphones on to think. Looking back it seems so surreal like thinking about when people used to smoke on airplanes. I can’t imagine ever going back to that.
  • bratgpttamer 3y ago
    Hah, I was scrolling through some commercial listings this morning and found a barren industrial warehouse (with windows!) that I thought would be perfect for the eternal tormenting of information workers under the guise of a Fun, Hip Place To Work. No carpets, no canvas on the walls, nothing - just a new paint job, a couple of kegs, some ping-pong tables, and maybe a cornhole setup for maximum tailgating vibes.
• jack_riminton 3y ago
  Yes! I've been a firm believer in this for ages. Heck I'd even quite like a cubicle, no really, I would. The open plan office that is ubiquitous in the UK is the absolute worst of all possible designs
  • wkat4242 3y ago
    Yeah it's amazing to think we now long back to the days of the cubicle. When they were introduced I never thought things could get worse. When I started in the late 90s I had my own office as an intern in a huge fancy building in Amsterdam. They started the cubicle transition soon after.
• rndmnflnce 3y ago
  We have a whole kitchen staff that prepares very good breakfast and lunch for us (no dinner!). The kitchen is also open for beverages/snacks throughout the day. We have a great gym with trainers. That is enough for me to come into the office everyday.
• hdjjhhvvhga 3y ago
  There is one sentence at the very beginning that is completely false: > But remote workers don’t build the skills and connections that can help them one day get a better job. It is so wrong yet it's repeated so much some people started to believe it. Maybe at some specific jobs or in some companies where management doesn't understand remote culture, but otherwise it's blatantly false as evidenced by all the people who switched from one remote job to another with a salary increase.[0] [0] Could they get an even better job if they had worked in the office? Maybe, maybe not, but it's clear what was important for them.
• stephc_int13 3y ago
  Some people are missing the social part of the office life. I only miss the meals with colleagues, but that is not worth the extra time wasted on commute and the productivity loss of being interrupted by noise and jack-asses. Middle managers are missing the sense of control, I think they rarely pay for themselves, with WFH this is even more apparent.
• ookblah 3y ago
  it will never happen, but i always felt that everyone should have a private office by default (not a cubicle) that opens into a main "open plan" area and then breakout/conferences rooms. to me that is the best mixture to mix things up and accomodate all types of working types. add to that the ability to wfh and i think it would make me want to go in. sometimes i like popping into cafes and random co-working spaces for that reason.
• hdjjhhvvhga 3y ago
  > If you want to watch your employees work, build glass walls I'm not sure if the author is serious or trolling. Looking forward to another series of articles "I gave them glass offices, why won't they come back in?!"
  • heavyset_go 3y ago
    "Why Gen Z/Millennials Ruined Glass Walls"
• kjkjadksj 3y ago
  How does the dual income effect never get mentioned? In these articles its like you work from home in a vacuum, and going from remote to back to the office should be as trivial as flipping a lightswitch. The vast majority of coupled these days are dual income. It is so much simpler to find a place to live when you both work remotely, than to try and find some middle ground that is as convenient as possible to both workplaces, but this hard sought convenience goes away with the snap of the fingers should one of your jobs change. Now you are back to square one trying to triangulate housing between two offices and perhaps a school or this that and the other thing. Remote work just makes that entire concern irrelevant. You can now live in the same location all your working years if you wanted. I see people talk about things like not having to commute as being big factors, but this benefit of not having to uproot I think is even more significant. Moving is terrible.
  • albert_e 3y ago
    agreed. add kids and their schools & playgroups to the mix and the prospect of having to move becomes stressful enough to shorten the lifespan :)
  • coffeefirst 3y ago
    Yes, especially with the shockingly high cost of housing this is a very real effect.
• renewiltord 3y ago
  Want employees in the office? Have an in-office culture and hire people who want to be in-office. The market is available enough now for people to just work remote if they want. I work at a company where we're in office all the time. This is what I like and that's who I like to hire.
• wintermutestwin 3y ago
  All of this RTO discussion comes from the idea that being in the office is the standard that must be "returned" to. Another perspective is that WFH is a paradigm shift and is now the objective standard. From that perspective: if you are asking a worker to shift from my new standard, you had better be offering enough to make up for the huge costs that working in the office incurs. The costs are so high that not many employers could really justify paying what it is worth to the worker. Maybe it is time for employers to pony up or STFU.
• rndmwlk 3y ago
  At my previous job, when they did their return to office rollout, I remember the head of our department waxing on about how much he missed being in the office with everyone. He missed it so much, he went on, that while he would previously have kept his office door closed so he could work in peace and quiet he actually kept it open (that day) so that he could hear all of the din of the office. This brought me great comfort when I struggled to hear anything during any of my meetings (all of which were still remote in nature due to a diversely located team).
• Someone1234 3y ago
  Offices are a vast improvement over open plan. But ultimately my work day is still 2-hours longer vis-a-vis commuting AND I am required to live in a much more expensive area to make that commute at all, essentially reducing my wages yet further. WFH is a 25% shorter work day (8 actual instead of 8 + 2) and I can live in a 20%~ cheaper home, how are you going to compensate that? You can either offer me WFH or increase my wages 40% and give me an office. Seems like WFH is the economically most efficient for both employer and employee but what do I know?
• NetOpWibby 3y ago
  For the first time in my life, I have space and energy to work on my fitness goals. I wouldn't be able to do that if I had to go into the office. Ironically, I moved to California because I was told we'd be working onsite...three years later and I _still_ don't have a badge because the back to office mandate never came. I use my lunch hour to workout because I can just eat at my desk. I wish I could afford a bigger house so I can have a home office instead of sharing my office with my bedroom but hey, Cali's expensive (but oh so nice).
  • thomasfromcdnjs 3y ago
    I've always been fit but when I was in the office, I understood why a lot of people weren't. Work + Commute + Daily exercise is a HUGE chunk of time. With remote, I simply exercise _during_ work with my home equipment, it's fantastic.
    • NetOpWibby 3y ago
      I could do the same thing too if I'm being honest. I'm at the point now where I wonder why I don't have residual income from a side business that doesn't require a lot of my time.
  • Tokkemon 3y ago
    Congrats. Not all of us are so lucky.
    • NetOpWibby 3y ago
      True luck is rare, most luck comes with hard work and dedication (as is my case).
• deleted 3y ago
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• zffr 3y ago
  One middle ground that's been working for me is having sound-proof "phonebooths" in the office (https://room.com/pages/office-privacy-booths https://room.com/pages/office-privacy-booths). Whenever I really need to focus, I'll go into one of these.
  • erik_seaberg 3y ago
    I need to focus all day, every day. What are people doing where they don't?
• DebtDeflation 3y ago
  Personal office is irrelevant to me. My criteria - Is there a reason for me to be in the office on this specific day? Will my team be there? Is there an upcoming milestone where having everyone in a room together for most of the day will make us more productive? If the answer to all three questions is yes, then I want to be in the office that day. If it's just to go to a physical location where I will be on Zoom calls all day with team members all in offices in other locations, then hard pass on going into the office and it doesn't matter whether it's an actual office or a cube.
• amluto 3y ago
  The nicest office, by far, that I ever worked in was a four person office, and my officemates and I were generally working on almost completely unrelated things. Outside the offices was a nice lounge, quite large but extensively broken up with furniture and architecture, with lots of couches and blackboards.
• m1117 3y ago
  Lol people get hella spoiled. Hybrid is the way to go.
  • rabuse 3y ago
    Spoiled? By providing more value to a corporation through productivity increases and work-life balance that allows people to have a better head-space?
• cxf12 3y ago
  WFH is a huge improvement in the work-life balance metric. You provide WFH and at least half of that W-LB issue is solved.
• roywashere 3y ago
  I never had a private office but always worked in bigger or smaller open plan offices. About 10 years ago I had a consulting engagement at a company that was working from a 70s office building with private offices. They were going to tear it down because it was not 'modern' but that was _really great_ and I always wondered what happened and if we would not get back to that style of offices at some point! It's great to be able to work from a private environment, where you could still enjoy shared lunches, or pop into a co-workers office to jointly spec something out or... and yeah you can do that stuff on Zoom but it's different. And I understand how it's great to work from hom. I also have the luxury of a proper office room at home. I don't like my commute either, but having the laundry, family, whatever available as distractions is not always great in my opinion.
• iamflimflam1 3y ago
  If you want me to spend 2 hours+ of my day commuting then pay me for it.
• kubectl_h 3y ago
  I'd gladly go back to the office if the company did away with Slack in favor of email and meetings.
• A4ET8a8uTh0 3y ago
  Eh, I mean.. it is better than some of the other ideas that were floated just over the past few months: - we donate to a charity of your choice and keep the tax writeoff - we let you rent a hotel room from us - we have a special room, where you can cloister yourself for a little bit when you want to be alone By comparison.. your own office is an actual perk.. either WFH is getting close or someone with actual ear to the ground is listening. It is still wrong. But it is less wrong.
• yboris 3y ago
  I can not return to an office -- I moved to rural Michigan where I enjoy nature and a quieter pace of life -- 100% WFH. All these articles from media controlled by capitalists hellbent on shaming workers and insisting the problem lies with employees rather than employers at every turn. Fuck them.
• 300bps 3y ago
  3.5% unemployment rate = nothing will get people back into office if they don't want to be in the office. This all flips around at some point though. Maybe 10% unemployment? For me, I'm looking incredulously at people making decisions on where to live assuming that "work from home" is locked in forever. I know someone who is in the process of settling on a house in the middle of nowhere working for a large publicly traded company remotely. The company just posted their first quarterly loss in forever. If she ends up losing that job, she'll be 100% dependent on being able to find another remote position or be forced to sell her house.
  • shortrounddev2 3y ago
    That's true for anywhere you live. If I get a new job in New Jersey and buy a house there, then I will have to get another job in New Jersey or sell my house if I lose that job.
• feyman_r 3y ago
  I am an outlier and minority here - WFH should have worked for me, but I realized the lack of control over snacking when at home, and a lack of discipline to take breaks between meetings to walk and be active. I gained 20 lbs over two years. When I’m in the office, both these problems don’t exist; in fact 1:1s become ‘walking 1:1s’. I feel more healthier; the commute back allows me to disconnect from work and decline meetings. This is not to say working from the office is better for everyone. I wish I had the discipline to be better at WFH.
  • DragonStrength 3y ago
    That's the opposite of me: I take twice daily walks when working from home because I prioritize living somewhere I like and can walk. Returning to the office means eating worse food for me (eating out) and spending more time in a vehicle versus walking.
  • deleted 3y ago
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  • snarf21 3y ago
    This is the thing I wish people would admit: it is all a preference. It's fine if some people want to WFH. It should also be fine if some people don't. Let employers fight to get their employees what their employees want or lose them to one that will. I wish I could work locally but it is no longer possible but I see a lot of benefits that you enjoy too. There is no absolute, just a preference for each person's priorities.
  • Tokkemon 3y ago
    Echo this a lot. Combined with a 4-year old at home constantly interrupting your flow, it's a hard time.
    • seanmcdirmid 3y ago
      If our kid was at home all the time, going to the office would be necessary, but someone has to watch the kid, and having a daycare in the neighborhood makes it better to just send them off there (and convenient to drop/pick them up via WFH).
• heisnotanalien 3y ago
  I love working from home as much as everyone else here (seemingly) but I don't think people are fully appreciating how damaging not talking to people in meat space is likely to be long-term. We are embodied/energetic creatures and that energy is not exchanging the same way online (sorry if that sounds woo but it's true!). More so for the younger people, let's not forgot some of whom have never worked with people much in person.
  • giraffe_lady 3y ago
    I simply do not get much if any of my human connection needs met by coworkers. I have a family, neighbors, close friends I see frequently and less close friends I see occasionally. A church, relationships based on volunteering, hobbies and interests, teens I mentor and their parents I shoot the shit with. Coworkers are so far down the list of priority socialization that my life isn't negatively affected by not interacting with them physically.
    • heisnotanalien 3y ago
      Me me me. Other people exist apart from you!
      • giraffe_lady 3y ago
        I'm not the one trying to change everyone else's work environment because I can't meet my human needs elsewhere! (and I don't think you are either?) If you value human connectedness then build it into your life. If you don't then learn to live without it. Don't try to shape the lives of others around you in order that they meet your needs merely because they are easily accessible as coworkers.
    • johnnyanmac 3y ago
      > I have a family, neighbors, close friends I see frequently and less close friends I see occasionally I guess some people have all the luck. By the time I graduated: - my family was across the country - neighbors have never been really friends - close friends mostly went to San Fransico. No one was in my town. - Meetups didn't form any relationships. If there was no work I'd just be lonely, and not for the lack of trying.
• surume 3y ago
  Why not also give them a Ferrari to get to work, and a handful of diamonds to make them feel valued. I have been working with the big corps for 12 years, and this is pure fantasy. If they can save $5 a month something, they will. The idea of every worker getting their own office is laughable, even if it is admirable.
  • screwturner68 3y ago
    I just want to be paid well and be left the fuck alone. I've been in consulting for over 30 years and I'm used to being treated poorly. I don't need a fancy office with a view. I don't need a coffee bar or a beer fridge. I don't need ping pong or bullshit team builders. I need good benefits, higher pay and more vacation. If you can provide those things you can make me work in the basement for all I care (and yes I have worked in basements with no windows and places worse than that).
• squirrel6 3y ago
  Digital meetings are never going away at this point so this is a great point. Also, the most meaningful interactions I had early in my career were in small offices with 1 or 2 colleagues. If offices can’t be made available for everyone, they should be available to people above a certain level in the org. There are new cubicle designs with lower walls that still foster interaction but allow for focus time. Hotdesking is so bad for morale, especially for people who have dedicated so many years of their life to their employer.
• mikhailfranco 3y ago
  The apocryphal narrative is that extroverts like the office, but introverts prefer WFH, ceteris domestic situations being paribus. Maybe tech workflow has a more natural fit with WFH, and tech attracts more introverts, so WFH could be the doubly reinforced preference. It seems psychologically plausible, but what is your experience?
  • Traubenfuchs 3y ago
    > It seems psychologically plausible, but what is your experience? I am dating a wide range of men, but I avoid engineers, because I don't want to date nerds like myself. Anyways, from my experience, the vast majority of the guys I meet is absolutely shocked and often disgusted by the idea of 100% homeoffice as I have it. "But don't you miss talking to people?", they ALL say. (I don't, I hate people) So in short, I am convinced you are right.
• say_it_as_it_is 3y ago
  We prefer that our employees sit shoulder-to-shoulder in long rows so that they can have spontaneous idea jams and whiteboard sessions together while talking about at least a dozen programming languages and debating about the best editor
• angry_moose 3y ago
  My company recently did a forced 3-day return-to-office to "gain the immeasurable benefits of face-to-face collaboration" bullshit. Except they used the pandemic to close down a site and merge two offices, so there aren't enough desks. So, everyone who isn't full time in the office has to use hotel cubes, so I had my cube taken away a few weeks ago. I quickly found out that most of the hotel cubes are several floors away from my team, so its incredibly rare I actually see anyone on my team when I go in. I usually sit in silence on a different floor and interact with my team on zoom. To the best of my knowledge no one is taking attendance yet, so I'm doing 1-2 days tops.
  • commandlinefan 3y ago
    > the hotel cubes are several floors away from my team My hotel cubes are several states away from my team, so I drive downtown, sit in my hotel cube, and get on zoom calls with my team that's in a different time zone.
• dijit 3y ago
  Prior to COVID, I had made a reputation for myself as being quite difficult when it comes to Office space. Mostly this was because I felt that I wasn't as effective working in the Open Office. I was told time-and-time again how the open office is the standard, I figured the problem was me and looked inwardly at solutions (some of which I documented on my blog). I later discovered I had many markers of ADHD, meaning that fighting myself was actually an unwinnable battle. -- and all those days of going home exhausted after having done nothing that day, only to pry open my laptop at home and finally accomplish everything required -- was something that was not a personal failing. I envied people who had their own office, or even a shared office; I was told I couldn't work from home unless I was sick or unable to get to the office, and truthfully it was painful to do so anyway due to the corporate VPN being a shambles. I'm so glad that we are collectively pushing back on this; we are told on one hand that rents are so expensive that it necessitates the open office push, but when that argument is invalidated (even lower rent if you don't need the space at all!) we are told to return to office anyway. That said, there are advantages to being on-site if you have a nicer working environment, getting away from the house (and the mental context shift that follows) along with access to certain equipment that might make your life easier. It's just that the juice isn't worth the squeeze. And boy, have we been squeezed.
  • electrondood 3y ago
    For what it's worth, I discovered a baseball cap to block the obnoxious overhead lights and some Sony noise-canceling headphones were a godsend for focus.
    • dijit 3y ago
      Baseball cap is a good idea, I wrote on my blog that ANC headphones are not a panacea as they are known to cause fatigue. Options where basically: Imagine that you have an office that surrounds you, try to feel like you really own your space. -- Also you can shift your working hours slightly so that there are fewer people around. (I recommended going early since there is a perception among managers that "early bird gets the worm" vs "oh he has to stay late because he didn't finish up everything").
• asow92 3y ago
  Small-town and low cost of living WFH is unbeatable for those raising a family. It'd take me about a 100% pay increase to drag me back to the city.
  • elforce002 3y ago
    Enjoy it my friend. They're fighting tooth and nail to reverse WFH.
  • johnnyanmac 3y ago
    >for those raising a family. Oh I wish...
    • asow92 3y ago
      ?
• bparsons 3y ago
  The whole office culture thing is unnecessary and performative, and the pandemic proved it. Any productivity gain/loss is negligible for most types of white collar work. Forcing people to go back to the office is about deliberately increasing attrition and the immiseration of employees because they were got too uppity during the labour crunch.
• jononomo 3y ago
  I think collaboration between software engineers is more effective if everyone works remotely because the screen-sharing and video chatting technology is so powerful and inexpensive. So it's a double win: more flexibility and more productivity.
• avmich 3y ago
  > This will be awful for commercial landlords, their banks and their cities’ tax bases. I especially like the last one. How about increasing a number of family houses in the city using that space, at least a little? That would get some tax back and improve the situation with housing at the same time.
• mapgrep 3y ago
  The best insight in the article is actually this: > cheaper real estate presents an opportunity for employers with vision On top of any deterioration in office rents, companies need way less space than they used to since people are working from home many days. This opens up many possibilities that will IMO keep offices in prime markets filled: -companies take more space per person in office for same cost, providing desks -companies that couldn’t afford prime markets move in and use them as mainly collaboration spaces (“let’s all work out of Manhattan next week while we finish this project”) -companies downsize in prime markets but reorient toward specific events - brainstorming, project closings, strategy retreats, get to know each other, cross department workshopping etc etc
• spamizbad 3y ago
  Hell is freezing over because holy crap I agree with Megan McArdle. Pre-pandemic office life was pretty crummy: you had crowded, noisy open-plan spaces. Most employees sat at their desk, put on their headphones, and quietly plodded away until quitting time - leaving their desks not to collaborate but to service their basic biological needs. Giving people quiet, private spaces that they can personalize would take much of the sting out of returning to the office.
• acd 3y ago
  The productivity loss for working in open plan work spaces is 15%-20%. Compare the cost of space vs hiring 20% more employees.
• throwaway5959 3y ago
  I don’t think people understand how cheap people in Ukraine, Poland and other countries are willing to work if companies go fully remote.
  • Nasrudith 3y ago
    That argument always gets used as a threat which makes no sense. Outsourcing has been a thing for decades. If they were remotely serious they would have done so already and reaped the premiums. They don't so the only response is to put up or shut up, and they sure aren't putting up.
    • throwaway5959 3y ago
      Before they could have people in the office to manage. Now that developers appear to refuse to show up, what’s the difference? Do you think there aren’t talented devs in Ukraine, South America, or Poland?
• helpfulmandrill 3y ago
  I've literally never worked somewhere where people other than upper-management had individual offices. I'm on board with the theory of why its better, but I think it would feel weird to start with. I might grow to love it, but it wouldn't be an immediate enticement.
• electrondood 3y ago
  I'm most productive where I have my workstation. It doesn't matter if that's at home or in office. If you want me to commute 45 minutes twice a day so you can physically see me, I'm going to need my own dedicated space, not some "grab what you can" hotel seating. Also, companies really should be adding some incentive for that 1.5-2 hours wasted each day.
• nerdchum 3y ago
  I would 100% come into the office if I didn't have to work in an open office environment like a child.
• Brystephor 3y ago
  I mentioned this in another post but here's my take. Background: I graduated from school in Spring 2020 and started at my first full time software in Aug 2020. I've began going to the office about 4 days a week since Feb 2023. Prior to that, I had only been in an office twice ever (excluding my 2019 internship). Here's some points that make in office tough for me to enjoy. * When I'm in office, stuck on a problem and need to just think, what can I do? I can stare at other people. I can hear other conversations, others typing, etc. When I'm at home, I can do basic home chores like fold laundry. * When I'm in office, my lunch options are more limited. I either need to buy lunch, bring it, or select from what work has catered. Bringing a lunch limits options and takes time at home to prepare. When I'm at home, I can eat whatever, whenever. No pressure to sit with people I with with. No comments about why am I eating what I'm eating. * I typically feel more isolated in the office than I do at home. In the office, I can see others walking around having conversations. I don't know anyone outside of my direct team. Even then, collaboration is very low. With no meetings, I'll talk for maybe 15-20 minutes in the day. At home, I am alone, but I'm not watching others actively socialize. This is more of a me problem than anything. There are also things I don't like about being in the office in general. I don't like that others speak in languages I don't understand. The monitors, chairs and lighting are worse than at home. The office is in a not great area, and I walk so it's not a nice commute. Overall, I've come to really enjoy and be excited for my work from home days.
• exabrial 3y ago
  Precisely what we did, with coordinated WFH days. We're still experimenting, but I'm pretty happy with it and it seems to work for a lot of people.
• swader999 3y ago
  I see white collar evolving to more virtual workspaces than physical. These will get more functional and productive, right now they are crude and clunky.
• mensetmanusman 3y ago
  At some point many years in the future, more lives will have been saved due to WFH trends (pollution, accidents, etc.) than were taken prematurely by COVID. Fascinating silver lining.
  • eloisant 3y ago
    COVID didn't create WFH, it merely accelerated its spread.
    • mensetmanusman 3y ago
      Accelerated by many decades.
• whiddershins 3y ago
  I don’t mind if people can see me working, but it makes me crazy to feel like people can look at my screen. Not that there is anything scandalous on my screen. It is just that my screen feels very intimate, private. I rarely share more than a window at a time when on calls. I just don’t want people to be able to read my screen. I can’t explain why, and I know no one is even interested in it. I don’t want people looking at it anyway.
• Bostonian 3y ago
  Lots of people in this thread complain about offices. I have worked for many years as a financial "desk quant". Often I find things to work on chatting with investment staff or overhearing what they are talking about. They will be comfortable asking me a question if they have spent time with me in person. Employees working together can build bonds. Having catered breakfasts and lunches a few times a week is pleasant, as is a monthly happy hour. I know offices can be noisy and distracting. So can a home when you have children (and dirty dishes in the sink, unopened mail, etc.) Sometimes I look forward to having more time to code uninterrupted on Friday, when fewer people are in the office and there are no meetings. Consider that if you can do your job fully remote, so can an engineer in a country where the pay is 1/10 that of the U.S.
• travisgriggs 3y ago
  8 years, 2 different jobs, of my career have been WFH, exclusively because I was remote. Each time, I thought it as the coolest thing at first, and came to loathe it over time. I tried many of the techniques you’re supposed to (breaks on the hour, dedicated space, put shoes on, etc). But I found that over time, what emerged was that I was working half time all the time. Work and other activities just blurred and I was half present for everything (family, work, faith, sleep, recreation, etc). Advocates are probably just better than me at compartmentalizing. Though I found that many of my also work from home peers seemed to just be skating along as well. I can’t say that everyone falls into the pitfalls, but I can also state that I know I am not alone. In the late 90s, I was an early adopter of XP. Pair programming and borg like unity seemed really cool. I had a set of motivated peers. We actually had to get lots of special permissions and suffer raised eyebrows to take down some of the cubicle walls on our own time to create a more open collaborative work space. This was really cool at first. Over time, as the makeup of the team morphed, it became less so. What had been open tables of people working side by side, morphed into everyone sitting around the edge facing outwards. Now days I’m working in a larger lab with two of us as permanent residents and two others that sit in there with us sometimes. My commute to work involves two lights and a seven minute drive to work. I’ve been given the opportunity to occupy a soon to be vacant solo office across the hall and I’ll be jumping on that. Our lab has become a constant cross roads of visiting, much of it not even remotely work related. After these various experiences, I’ve concluded a couple of things in the final legs of my career journey (I’ve got around 15 years left). 1. Individuals will absolutley work and thrive better if you give each one their own space where their own identity and choices are manifest — this means real walls, a closeable door, the ability to play music (quietly) if they want, sunlight, and plants if desired. I have especially observed this with interns and new hires. They need their own little den to hide in. Most people will appreciate it (in the long run) if the space is actually small enough that while they can express some autonomy/agency, it’s not a large enough space for others to corner you and talk to you because they’re avoiding work. 2. Collaborative desire comes from within a person. When it manifests, you should absolutely enable and support it, but never compulse it. The company will realize cool 1 + 1 > 2 effects if they do. Providing open spaces with tables, boards, at near convenience to said office spaces is a great thing. But you can’t force people into those spaces. “The fishbowls will continue until creativity and innovation thrive” is synonymous with “the meetings will continue until morale improves.” 3. I recognize the above is the least efficient from a logistics point of view for the office planners. Not just one space per employee, but two? And how do you scale it with people coming to/leaving from organizations? I honestly don’t know. I’ve been told for years “how hard can it be? It’s just software?” So to you office planners, I’m passing on this encouragement “how hard can it be? It’s just peopleware?”
• soggybread 3y ago
  Being a level-1 helpdesk tech I never got to work from home as my job requires hands on work with servers, swapping drives, plugging in cables, etc. I haven't seen my coworker in 3 years though. We like to joke that he finally ditched the buzz cut and grew it out like Fabio
• gdubs 3y ago
  It's been wild to see the amount of news stories that came out this summer all at the same time – this enormous back-to-office push that's not at all some kind of commercial real-estate PR campaign. Anyway, one thing that gets thrown around a lot is the 'hallway conversation'. This idea that work is suffering because people aren't getting together spontaneously, or they're lacking the high-fidelity in-person exchanges, etc, etc. But the funny thing is, over the years I've been in countless in-person intensive sprints. Week long exhaustive affairs where people are all in a room, brainstorming, planning. Great ideas happen! But, how many of those sprints actually lead to action in the company? Once the herd-followers force everyone back into the panopticon, what then will they blame the lack of innovation on? Or are we simply pretending that prior to the pandemic every company in the world was truly operating at genius level, and it wasn't largely a by-product of a zero-interest-rate phenomenon? "Sorry – gotta go, someone else needs this room."
• rqtwteye 3y ago
  when I worked in Germany we had small offices for 2 or 3 people. I thought that was perfect. You could have nice, quiet chats and really work on things together. Open office seems to be something made up by super extroverts who think things get done best in a loud and frantic way where everybody yells at each other. And cubes seem to be made up by people who like to dehumanize workers. Interestingly the execs who push hardest for WFH are a) almost never at the office and b) have a nice private office with windows.
• Double_a_92 3y ago
  I couldn't care less about having a private office at work... That would even ruin any benefit of actually being there in person (e.g. spontaneously talk to a coworker, pick up knowledge from listening to coworkers talking about some problem...). What would help is paid commute time (or at least reimburse my commute costs), and paid lunch. Literally going to the office costs me 20-30$ per day, which is almost 10% of the salary I earn that day.
• tpankaj 3y ago
  I don't want my own office. If I wanted to work in a room by myself, I would work from home. The whole reason I go to the office at a job that lets me choose is because I find it easier to be productive when sitting with my teammates.
• bilsbie 3y ago
  I’d say the first priority is to fix the commute. Open regional offices perhaps? Or rent space in smaller towns like Idaho falls.
• commandlinefan 3y ago
  My employer is calling us all back to the office, but only the people that work in hotelling cubicles. There are individual offices in the building, but the people who are assigned to them are still working from home.
• agentultra 3y ago
  I had a private office once. On a short walk from where I lived. That would be the closest I would get to returning to an office. But no tech companies set up small offices where I live so remote it is. And that's fine with me. I like where I live, the people around me, etc.
• coryfklein 3y ago
  One efficiency of WFH that is underappreciated is the ability to match working hours to capacity. I can't count how many times I was in the office and 3 PM rolled around and I was completely spent. I knew that with a herculean effort I could probably squeeze a few more drops of productivity into my day, but it wasn't worth it. But you can't just "go home" at 3 PM. So you check some emails. Look over your shoulder and pull open Reddit or – dare I say – Hacker News and you while away those final 90 minutes until you can walk out the door having said you worked a full 8 hour day. Neither you nor your employer really want those 90 minutes spent that way, but it happens, and it's demoralizing all around. When working from home there is sooo much more flexibility to match productive hours with working hours. When I'm excited and energized and a project is in that flow state I might actually put in 10 hours. Other times at that 3 o'clock slump, I put headphones in and phone into a meeting (or listen to a recording) while doing random chores around the house. What time I check out of work is now a fuzzy mental calculation of how much energy I have, how productive I'd be, how much demand there is for my time, and, yes, a little bit of a simple desire to have life outside of work.
  • sph 3y ago
    Careful, going down this path will make you realise that if you can optimise your workday and eliminate any distractions such as meetings and wasted time, you'd fill 3-4 hours of extreme focused work, and you'd be spent. In normal office work, these 4 hours of focus are spread over 8 hours. I have reached this state, and it feels surreal to complete a day's worth of work in my morning, so I have the entire afternoon for chores, research and other unstructured me or family time. The silver lining of the pandemic is that it might be the first step towards the abolishment of the 40 hours week. We're talking about 4 day work week now and it's still far too much time dedicated to your employer, that's still filled with mostly nonsense. We should be pushing for the 15-20 hour work week instead. Or just be your own boss I guess.
• johnaspden 3y ago
  Oh God, yes! I'm old enough to remember when people thought it was important to have quiet and privacy to think. I used to love my job. All my life I've loved programming, and I used to love being able to solve other people's problems for them by doing the thing I love. And I used to love being surrounded by other people who were interested in the same things as me, all collaborating on a project to make something useful. The open-plan curse killed it for me. For years I've done as little paid work as I can get away with because I hate trying to think in an open-plan horror so much. It's like having my brain in a blender. I still program, and think, a lot, but I only do it for other people when I need the money.
• 6510 3y ago
  To do a plot twist, what other things are there be that would make work more enjoyable, more efficient and cheaper while contributing to private life? No need to check all the boxes.
• camgunz 3y ago
  After years of thinkpieces about RTO, my take now is "why is this up to employers at all?" Workers should get to pick their environments and their tradeoffs. If I super enjoy a collaborative open office space I should be able to find one. If I super enjoy a 100% remote/asynchronous configuration I should be able to find that too. So much of this libertarian/right-wing/capitalist junk is ironically top-down and authoritarian. Maybe WFH is bad for innovation, or maybe RTO is bad for focus and thus innovation. Let's let the market sort it out, including the labor market.
• LatteLazy 3y ago
  Does anyone else just have zero faith in this? If I came in to a gold plated office, our own barista, private rooms and a massage therapist, I'd love it. And I'd expect it all to disappear as soon as corporate got what they wanted...
• LatteLazy 3y ago
  I find a lot of this amazing. Management in many places seems to insist on getting people into offices, but cannot explain why? And they think people will spend 2h a day and 100s of dollars a month because they shuffled some desks around and bough bagels? And the idea that you just trust people to be productive or god forbid actually check Vs just relying on social pressure to "look" productive is out of the question I'm just baffled.
• someonehere 3y ago
  VCs and companies like Blackrock have investments in commercial real estate. They will definitely “encourage” C-levels to RTO to keep their investments safe at the expense of the people at the bottom.
• ljf 3y ago
  I find the idea that you can't grow, progress or build a network, when working from home, really alien. I've personally and workwise developed hugely in the last 3 years, despite being remote. I have built networks with people I've never met and picked up skills and work I'd never considered before.
• dudul 3y ago
  Not a single link to back the claim. I bet it wouldn't change anything.
• duxup 3y ago
  Everyone just does their thing and it sorts itself out. The debate about all this is endless and companies are going to do what they feel they need to do and so will everyone else. Right now employment is pretty fluid and that's good.
• cafard 3y ago
  I was inside the old Post building on 15th St. NW twice: once for an interview for a job that I didn't really remember applying for; once to buy copies of the election-night edition in 2008. But I think I recall still pictures from "All the President's Men" showing a newsroom that everybody at desks in a big open space. Actually, I'd rather the Post reporters not sit in the same room all day--better that they should be out talking to persons who are not their co-workers most of the time.
• barbazoo 3y ago
  It's not about what the office looks or feels like or what the amenities are for me but about a lifestyle. Once I got a taste of this lifestyle I decided that, for the kind of work I'm doing right now, ordinary software development, I will never go back to the office unless absolutely necessary (recession, war, etc). I'd be happy to go work from my employer's building where the job requires it, where I need equipment I can't reasonably expect to have at home (factory) or where I have to work where the customers are (service), things like that. The kind of software job I'm in though, it's absolutely possible with the right policies and technology to have the same kind of productivity as in the office, it's up to the employer to fix whatever they think is missing.
• cyrillite 3y ago
  Oh, I’ll go back to the office for a very significant pay rise. That’s the only reason, though.
• kinghuang 3y ago
  Distance from home to the office is an enormous factor to me. I’m currently an 8 minute bike ride or 25 minute walk from my office, and prefer going in. But, 10 years ago, when it was a 30 minute bike ride or drive, I would’ve loved to WFH.
• Simulacra 3y ago
  So a home away from home. Who gets windows? My career began in a windowless office in San Jose. I did not get a window for 2 years.
• meremortals 3y ago
  office + personal bathroom
• tristor 3y ago
  I've worked remotely since 2015. I have no intent of ever going back to the office. I actually enjoy working from the office occasionally, but it can't be a permanent thing for me, and giving me an office with a door and a short commute are not enough to make it matter. That makes it better, but not enough to change my mind. It's really simple. My office at home is better than any corporate owned office could ever feasibly be. A major reason why is because it's /mine/, I have absolute and complete control over it, and basically no budget restrictions. My home office is /comfortable/, /relaxed/, and /nice/. None of which are things companies care about when they start putting numbers in spreadsheets, and even if they did care about, they'd have to standardize it. My home office is also /personal/, which a corporate office can never be. I will /consider/ going back to the office when I get a 15m^2 space to myself with a locking door that closes, a window view, and a $30k/yr a budget to do whatever I want inside that office on top of world-class pay, and I can commute there in under 20 minutes. When all of those things are true, and only then, does it even become a consideration that is comparable to working from home permanently.
• ilaksh 3y ago
  Give it say 1-5 years and there will be a whole new dimension to this. It will be about whether you have to put your VR/MR glasses/googles on and enter the shared space during any specific times. That will be a whole new fight.
• Simon_O_Rourke 3y ago
  When I started out working for a major IT firm that everyone knows, they allocated each of us junior devs to a two-person office with a senior dev. The company has office space to burn, so it was no major issue to them. For me however, it was mostly isolating, the kind of drop-ins that are more permissible in an open plan are sure to just annoy anyone else. I suspect with single office occupancies it could be quite a lonely existence, all the remoteness of WFH coupled with a long commute for the heck of it.
• deleted 3y ago
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• moomoo11 3y ago
  WFH is great for jobs where you don’t need to innovate _as much_ or do anything significantly meaningful but keep the lights on. You really do benefit from being in person when doing something meaningful and impactful. It just works much better, and you only need a few people to do this and delegate the rest of the work to the WFH crowd.
• Racing0461 3y ago
  It's the commute/"salaryman lifestyle" that im avoiding, not an office.
• beastcoast 3y ago
  Amazon has decided the worst of all worlds: a return to office mandate (stick) and agile seating plans with no assigned seating (stick). No carrots…
  • barbazoo 3y ago
    But it's a safer, more productive, higher performing, more diverse, and more just work environment. And not having assigned desks? Don't you know that this way you accomplish more with less. Constraints breed resourcefulness, self-sufficiency, and invention. There are no extra points for growing headcount, budget size, or fixed expense. Thinking small is a self-fulfilling prophecy. /s obviously https://www.amazon.jobs/content/en/our-workplace/leadership-principles https://www.amazon.jobs/content/en/our-workplace/leadership-...
• everdimension 3y ago
  Completely agree with "give people a better office" and completely disagree on what a good office is. But instead of arguing on details, I want to say that as always, people are different. Sometimes polarly different. I love an open space which is a bit loud rather than quiet. It actually makes me feel more privacy than a quiet room full of people. But here's a recipe. Create an amazing office and don't force anyone to go there! No "once a week" rules or similar. Make it completely voluntary. And see what happens. A great office located closely, ideally walking distance, where you can discuss ideas and offtopics with your coworkers, have great coffee, not worry about snacks and stuff is like visiting an all-inclusive hotel, but for work. This statement isn't true for everyone. For some people working from home will always be better. Don't force them to change. But see what happens when you have an inviting place that's available for people to visit for as long and for as short as they want.
• momirlan 3y ago
  i remember a contract job at Deloitte, where they gathered some 20 of us around a table so that the partner could see all of us at a glance. there wasn't even room for laptops, never mind elbows... sayonara suckers!
• stephenblum 3y ago
  WFH is happiness. I want that. And I want that for my team.
• penguin_booze 3y ago
  When the work I'm doing is the same both from home and from the said private office, I don't want to come--as simple as that. No, and no thanks.
• Apocryphon 3y ago
  Always found it funny that software engineers think they have so much power just because of relatively high compensation. (And ease of finding new jobs- guess not so much, this year.) But pre-pandemic, how much labor power did SWEs have in determining whether or not they could work in a private office or even a cubicle as opposed on the open floor? And soon, how much power do you have to determine whether you can WFH or not?
  • declan_roberts 3y ago
    Engineers who have been playing arbitrage with bay area salaries in LCOL areas have incredible leverage now. My mortgage is $2k a month and my finances are in fantastic shape because I was making hay while the sun was shining. What's more likely? They'll convince me to uproot my family and pull them across the country and away form their grandparents to increase "in-person synergy..." Or I'll just take a marginal-paying job at a startup working remote? Heck, I'll start applying for jobs at the local sewer plant ($22/hr starting pay with benefits!) than move my family back to the bay area.
  • physicsguy 3y ago
    It totally depends on the market a candidate or company is operating in. A strong candidate has a lot more leverage than a weak one. A company that underpays in the local market has better luck hiring if they open their pool to remote. A company wanting a specific skill set might not find anyone willing to work for them without flexibility.
• dbg31415 3y ago
  Having an office doesn’t change how crappy a commute is. Or how annoying people in the office are… looking at you people who reheat fish, or try and peddle your kids’ cookies and bags of popcorn, or show up sick and act like you don’t think they rest of us notice you didn’t wash your hands after blowing your nose. Or how literally everything in my house is more comfortable for me. I don't want florescent lights, or bright lights at all... I want my dual 4k monitors and comfy chair that doesn't get stolen by some random dude while I'm in a meeting just because they ran out of chairs in the conference room again. I don't want pointless "all hands" meetings once a week where some guy who wants to hear himself talk stands up and bores everyone with new HR policies or sales numbers, while serving a few bits of snack food that people flock to like it's their last supper. What do I miss about the office? Meh, I miss how easy it was to grab a few people and do a happy hour after work. I miss some of the "culture" like foosball tables, or pranks, or stupid inside jokes about how the Keurig machine on Floor 2 will electrocute you... I miss being able to race up and down the stairs and the feeling of getting a win when I beat the people who took the elevator. Stupid little stuff I guess. But it's going to take a lot more than just an office to make me not want to work from home.
• sigzero 3y ago
  They are putting "hoteling" into place for possible future use. I went to see where my desk would be and it is down a dark hall with no windows and in an office with no windows. Not only no, but hell no.
• moneycantbuy 3y ago
  echoing others here, the cost of living in the bay area and hours of daily commuting aren’t worth the proclaimed “innovative water cooler conversations”. i wish the executives would at least be honest about why they are forcing us back on location. i suspect it is to try to keep their real estate values high. to my knowledge none of the big companies have published data showing wfh being less profitable than on campus work. anecdotally i am much more productive wfh from my sweet affordable mountain home than trying to sleep in my expensive but still crappy sf apartment then risk my life driving for hours for some badge swipe kabuki. icing on the cake is my manager and colleagues are in other countries. not surprisingly i’m looking for another job.
• deleted 3y ago
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• m3kw9 3y ago
  Won’t work, they giveth hand taketh after sometime
• dtx1 3y ago
  Our offices are empty enough that if you want to you can easily have your own. It's just that wearing trousers, getting through traffic, etc. are too inconvenient
• shrimpx 3y ago
  Can someone explain why companies want engineers to return to the office so badly? Engineering requires prolonged periods of uninterrupted focus. Working from home provides that focus. Who wants this return to the office so badly and why? When I worked “from the office” I routinely had to work from home to focus on high stakes projects, because the office was interruption hell. The office, especially open plan, is good for catching up but sucks shit for focusing and getting stuff done.
  • postalrat 3y ago
    Because you are actually more production when you are being interrupted vs locked away where nobody can reach you. Or do you just work on small projects that you can finish by yourself?
    • shrimpx 3y ago
      > you are actually more production when you are being interrupted That makes no sense. If you research the impact of interruptions on productivity you will find that interruptions unanimously destroy productivity. For engineers, it takes a significant amount of ramp-up time to get into flow, and being interrupted resets that ramp.
• omar12 3y ago
  What others have likely mentioned, the biggest perk that I get from WFH is flexibility to do home duties during business hours. Working from home has given me the flexibility to manage my day to deal with personal errands along with your work responsibilities. When coming to the office, all the home tasks are left for later, where my cognitive level is below ideal or where businesses are closed. There is also child care, where when working from home, you can pick up your kids, where you are present for them.
• pookha 3y ago
  I've never worked from home. I wouldn't even know what to do with myself...In the red hot heat of the pandemic (April of 2020) I was commuting to an office with 50+ other people (developers) in a cubicle forest. I even worked with an elderly lady. I caught covid something like three times and I'm waiting for the next round to fire up again. Working in DC has its advantages but dodging plagues is not one of them.
• kkfx 3y ago
  The RTO policy have a purpose: keeping up a dumb but profitable for some economy of services. Not really different than the old soviet adage, today dig a hole, tomorrow fill it so you have a job... Offices means bars/restaurants/ready-made food delivery/cleaning services/rents and so on in cities. Means the base needed to head to a 2030 where "you'll own nothing" because anything is a service of someone else. This is clear, what's not clear is the fact that such model is untenable. In an era of abundance we can keep money flowing with bullshit jobs, in an era of scarcity we can't. Long-story short: - most people will resist with any means because WFH means much to them - most service economy will collapse anyway - the disaster made in the meantime will push much more poor in cities, creating a bigger disaster thereafter. Some I've no doubt think they can also profit from it...
• deleted 3y ago
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• jarjoura 3y ago
  I loved having my own office briefly during the end of the 2000s, but that's not really a perk in my mind. If I'm going to commute 45 minutes into an office, the value is being next to the people I'm there to work with. Going from my home office that I've spec'd out and make exactly how I want my workspace to be, to another isolated lonely corporate office, seems, like a side-grade.
• dadoomer 3y ago
  A counter-intuitive part of the reluctance of employers to keep work-from-home, is that offices costs them money. So, if efficiency stays the same (which seems to be the case), then they should want to keep work-from-home. So why do they want to go back? Is it all about control?
• EchoReflection 3y ago
  Modern white-collar work wil never go back to the way things were (nor does it need to). Pros and cons to that of course. The path of least resistance (saving the costs of lighting/heating/cooling/plumbing/office-maintenance, etc) will triumph.
• nullsmack 3y ago
  If they want me to return to the office, then I need a private trailer with my office and it's own facilities in it. Don't shove me in where I'm forced to share air and virus with anyone else.
• nuancebydefault 3y ago
  Give each one an office? There's little difference with WFH except the commute, which in general is not a plus. The thing is, if you only talk about the annoyances of an open office, there's no comparison possible. There's one type of office plan that i find horrible though. Cubicles: the combination of annoyances from noise and feeling isolated, without the benifits of immediate feedback and more ad hoc communication.
  • wetpaws 3y ago
    [dead]
• swsdsailor 3y ago
  Maybe if the commute was on the clock, people would be more willing to do it.
• dahwolf 3y ago
  A recent internal company poll/discussion about the design of the new office building revealed a pretty hard split: talkers and workers. All the manager types, HR, comms...people that spent all day talking, they all want more "collaboration" rooms. All the other types, people actually doing tasks, want more "concentration rooms". The collaboration people don't like that. There can't be too many concentration rooms and attendance is max 2 hours per day. It's all so pathetic. It's truly baffling how in our society that ordinarily aggressively optimizes for costs and efficiency, businesses really believe that employees should collaborate MORE. The entire fucking problem is that there's TOO MUCH of it. Endless meetings, emails and chat with very little to show for it. How can you stand by and piss away all your money on buildings nobody wants to be at to do absolutely nothing of actual value for most of the day? Make it make sense.
  • HDThoreaun 3y ago
    A lot of contempt for non engineers in this comment. HR, comms, and managers are also doing tasks. Collaborative tasks are just as legitimate as solo engineering ones.
• switch007 3y ago
  Our company waxes lyrical about the “amazing offices” and the “investment” in them. Yet the desks are next to each other and so cramped you have to be careful rolling back your chair when you stand up else you might hit someone else’s chair. Zero effort was put in to make desks less distracting. Only some desks are height adjustable. Chairs are cheap. They were hoping all the “fun” stuff would lure people back. It didn’t work. Because while fun stuff is nice, if work doesn’t happen, we get fired, so the working area has to be good too Same old same old. All that changed was the language to describe the offices and the “experience”
• lizardking 3y ago
  Having my own office wouldn’t make the companies in my medium sized city any more attractive to me.
• lakomen 3y ago
  Not even then
• joshka 3y ago
  Anyone else see the irony of this being in a Bezos owned paper?
• alexpotato 3y ago
  There was a great quote from an old time journalist on open plan offices: "There is a lot of talk about how open plan offices foster more communication, transparency and honest conversations. In my day, I would invite you into my office, I would pull out a bottle of whiskey and two glasses. I would pour each of us a drink and we would have an private and honest conversation."
• cratermoon 3y ago
  I would consider moving to be near enough for a decent commute for a company where I had my office. Provided "near enough" was affordable for what I'd be paid and the company was located in a place I'd want to live. Obviously that last part is a matter of taste: I'd be willing to live somewhere around Boulder, CO, for example, but others might not. I can generalize it a bit: put your offices in a part of the country where people want to live, give each of them a private office, and pay them enough to live a reasonable distance, and you might find people lined up to apply.
• dizzydes 3y ago
  Yea this article is patently ridiculous. As with any benefit people who have little other option or who like socialising (young city dwellers) will return to open plan bull-pits. For others, the next proper recession (with actual unemployment) will potentially tilt the % again towards company preferences. I say company preferences as there’d be huge savings from WFH if they can make it work by then. The fact so many companies are pushing for return suggests that it must be more profitable for the companies in question, for sales it certainly is. Their arguments > our arguments here as they have their own data.
• bearmode 3y ago
  The problem is the commute, not the office. Mostly.
• PeterStuer 3y ago
  Already have a private office at home. You'll have to do better than just match one thing.
• xchip 3y ago
  It should be called back to the cubicle
• hqsolomo 3y ago
  I don't want an office. I don't even want to go outside. More pay would absolutely bring me into the office though- especially if it means I can afford the wear and tear on my car plus the 20 hours of my life drained being stuck in traffic each month. But at the same time, I'd much rather be given the freedom to prioritize life over working... So I'd consider coming in every business day if I could make full-time rates at part-time hours. Just cut my salary and working hours in half and let me do my thing!
• fennecfoxy 3y ago
  I don't think having our own office was the problem. The problem was that entire industries were set up around selling and buying space in office buildings, roads and public transport routes had to be expanded over time to keep up with the demand of commuters. And the pandemic blessed us with the opportunity to say "for what?" The only reason to make employees work from an office when they could work fine remotely is so that they can be micromanaged - it's just a needless waste of building space, public transport capacity, employee time commuting. I totally agree that it helps to have people come in now and then though, I think the social part of working with other people is still relevant to us as hoomans and it's useful to have everyone come in once every x to get to know each other, in jobs where you're working in a team.