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Doesn't this basically just apply the same assumption in reverse, that most people can work in an office equally well? So much of the discourse on this topic (f

by saghm 11mo ago

Doesn't this basically just apply the same assumption in reverse, that most people can work in an office equally well? So much of the discourse on this topic (from either side) seems to just boil down to generalizing ones own work experience as the norm and making inferences based on that. Maybe the reason it's so contentious is that people's experiences with remote versus in person work are not going to be expansive enough to be able to draw any conclusions about whether one of them is "better" for arbitrary groups of people, and we should just recognize that outside of teams one has personal experience with, we're just as likely to be incorrect as we are correct about how they'd work best.

Aurornis 11mo ago
> Doesn't this basically just apply the same assumption in reverse, that most people can work in an office equally well? Interacting in person and cooperating is something you start learning from a young age. Working in person in the office is a natural extension from years of schooling in person with your peers. Working remote is a skill that must be learned. Many people have barely done it at all before their first WFH job. It doesn't come as naturally. It's not a symmetric comparison.
- saghm 11mo ago
  > Interacting in person and cooperating is something you start learning from a young age. I'm not sure what your experiences were like in school, but during my early years, there were drastic differences between how much different classmates thrived or struggled in highly social environments. Just because everyone is forced to interact in a certain way doesn't mean that it works well for everyone equally. > It doesn't come as naturally. I'd argue that it doesn't come as naturally to a lot of people to work in largely dense social environments either. To your own point, this is something that people are actively conditioned for, not a naturally occurring phenomenon, and I'd argue that even despite that it still leads to a pretty wide variety of outcomes for people at an individual level not in small part because of how suitable an environment like that is for each of them. To me, this seems like a pretty fundamental disagreement in how much uniformity should be imposed on a population based on how well that proposed norm fits with the members of the population. I imagine that to people who disagree with me, the idea that many people might work better in seclusion than in a larger shared environment probably seems radical, but I've yet to see a justification for it as the rule rather than the exception that doesn't end up coming from an assumption that people who don't prefer this are a small minority that aren't worth changing things for. I don't have any clue what the actual number of people who don't fit the assumed norm are, but I don't find it nearly as easy to accept that the threshold at which point it's worth reconsidering how we do things is comfortably higher based on any of the arguments I've seen presented. Maybe this is due to my perception of what a fair threshold would be being lower than average, but most of the disagreements I've encountered seem to already stem from an assumption that the number of people who prefer to work in an office-like environment is high enough to be the basis of how things get run in the first place, and then extrapolate the threshold from that fact.
- lucyjojo 11mo ago
  > Interacting in person and cooperating is something you start learning from a young age. Working in person in the office is a natural extension from years of schooling in person with your peers. that is a wiiiild wiiillllld take sir

by saghm 11mo ago

Aurornis 11mo ago

> Doesn't this basically just apply the same assumption in reverse, that most people can work in an office equally well? Interacting in person and cooperating is something you start learning from a young age. Working in person in the office is a natural extension from years of schooling in person with your peers. Working remote is a skill that must be learned. Many people have barely done it at all before their first WFH job. It doesn't come as naturally. It's not a symmetric comparison.

saghm 11mo ago
> Interacting in person and cooperating is something you start learning from a young age. I'm not sure what your experiences were like in school, but during my early years, there were drastic differences between how much different classmates thrived or struggled in highly social environments. Just because everyone is forced to interact in a certain way doesn't mean that it works well for everyone equally. > It doesn't come as naturally. I'd argue that it doesn't come as naturally to a lot of people to work in largely dense social environments either. To your own point, this is something that people are actively conditioned for, not a naturally occurring phenomenon, and I'd argue that even despite that it still leads to a pretty wide variety of outcomes for people at an individual level not in small part because of how suitable an environment like that is for each of them. To me, this seems like a pretty fundamental disagreement in how much uniformity should be imposed on a population based on how well that proposed norm fits with the members of the population. I imagine that to people who disagree with me, the idea that many people might work better in seclusion than in a larger shared environment probably seems radical, but I've yet to see a justification for it as the rule rather than the exception that doesn't end up coming from an assumption that people who don't prefer this are a small minority that aren't worth changing things for. I don't have any clue what the actual number of people who don't fit the assumed norm are, but I don't find it nearly as easy to accept that the threshold at which point it's worth reconsidering how we do things is comfortably higher based on any of the arguments I've seen presented. Maybe this is due to my perception of what a fair threshold would be being lower than average, but most of the disagreements I've encountered seem to already stem from an assumption that the number of people who prefer to work in an office-like environment is high enough to be the basis of how things get run in the first place, and then extrapolate the threshold from that fact.
lucyjojo 11mo ago
> Interacting in person and cooperating is something you start learning from a young age. Working in person in the office is a natural extension from years of schooling in person with your peers. that is a wiiiild wiiillllld take sir