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I am doing well with remote because I'm pathologically introverted and find that being around people is exhausting. I can imagine things being the other way ar

I am doing well with remote because I'm pathologically introverted and find that being around people is exhausting. I can imagine things being the other way around for extroverts and that is saddening.

steveBK123 2mo ago
Yeah this is the primary disconnect because management is more extroverted and so they hated remote / don't see why some want it.
- sunaurus 2mo ago
  Honestly the lack of empathy about this topic from top management is extremely disturbing. Nothing else in my career has ever changed my opinion about a CEO as quickly and drastically as hearing them completely dismiss it as noise, when hundreds of employees explain how negatively forced RTO affects their well-being and productivity.
  - gopher_space 2mo ago
    My "first-order costs only" spreadsheet put RTO at like twenty grand a year. I had no idea. I started playing around with the idea of how much it costs to have a job based on location and it was interesting to see how different variables changed the final wage and how that played out against a map of the city.
    - DiggyJohnson 2mo ago
      $20k for the company to facilitate your workspace or $20k of net cost to you the employee to comply with RTO? If the latter and assuming a reasonable commute (15-35 minutes) one way how did you arrive at that number?
      - preg_match 2mo ago
        Well on the employee side it’s more complicated than you think. You have gas, yes, and then mileage on your car. And then working in an office means you have to take more time off to deal with mundane things like “the plumber is coming today”. And then 30 minutes of commute is 1 hour a day, which lowers your effective wage. And then of course there’s various other costs like food being more difficult and expensive, higher risk of serious bodily harm or death due to automobile use, and the biggest one: COL. living close to work can easily double your COL for no real gain. Depending on the city, you could easily be looking at a 100% cost rise in rent, a few thousand on car maintenance and gasoline depending on your car a year, a few thousand on food, about ~12% reduction in wage, and a few days of lost PTO.
        DiggyJohnson 2mo ago
        I guess if you consider your commute as purely work time then it starts making more sense. Maybe I’m unusual in that I don’t loathe my commute and see the time as 100% personal time.
        preg_match 2mo ago
        The way I view it is that personal time means time id spend if work didn’t exist. If work didn’t exist, I wouldn’t commute. So, to me, it’s work time. Yes it’s “easier” (sometimes) than working, but it’s still time I dedicate to work. Its entire purpose exists because work exists. I used to have a really gnarly commute (1.5 hours one way, so 3 hours total, 3.5-4 if there was an accident). The level to which it affected my finances is one thing, but it absolutely demolished my quality of life. I couldn’t socialize, sleep, or even cook for myself due to the exhaustion. And spending minimum of 12 hours a day sitting destroyed my body and mental health. Not to mention traffic is not peaceful, it’s stressful. You have to constantly be “on” and paying attention. Even a single second of distraction can be an accident.
        account42 2mo ago
        I generally agree that commute should count as work time more often than not but its complicated when you can take advantage of the commute to get other things done near your work site or along the route. E.g. if you commonly stop to get groceries half way from work to your home then perhaps you would have needed to spend time for that trip anyway. But that's more of an excuse for a 30 minute or less commute, not for over an hour.
  - ghaff 2mo ago
    I saw some management being hesitant about enforcing back to office at least part-time. But the way a lot of companies did hiring during COVID it was going to be pretty hard to put the genie back in the bottle unless they wanted to lose a lot of people. I'm familiar with one company that really hesitated to shove a lot of people into an official (as opposed to remote) category but they eventually gave up after closing some offices.
- tpmoney 2mo ago
  I think the introvert / extrovert thing is oversimplifying things too much. I'm a very introverted person, and my favorite thing to be working on is stuff that's in the background quietly making things better in invisible ways. But that's the whole reason I want to be in an office with other people. Because I'm aware that I need people to know what it is that I do, and it's easier for me to make that happen when I can interact with someone one on one instead of having to blast stuff into a chat with 30 other people reading, or having to carefully pick my words because all the side bands of human communication that I've put so much effort into learning to read and use are gone in the sterile text of the screen. We all know networking is an important part of your career. As an introvert, networking is a lot easier when I'm in a space where people already are and I can be seen, even if I'm not always being heard. And when I am heard in the office, it's usually among small groups of people, maybe 10 or less. Having to network by being actively visible and speaking in big open channels with 2-3 different teams and a few layers of management all watching, that's terrifying as an introvert but that's also how most companies run their chat systems because otherwise everyone has hundreds of channels that they have to keep track of and remember whose in what places and copy discussions around. Since it's easier just to have massive groups of people in one channel and have everyone use the larger channels most of the time, being remote and on slack is actually far more draining to me as an introvert. I also do best keeping tabs with what's going on when I can keep one ear on the other things going on around me instead of having to stop what I'm doing and intentionally scroll through pages and pages of slack messages. And yes, because I'm introverted, being in person with a team of people that includes extroverts means I get human social connections that I need and would otherwise not seek out because, again I'm an introvert.
wing-_-nuts 2mo ago
For me, the biggest thing was simply my ability to work in a quiet environment with little distraction. We went from an open office floor plan that was so loud I wore noise canceling head phones and a baseball hat to block the buzzy lighting to my own desk, in my own home, feet away from a bathroom and kitchen cleaned and stocked to my standards. I will never go back.

steveBK123 2mo ago

Yeah this is the primary disconnect because management is more extroverted and so they hated remote / don't see why some want it.

sunaurus 2mo ago
Honestly the lack of empathy about this topic from top management is extremely disturbing. Nothing else in my career has ever changed my opinion about a CEO as quickly and drastically as hearing them completely dismiss it as noise, when hundreds of employees explain how negatively forced RTO affects their well-being and productivity.
- gopher_space 2mo ago
  My "first-order costs only" spreadsheet put RTO at like twenty grand a year. I had no idea. I started playing around with the idea of how much it costs to have a job based on location and it was interesting to see how different variables changed the final wage and how that played out against a map of the city.
  - DiggyJohnson 2mo ago
    $20k for the company to facilitate your workspace or $20k of net cost to you the employee to comply with RTO? If the latter and assuming a reasonable commute (15-35 minutes) one way how did you arrive at that number?
    - preg_match 2mo ago
      Well on the employee side it’s more complicated than you think. You have gas, yes, and then mileage on your car. And then working in an office means you have to take more time off to deal with mundane things like “the plumber is coming today”. And then 30 minutes of commute is 1 hour a day, which lowers your effective wage. And then of course there’s various other costs like food being more difficult and expensive, higher risk of serious bodily harm or death due to automobile use, and the biggest one: COL. living close to work can easily double your COL for no real gain. Depending on the city, you could easily be looking at a 100% cost rise in rent, a few thousand on car maintenance and gasoline depending on your car a year, a few thousand on food, about ~12% reduction in wage, and a few days of lost PTO.
      - DiggyJohnson 2mo ago
        I guess if you consider your commute as purely work time then it starts making more sense. Maybe I’m unusual in that I don’t loathe my commute and see the time as 100% personal time.
        preg_match 2mo ago
        The way I view it is that personal time means time id spend if work didn’t exist. If work didn’t exist, I wouldn’t commute. So, to me, it’s work time. Yes it’s “easier” (sometimes) than working, but it’s still time I dedicate to work. Its entire purpose exists because work exists. I used to have a really gnarly commute (1.5 hours one way, so 3 hours total, 3.5-4 if there was an accident). The level to which it affected my finances is one thing, but it absolutely demolished my quality of life. I couldn’t socialize, sleep, or even cook for myself due to the exhaustion. And spending minimum of 12 hours a day sitting destroyed my body and mental health. Not to mention traffic is not peaceful, it’s stressful. You have to constantly be “on” and paying attention. Even a single second of distraction can be an accident.
        account42 2mo ago
        I generally agree that commute should count as work time more often than not but its complicated when you can take advantage of the commute to get other things done near your work site or along the route. E.g. if you commonly stop to get groceries half way from work to your home then perhaps you would have needed to spend time for that trip anyway. But that's more of an excuse for a 30 minute or less commute, not for over an hour.
- ghaff 2mo ago
  I saw some management being hesitant about enforcing back to office at least part-time. But the way a lot of companies did hiring during COVID it was going to be pretty hard to put the genie back in the bottle unless they wanted to lose a lot of people. I'm familiar with one company that really hesitated to shove a lot of people into an official (as opposed to remote) category but they eventually gave up after closing some offices.
tpmoney 2mo ago
I think the introvert / extrovert thing is oversimplifying things too much. I'm a very introverted person, and my favorite thing to be working on is stuff that's in the background quietly making things better in invisible ways. But that's the whole reason I want to be in an office with other people. Because I'm aware that I need people to know what it is that I do, and it's easier for me to make that happen when I can interact with someone one on one instead of having to blast stuff into a chat with 30 other people reading, or having to carefully pick my words because all the side bands of human communication that I've put so much effort into learning to read and use are gone in the sterile text of the screen. We all know networking is an important part of your career. As an introvert, networking is a lot easier when I'm in a space where people already are and I can be seen, even if I'm not always being heard. And when I am heard in the office, it's usually among small groups of people, maybe 10 or less. Having to network by being actively visible and speaking in big open channels with 2-3 different teams and a few layers of management all watching, that's terrifying as an introvert but that's also how most companies run their chat systems because otherwise everyone has hundreds of channels that they have to keep track of and remember whose in what places and copy discussions around. Since it's easier just to have massive groups of people in one channel and have everyone use the larger channels most of the time, being remote and on slack is actually far more draining to me as an introvert. I also do best keeping tabs with what's going on when I can keep one ear on the other things going on around me instead of having to stop what I'm doing and intentionally scroll through pages and pages of slack messages. And yes, because I'm introverted, being in person with a team of people that includes extroverts means I get human social connections that I need and would otherwise not seek out because, again I'm an introvert.

wing-_-nuts 2mo ago

For me, the biggest thing was simply my ability to work in a quiet environment with little distraction. We went from an open office floor plan that was so loud I wore noise canceling head phones and a baseball hat to block the buzzy lighting to my own desk, in my own home, feet away from a bathroom and kitchen cleaned and stocked to my standards. I will never go back.