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I feel these discussions always go the same way. Working at an office sucks because of some combination of {long commute, open office plan, team not being there

I feel these discussions always go the same way. Working at an office sucks because of some combination of {long commute, open office plan, team not being there}. I quite like going to the office myself because my situation is the opposite: I bike to work, where I have my own office, and my team likes to come in too. Hating the office is totally justifiable given that my setup isn't common; most people are forced to deal with crappy built environments.

strangesmells06 3y ago
Yes! This! I think anyone would not mind the office if they werent treated like cattle. I dont think people dread going back to the office. People dread going back to the open office.
- ghaff 3y ago
  Some people really dislike open offices (or just spending the day around a lot of people generally) but I'm betting commutes are the #1 reason most people have against going into an office. Unless you can walk or, for some, bike any meaningful commute is basically a not very pleasant hour+ out of your day.
  - strangesmells06 3y ago
    Agreeed! Commute is rough also.
- 8n4vidtmkvmk 3y ago
  I'm used to open office. Not sure it'd matter if I had my own room. I'd still get dragged into useless meetings that interrupt my flow. If I can even get into a decent flow because our DX is so atrocious.
wrp 3y ago
I know a few retired guys who pay their own money to rent office space away from the house. They don't even have kids living at home any more. If you have a nice office, it's...well...nice.
- kzrdude 3y ago
  They do it together, so it's a shared space?
  - lostlogin 3y ago
    If they work at the same place, or own the company, isn’t that just ‘the office’?
  - Cacti 3y ago
    lol no
agumonkey 3y ago
yeah, switch this with open floor and bad peers and you get a ptsd swamp
lowercased 3y ago
I worked at a place years back that was expanding; bought a second building - 2 stories. Downstairs had semi-open cubicles, and a wall of private office spaces (8 IIRC). All empty. Cubes were full. I was in the other building, told we were needing to move over the next couple months. I asked for one of the private spaces. They weren't really that big, and had no natural light, but... they did have a door. I'd been wrestling with being in an open cube next to marketing people (trying to juggle multiple dev projects), and routinely had 3-5 people on the phone around me. Very distracting. "Nope, those offices are for managers". "But... they're empty now". "We're putting together the budget for next year to hire more managers". "So... those will sit empty for the next 6-9 months and I have to work in an open cube environment, being distracted by the growing number of people around me". "Looks that way, but don't be so negative about it. I think we're done here. Close my door on your way out please". I left a few weeks after that exchange.
- rootusrootus 3y ago
  I don't even need a private office. One of the best environments I've ever worked in was a hybrid office/open model. Basically a bunch of conference rooms where each team got a room, and within the room the desk walls were low. Decorate it however you want, if you agree on style then you can have ambient music, etc. It was pretty great. But then they knocked all the walls down and put in rows of desks because they could cram more people in that way. Within a year probably 25% of our development staff walked.
  - lowercased 3y ago
    Worked in a place like that - mostly open cube space for around 80 inbound call agents, and a few 'side rooms'. Worked with 5 other dev/tech folks in one of those 'side rooms' - a suitably sized office for the 6 of us. It was reasonable, in that we were generally all quiet or talking at the same time, and was not the worst place at all I've worked. Dedicated private space still works best for a lot of type of work (obviously that's "imo" but seems a standard POV from most colleagues today).
  - ghaff 3y ago
varelse 3y ago
[dead]
makeitdouble 3y ago
Why office sucks can be for any number of reasons, I think it's more of a long tail phenomenon with a myriad of distincts personal preferences and special needs. For instance office drinks can suck, and someone drinking 3 to 5 cups of warm drinks a day, being able to prepare delicious beverages with specialized equipement is a godsend. Or people who work sitting on their bed. Or want their pet around. Or don't want to wear makeup and get out of the house at all. Those who squat during the long meetings. Those who usually need an hearing aid but can instead just push the sound up if they're at home etc. Sure, any of those could be addressed in an office setting, but you still only have one office for hundreds of people who probably wish for different things. Most will just give up on comfort, where WFH is an option to be in a better situation.
- aplummer 3y ago
  > Most will just give up on comfort, where WFH is an option to be in a better situation. It’s also an option to be in a worse situation. My office is all setup for work and has the best perk, I can physically leave work behind each day.
  - cebert 3y ago
    > My office is all setup for work and has the best perk, I can physically leave work behind each day. You can also have a room setup for work at your home.
    - ghaff 3y ago
      Not everyone has a spare room for that purpose.
      - doubled112 3y ago
        Right. I joke that my corner in my bedroom is my home office, workbench, rec room, music room, data center combo. The use of vertical space is real. Family of four, 2bdrm 1100 sq ft divided across three floors. I'd love another room. Do they sell those at Costco? Can I put it on the lawn? I work from home full time, and while it was harder in the beginning, the click of the KVM button and putting my work phone on the charger is enough of a signal.
ravetcofx 3y ago
So maybe many people just really hate car dependency and long commutes which should push us to move away from such a model of urban planning. More offices seamlessly integrated into middle density housing similar to a lot of cities like Stockholm where big towers and suburban detached homes are more rare.
- morelisp 3y ago
  The RTO discussions for us in Germany (30m train commute in/to a city center) definitely begin with a very different tone than my friends in the US (60m car to an office park with a sandwich shop across the street) seem to have.
kspacewalk2 3y ago
I like both pretty much equally. I also bike to work and share an office with another dev, who is very easy to share a workspace with (in terms of habits, noise, distraction, etc). But I also enjoy working at home, going for a 10-minute walk around the block to clear my mind, opening my patio door and listening to birds while I work, etc. Hybrid works perfectly for me: a minimum of 1 day a week WFH, preferably 2, but no more than 3.
ghaff 3y ago
If I could easily walk to or even take a modest transit ride to the office I'd probably go in once or twice a week for the change in scenery. But the only company office it makes any sense for me to go into at this point is a two hour commute each way. I would need to have a specific reason to do that and no one I work with regularly is in that office. (I'm a 30 minute drive to another office but no one I know is there, it's in a boring office park, and it's closing.)
n8cpdx 3y ago
Guilty as charged. I almost commented about how I bugged HR to let me return to office when it became available (having some months earlier signed a permanent work-from-home contract). I like walking to work and having the work-life separation. Not to mention my office is tricked out with sweet posters, mostly of the transit and active transportation propaganda variety. The million dollar 360 views are a nice bonus though. Of course I still work from home on days where it is really inconvenient not to, but I tend to not enjoy that nearly as much now.
corobo 3y ago
Aye I'd happily go to an office every day if it was within walking distance. The problem was the commute and all the time wasted to and fro. If anyone ever comes up with working teleporters I'll go back to the office no bother Also punctuality and butts-in-seats, but that whole thing turned out to be adhd (working from home gave me the time to figure that out!) so might not be an issue now I can get up early enough to not have a mad panic rush every morning, haha
brandall10 3y ago
As someone who has been remote since '12, I absolutely agree. Nothing is better than having a cool/fun office environment close to home where you have things set up to an ergonomic ideal. I've been a member of many co-working spaces because of this. The problem is 95% of the time it's not like this.
starttoaster 3y ago
While your setup now is great, just know that it can change at any time. I know multiple people whose companies are finding a new address for their office for one reason or another. Some of them in completely different areas. My mom, who used to live a 5-10 minute drive from her office now has to drive about 30-40. My office being at home, I'll never have that problem as long as I don't change jobs. Granted I know multiple people who had WFH jobs where the carpet was swept right out from under them and they had to start coming into the office or be laid off, which is the flipside to my argument, though it doesn't really affect me because my company has no central headquarters so some huge internal changes would need to happen for my situation to change. Anyway, biking to work is awesome, that's a cool setup too for sure. I used to bike 10 miles into one of my previous jobs (and then 10 miles back home.)
iLoveOncall 3y ago
Even if I lived next door to an office where I had a private room and my teammates there I wouldn't want to go at all, for many reasons. Off the top of my head: - Even without commute there's at least 30-45 minutes of preparation to be decent for the office, - The office invariably doesn't have the setup that I want and have at home, - People are able to come "bother" you all day long. None of those are things I'm willing to put up with.
balderdash 3y ago
Agree - though from a personal perspective the first ~7 years of my work life was sitting on a trading floor layout, and then I got an office and hated it, still don’t love it. I think the personal office thing is partly personality/experience, partly job function, and partly convenient excuse.
scruple 3y ago
I'm a remote working veteran, having worked in that arrangement for over a decade. Recently I changed employers, to a place down the street, and I loved going to the office before RTO (we're expected to be in the office 3 days a week). Most of the team voluntarily came in every Tuesday and Thursday. We had a lot of fun. Then RTO came, and it seemed to coincidence with every other large employer in the area forcing RTO, and most of the things that were great about it evaporated overnight. Now the campus is crowded and noisy. Parking is annoying. The lines in the cafeteria and nearby restaurants are insane and simply not worth the wait or frustration of trying to coordinate timing. There's a lot of small battles being fought about temperature control, lighting in the office, etc. ~Half the team is still geographically remote to our main campus, at smaller satellites across the country or they have long term full-time remote arrangements. So we're on Zoom regardless. And I still between someone on my team and someone on an adjacent team, and frequently find myself sitting in between them while they're on separate calls. Even with headphones on, it is fucking madness. It's just annoying again, and needlessly frustrating, and reminds me of why I originally sought out full time remote back in 2011.
- cereal_cable 3y ago
  I love the mandates to RTO to only get onto Zoom or Teams meetings with people in multiple timezones and offices all traveling to the office to fulfill the RTO mandate and yet...the only thing that changed was the blurred backdrop.
ne0flex 3y ago
For my company, the worst thing is that we have hot desks, which wouldn't be a problem if there were enough seats if, say, 90%-95% of all staff came in on the same day and had their own seat. However, one of the floors that my company leases out is undergoing renovations and they shifted all those employees to other floors while keeping the same in-office weekly requirements. Way too many times, I've went into the office just to not be able to find a seat. We have a hoteling reservation system, but even if you reserve a seat, if you don't come in by 8:50 or so, someone will have taken it. I've complained to our corporate services team and have never received a response.
mikebenfield 3y ago
> Working at an office sucks because of some combination of {long commute, open office plan, team not being there} Working at an office sucks because it is a massive constraint on where you can live, even if you can tolerate a long commute. If you live with a partner who also has a career your options are even more constrained. I find it miraculous such a situation works out for anyone.
- paulddraper 3y ago
  And yet for millions of people and many years, it has worked out. There are tradeoffs, sure. But there are a lot of jobs in a lot of fields in a lot of places. The venn overlap is not tiny.
  - antisthenes 3y ago
    Trends happen a lot faster and make people miserable than you can definitively say "it's working out".
  - whoknowsidont 3y ago
    >it has worked out. Hardly. This is actually kind of insanely tone-deaf statement to make. People have uprooted their lives, spent lots of their wealth in expensive real-estate markets due to artificial demand, given up time with their families, etc etc. Saying it's "worked out" is a really bland dismissal of the entire conversation.
    - ghaff 3y ago
      What alternative do you have even for many highly-paid professional jobs like doctors?
      - zerbinxx 3y ago
        Doctors are somewhat unique in the fact that they can live and practice in a wide variety of places. Anywhere there’s a hospital, you will have them. Where they will choose to work/for how much is a much wider decision matrix than it is for many white collar organizations which would have no reason to exist (physically) in a small town of 20,000 people. Such a town would require at least a single hospital employing many medical professionals, depending on how far it is from other forms of medical care.
ergocoder 3y ago
Both opinions are valid and fine. What is not okay is that the work-from-office people seems to want to force everyone to work from office. (not directed at you. This is directed at the company execs) Meanwhile, the work-from-home people advocates for everyone to be able to choose. Akin to being the pro-choice side.
bonif 3y ago
You' re missing a point, quality of life

strangesmells06 3y ago

Yes! This! I think anyone would not mind the office if they werent treated like cattle. I dont think people dread going back to the office. People dread going back to the open office.

ghaff 3y ago
Some people really dislike open offices (or just spending the day around a lot of people generally) but I'm betting commutes are the #1 reason most people have against going into an office. Unless you can walk or, for some, bike any meaningful commute is basically a not very pleasant hour+ out of your day.
- strangesmells06 3y ago
  Agreeed! Commute is rough also.
8n4vidtmkvmk 3y ago
I'm used to open office. Not sure it'd matter if I had my own room. I'd still get dragged into useless meetings that interrupt my flow. If I can even get into a decent flow because our DX is so atrocious.

wrp 3y ago

I know a few retired guys who pay their own money to rent office space away from the house. They don't even have kids living at home any more. If you have a nice office, it's...well...nice.

kzrdude 3y ago
They do it together, so it's a shared space?
- lostlogin 3y ago
  If they work at the same place, or own the company, isn’t that just ‘the office’?
- Cacti 3y ago
  lol no

agumonkey 3y ago

yeah, switch this with open floor and bad peers and you get a ptsd swamp

lowercased 3y ago

I worked at a place years back that was expanding; bought a second building - 2 stories. Downstairs had semi-open cubicles, and a wall of private office spaces (8 IIRC). All empty. Cubes were full. I was in the other building, told we were needing to move over the next couple months. I asked for one of the private spaces. They weren't really that big, and had no natural light, but... they did have a door. I'd been wrestling with being in an open cube next to marketing people (trying to juggle multiple dev projects), and routinely had 3-5 people on the phone around me. Very distracting. "Nope, those offices are for managers". "But... they're empty now". "We're putting together the budget for next year to hire more managers". "So... those will sit empty for the next 6-9 months and I have to work in an open cube environment, being distracted by the growing number of people around me". "Looks that way, but don't be so negative about it. I think we're done here. Close my door on your way out please". I left a few weeks after that exchange.

rootusrootus 3y ago
I don't even need a private office. One of the best environments I've ever worked in was a hybrid office/open model. Basically a bunch of conference rooms where each team got a room, and within the room the desk walls were low. Decorate it however you want, if you agree on style then you can have ambient music, etc. It was pretty great. But then they knocked all the walls down and put in rows of desks because they could cram more people in that way. Within a year probably 25% of our development staff walked.
- lowercased 3y ago
  Worked in a place like that - mostly open cube space for around 80 inbound call agents, and a few 'side rooms'. Worked with 5 other dev/tech folks in one of those 'side rooms' - a suitably sized office for the 6 of us. It was reasonable, in that we were generally all quiet or talking at the same time, and was not the worst place at all I've worked. Dedicated private space still works best for a lot of type of work (obviously that's "imo" but seems a standard POV from most colleagues today).
- ghaff 3y ago

varelse 3y ago

[dead]

makeitdouble 3y ago

Why office sucks can be for any number of reasons, I think it's more of a long tail phenomenon with a myriad of distincts personal preferences and special needs. For instance office drinks can suck, and someone drinking 3 to 5 cups of warm drinks a day, being able to prepare delicious beverages with specialized equipement is a godsend. Or people who work sitting on their bed. Or want their pet around. Or don't want to wear makeup and get out of the house at all. Those who squat during the long meetings. Those who usually need an hearing aid but can instead just push the sound up if they're at home etc. Sure, any of those could be addressed in an office setting, but you still only have one office for hundreds of people who probably wish for different things. Most will just give up on comfort, where WFH is an option to be in a better situation.

aplummer 3y ago
> Most will just give up on comfort, where WFH is an option to be in a better situation. It’s also an option to be in a worse situation. My office is all setup for work and has the best perk, I can physically leave work behind each day.
- cebert 3y ago
  > My office is all setup for work and has the best perk, I can physically leave work behind each day. You can also have a room setup for work at your home.
  - ghaff 3y ago
    Not everyone has a spare room for that purpose.
    - doubled112 3y ago
      Right. I joke that my corner in my bedroom is my home office, workbench, rec room, music room, data center combo. The use of vertical space is real. Family of four, 2bdrm 1100 sq ft divided across three floors. I'd love another room. Do they sell those at Costco? Can I put it on the lawn? I work from home full time, and while it was harder in the beginning, the click of the KVM button and putting my work phone on the charger is enough of a signal.

ravetcofx 3y ago

So maybe many people just really hate car dependency and long commutes which should push us to move away from such a model of urban planning. More offices seamlessly integrated into middle density housing similar to a lot of cities like Stockholm where big towers and suburban detached homes are more rare.

morelisp 3y ago
The RTO discussions for us in Germany (30m train commute in/to a city center) definitely begin with a very different tone than my friends in the US (60m car to an office park with a sandwich shop across the street) seem to have.

kspacewalk2 3y ago

I like both pretty much equally. I also bike to work and share an office with another dev, who is very easy to share a workspace with (in terms of habits, noise, distraction, etc). But I also enjoy working at home, going for a 10-minute walk around the block to clear my mind, opening my patio door and listening to birds while I work, etc. Hybrid works perfectly for me: a minimum of 1 day a week WFH, preferably 2, but no more than 3.

ghaff 3y ago

If I could easily walk to or even take a modest transit ride to the office I'd probably go in once or twice a week for the change in scenery. But the only company office it makes any sense for me to go into at this point is a two hour commute each way. I would need to have a specific reason to do that and no one I work with regularly is in that office. (I'm a 30 minute drive to another office but no one I know is there, it's in a boring office park, and it's closing.)

n8cpdx 3y ago

Guilty as charged. I almost commented about how I bugged HR to let me return to office when it became available (having some months earlier signed a permanent work-from-home contract). I like walking to work and having the work-life separation. Not to mention my office is tricked out with sweet posters, mostly of the transit and active transportation propaganda variety. The million dollar 360 views are a nice bonus though. Of course I still work from home on days where it is really inconvenient not to, but I tend to not enjoy that nearly as much now.

corobo 3y ago

Aye I'd happily go to an office every day if it was within walking distance. The problem was the commute and all the time wasted to and fro. If anyone ever comes up with working teleporters I'll go back to the office no bother Also punctuality and butts-in-seats, but that whole thing turned out to be adhd (working from home gave me the time to figure that out!) so might not be an issue now I can get up early enough to not have a mad panic rush every morning, haha

brandall10 3y ago

As someone who has been remote since '12, I absolutely agree. Nothing is better than having a cool/fun office environment close to home where you have things set up to an ergonomic ideal. I've been a member of many co-working spaces because of this. The problem is 95% of the time it's not like this.

starttoaster 3y ago

While your setup now is great, just know that it can change at any time. I know multiple people whose companies are finding a new address for their office for one reason or another. Some of them in completely different areas. My mom, who used to live a 5-10 minute drive from her office now has to drive about 30-40. My office being at home, I'll never have that problem as long as I don't change jobs. Granted I know multiple people who had WFH jobs where the carpet was swept right out from under them and they had to start coming into the office or be laid off, which is the flipside to my argument, though it doesn't really affect me because my company has no central headquarters so some huge internal changes would need to happen for my situation to change. Anyway, biking to work is awesome, that's a cool setup too for sure. I used to bike 10 miles into one of my previous jobs (and then 10 miles back home.)

iLoveOncall 3y ago

Even if I lived next door to an office where I had a private room and my teammates there I wouldn't want to go at all, for many reasons. Off the top of my head: - Even without commute there's at least 30-45 minutes of preparation to be decent for the office, - The office invariably doesn't have the setup that I want and have at home, - People are able to come "bother" you all day long. None of those are things I'm willing to put up with.

balderdash 3y ago

Agree - though from a personal perspective the first ~7 years of my work life was sitting on a trading floor layout, and then I got an office and hated it, still don’t love it. I think the personal office thing is partly personality/experience, partly job function, and partly convenient excuse.

scruple 3y ago

I'm a remote working veteran, having worked in that arrangement for over a decade. Recently I changed employers, to a place down the street, and I loved going to the office before RTO (we're expected to be in the office 3 days a week). Most of the team voluntarily came in every Tuesday and Thursday. We had a lot of fun. Then RTO came, and it seemed to coincidence with every other large employer in the area forcing RTO, and most of the things that were great about it evaporated overnight. Now the campus is crowded and noisy. Parking is annoying. The lines in the cafeteria and nearby restaurants are insane and simply not worth the wait or frustration of trying to coordinate timing. There's a lot of small battles being fought about temperature control, lighting in the office, etc. ~Half the team is still geographically remote to our main campus, at smaller satellites across the country or they have long term full-time remote arrangements. So we're on Zoom regardless. And I still between someone on my team and someone on an adjacent team, and frequently find myself sitting in between them while they're on separate calls. Even with headphones on, it is fucking madness. It's just annoying again, and needlessly frustrating, and reminds me of why I originally sought out full time remote back in 2011.

cereal_cable 3y ago
I love the mandates to RTO to only get onto Zoom or Teams meetings with people in multiple timezones and offices all traveling to the office to fulfill the RTO mandate and yet...the only thing that changed was the blurred backdrop.

ne0flex 3y ago

For my company, the worst thing is that we have hot desks, which wouldn't be a problem if there were enough seats if, say, 90%-95% of all staff came in on the same day and had their own seat. However, one of the floors that my company leases out is undergoing renovations and they shifted all those employees to other floors while keeping the same in-office weekly requirements. Way too many times, I've went into the office just to not be able to find a seat. We have a hoteling reservation system, but even if you reserve a seat, if you don't come in by 8:50 or so, someone will have taken it. I've complained to our corporate services team and have never received a response.

mikebenfield 3y ago

> Working at an office sucks because of some combination of {long commute, open office plan, team not being there} Working at an office sucks because it is a massive constraint on where you can live, even if you can tolerate a long commute. If you live with a partner who also has a career your options are even more constrained. I find it miraculous such a situation works out for anyone.

paulddraper 3y ago
And yet for millions of people and many years, it has worked out. There are tradeoffs, sure. But there are a lot of jobs in a lot of fields in a lot of places. The venn overlap is not tiny.
- antisthenes 3y ago
  Trends happen a lot faster and make people miserable than you can definitively say "it's working out".
- whoknowsidont 3y ago
  >it has worked out. Hardly. This is actually kind of insanely tone-deaf statement to make. People have uprooted their lives, spent lots of their wealth in expensive real-estate markets due to artificial demand, given up time with their families, etc etc. Saying it's "worked out" is a really bland dismissal of the entire conversation.
  - ghaff 3y ago
    What alternative do you have even for many highly-paid professional jobs like doctors?
    - zerbinxx 3y ago
      Doctors are somewhat unique in the fact that they can live and practice in a wide variety of places. Anywhere there’s a hospital, you will have them. Where they will choose to work/for how much is a much wider decision matrix than it is for many white collar organizations which would have no reason to exist (physically) in a small town of 20,000 people. Such a town would require at least a single hospital employing many medical professionals, depending on how far it is from other forms of medical care.

ergocoder 3y ago

Both opinions are valid and fine. What is not okay is that the work-from-office people seems to want to force everyone to work from office. (not directed at you. This is directed at the company execs) Meanwhile, the work-from-home people advocates for everyone to be able to choose. Akin to being the pro-choice side.

bonif 3y ago

You' re missing a point, quality of life