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It's hardly a caricature, when you realize that by working remotely, you're asking someone else to pay the costs of you not being in the room. Maybe for some i
It's hardly a caricature, when you realize that by working remotely, you're asking someone else to pay the costs of you not being in the room. Maybe for some it's fine, and that's what your manager can do for you, but if you're WFH and your whole team isn't, the cost is shifted to someone else.
But for workplaces that presume WFH is cost-free and all benefits, someone there is suffering on behalf of the people who WFH.
You talk as though most people who work from home are doing so as an exception to the rule— maybe that's how it is in your organization, but by now most companies have established official policies for WFH. Mine decided to go fully remote, others demanded a returned to the office, and others set up a hybrid system.
If your company landed somewhere on that spectrum that you're unhappy with, that sucks, but that suggests it's time to get a new job, not bitterly caricature your co-workers as only wanting to work remotely in order to avoid interacting with you.
There’s plenty of costs the work in office crowd are shifting as well. Look at the hit the economy took from people not being prepared to work from home during a pandemic. Look at how offices inflate the prices of everything surrounding them and artificially force densification. Look at the environmental catastrophe office culture has caused through commuting.
The work in office crowd also forcibly shifts costs onto their coworkers by forcing them into the office under threat of firing, but the inverse never happens. I have a disability and had a legal entitlement to WFH for years which was routinely denied as a result of fraud where HR departments would claim undue hardship regardless of legitimacy. Since COVID this no longer flies as there is abundant proof that employers can in fact perform such accommodations trivially in many cases.
Work in office cost shifting was enforced through force and crime, so I have little sympathy for complaints of the costs of the work from home crowd voluntarily doing what they prefer to do.
"Work from office" is just "work". That's the default; you go somewhere, provide value in exchange for money, and go home. There was no "shifting" unless you mean pre-capitalistic agrarian societies where "work" meant doing literally everything yourself.
I do go somewhere - I go to my home office. I have an entire formal written agreement which stipulates that I am to work from this location, and not other locations. If I’m stuck in a different city - tough luck - I need to haul ass back home.
This is a location where I have expended great effort in creating a productive and specialized workspace engineered to deal with personal medical issues largely using money out of my own pocket. I went to this expense, not just to benefit myself, but out of a sincere desire to be as productive as possible at my job.
Oh well if it's formal, that suddenly makes it totally okay and therefore nobody is paying for you to do that in extra effort...
My point is that in situations like yours, there's always a loser, and they often don't get a choice. You're benefitting, but the people you have an agreement with have passed the cost of keeping you in the loop and productive onto someone else, and that someone else can't decide to end remote work for you if the burden it too high.
You sound like you think of yourself as a loser to remote work, but I assure you that in most cases there are not losers. My company is fully remote and we all choose to be here. No one is bearing any burden of the rest of us being remote because we all are remote and we structure our work accordingly.
I'm sorry your job sucks, but I suggest again: get another job. Wasting time telling other people in a completely different work environment how much your job sucks isn't going to persuade them that they're in the wrong.
Of course, SOMEBODY needs to at the very least needs to lay fiber-optics and rack networking gear to make remote work, work. I was one of those people for year. I was at one point the only person in a building full of servers. When I say the ONLY person, in a building of hundreds of people, I mean across departments, and I was paid a pittance extra for my service. The janitors would wish me good night and I would activate the alarm on my way out the door.
You can sure bet I worked my ass off to reduce that companies need for an on-site presence. It was also because one of my backups was disabled and I didn’t want to push that cost onto them. Another went for into a car accident and went on disability and it was bad enough that their personality changed when they came back. Shit fucking enraged me, I just did math in my head about how many employees my employer killed or maimed on the highways yearly with its forced office attendance policy and it was a decent number.
Of course, I respect the sacrifices of anybody doing such work and staying in the office so people can stay home.
Yet what we saw with on-premise work wasn’t that. What we saw was managers misappropriating company resources to have employees keep them company and make them feel important and follow them around to flex on their contemporaries. Who threw tantrums and threatened peoples livelihoods and broke disability accommodation laws to get their way. There are people who need to “come in to work” but it’s a LOT less than who was actually coming into work.
It's more like the constant coordination of disparate people, keeping those people motivated and aligned, making sure they're getting full access to all of the resources that would be otherwise trivial to provide to people collectively in an office.
And there's zero reason to believe that driving to work killed anyone. That's like saying being born killed people. The causes of people's car accidents are what killed them, not the reason they were driving.
Of course meeting in person can be a good way to deal with such concerns, but it doesn’t need to happen five times a week. Sometimes solving such problems just means sending an email.
There are also a significant number of companies that are remote only and successful and totally reject the need for this at all but of course - this won’t work for all workplaces or all workers. Just saying.
That's not how the history of work actually happened.
Specialization predates dedicated work spaces by millennia—the ancient Egyptians didn't "do literally everything themselves", they had quite sophisticated division of labor, with craftsmen regularly operating out of their homes. Even after people started receiving wages, work continued to be routinely done at home. It was less efficient to maintain a second space large enough for all your laborers than it was to just send them home with the materials they needed to get the job done, then have them come back with the finished product.
The industrial revolution changed that because now there were very expensive machines that were doing mostly actual work, and the people needed to be where those machines were. Once people were primarily interacting with ideas centralization still continued to be preferable because communication technology was limited.
COVID proved that the centralization is no longer necessary—our communication tech is sufficient to run an effective team distributed across the world, and very few jobs have the kind of large, expensive shared machinery that started the centralization process. There may still be preferences towards shared spaces, but those are personal preferences, they're no longer just the reality of work.
There was a 200 year window where centralization was a necessary feature of industrialization and knowledge work, but that era has come to an end, and it certainly wasn't long enough to become some sort of evolutionary fact of life!
Sorry but ancient Egyptians absolutely had dedicated workspaces separate from their homes. Obviously these places were more proximate to their homes insofar as their transportation methods limited the reasonable distances their workplaces could be, and a lack of zoning laws meant the intermingling of habitation spaces alongside these artisanal craftsmen you're referring to.
Further, this doesn't even disagree with my claim; what you've said here doesn't in any way support the claim that the "default" way of working was at home, and only "recently" did work centralize. Quite the opposite; work has always been "remote" in some sense. Even just practically, few people literally had the luxury to live exactly in the place where they worked, down to the room, as a great deal of work actually took place outside of any "room".
Additionally, COVID did not prove anything except that we can temporarily mitigate losses by working apart. Since, it's become very clear that such work styles create undue burdens on the folks who don't work remotely in order to support those who do, unless a company is entirely dedicated to remote work, which nearly none are.
People who got into tech because they're bad at human interaction will find no refuge working professionally. You're a burden to your company and your coworkers if you're in a role that requires coordination and you refuse to coordinate.
For roles that require little/no team coordination, it's acceptable to not work in the office most days. That isn't what a software developer job is, however, nor is it the vast majority of white-collar jobs generally.
Yes, you must commute. Yes, it takes time. But that's what the money is for. You wouldn't do this for free, so they compensate you for the inconvenience. The hour lost in a commute is infinitely made up for in the human interfacing that happens in person.