Who is demanding this? My company is openly talking about “office optional” when normalcy returns with “office days” being the exception rather than the norm.
UK politicians and business landlords are banging the "back to the office, proles!" drum pretty hard right now. Thankfully people are mostly ignoring them.
My company was a few months away from an office move when Covid hit. Most leadership was fiercely anti-wfh. Fast forward to today, and the new office buildout has been converted into a “hotel” model with no permanent desks and the expectation is when it’s safe, you will have option to do come in a few days a week.
If my work ever went to a "no permanent desks" rule, they'd never see me in the office again. Not knowing where I'll be sitting and what noise/neighbor issues I'll have to work around is like adding insult to the injury of having to commute and forego all the benefits I get spoiled by with wfh.
The people that I know who work managerial and director roles in healthcare and pharmaceuticals are discussing this, also. Apparently productivity is through the roof with work from home.
That, and the fact that many politicians, media barons and other wealthy individuals stand to lose a lot of money on their commercial property investments, and so have their flying monkeys working overtime to persuade the rest of us to risk life and health for no good reason.
I miss the ad-hoc conversations with coworkers that lead to cool product innovation. I also miss being able to mentor junior engineers in person, and receiving in-person mentorship from my seniors.
I personally believe that we're all running on the trajectory and direction we scoped before the shut-down, and as we move into H1 planning next year, things are going to get much slower and more complicated.
But do you really need that from a company? I get that from coworking spaces. And if anything I'd argue it's more innovative.
Instead of a bunch of programmers spouting group think, I get to interact with writers, artists, indie game devs, etc. Way more innovative than any programmer group I've been in.
Well these folks will probably not have much context on what you are doing though. Offices are nice because people working in them have some shared reality, vision and goals. I know that the service or tool I build or use is built or used by another team for a specific purpose. A lot of the innovations I’ve seen happening are because humans with this shared reality try to solve one others problems, or at least talk about it. Many times, others will also actually help out if someone is stuck on something.
We need something to simulate this kind of shared reality somehow. Video conferences don’t do that. I’m sure there will be some innovation that might, I’m betting on cheap, high quality AR headsets. Right now it feels like in 2007... internet on cellphones was a thing but an iPhone with touchscreens had to be invented for something revolutionary to happen...
I couldn't really talk to random people at a coworking space unless they signed NDAs, which would be hard to enforce. Lots of IP and other secrets. Do people really discuss their work with strangers at coworking spaces? I've never worked in one so thats interesting/surprising. Maybe some more generic programming challenges could be discussed vs product/research specifics.
I'm the opposite. Without having to hear the two women sitting two rows back talking loudly about whatever the hell it is, or be interrupted 8 times a day by people in unrelated areas asking inane questions that are already documented on confluence...
Working from home has been amazing for my concentration levels.
Number one reason for me is the separation of work and private life. It's so much easier to keep work from creeping into my private life when it happens in a totally different place.
I also miss the social interactions, discussion with colleagues is much easier in person. Lastly, I hope it will reduce the amount of video conferences that crept up considerably.
edit: Not OP obviously.
edit2: Note: Just to make sure, I know this is personal preference and I am perfectly happy with other people being super happy and productive at home!
I am glad this works for you! Maybe it's because I can't switch my mind so easily, I prefer a physical distance (I don't think a separate room would be enough for me either).
If you don't have a separate room, it's hard to see how much difference it can make. I've worked from home since 2008 with a one-year break immediately before COVID-19, and I'm glad to be back, but the separate room was essential for me.
To be fair I've been working 60% remote for a few years now, so moving to 100% wasn't a huge strain for me. It's actually something I've wanted for a while.
I've had time to get my head around the separation you talk about, I guess. Also helps that I'm on a small team and we all slack something like "Signing off now, catch you tomorrow" at around 5.30. Puts an end on the day.
What worked for me best during lockdown was strong ritualized schedule (which is completely at odds with my normal personality).
What used to be going to work in the morning became exercise. Then, when it was end of day, we went outside. I have kids which made it making more sense. But you can go outside for walk or read book outside etc. The point is that you leave room and do something that causes mental switch.
No I haven't considered alternatives between a corporate office and a home office. Could you list some? I am fairy uncreative about these things, unfortunately :/
I've worked at home for 20 years, more or less, and I have a separate space (garden office), $300 conference camera and mic, huge screen, and the best internet connection possible. When this is your life you arrange things differently, and I've no doubt that others who make the change to working from home will make similar adjustments over time.
I could work with it if I was forced to do it, which I was for a few months. If I had to do it for an even longer period, a separate room would probably be necessary. But having a "black space" room is not exactly something I want in my private space either. (Not to think about my work most likely not willing to pay rent for that room :D )
I know this is a personal preference, but for me, physical distance makes my work more productive and my private time more relaxing.
Not the parent, but I use a Logitech 920s webcam. I could use one of my high-end cameras--I even have an older model Fujifilm I don't use any longer--with an HDMI to USB converter but I decided it wasn't worth the trouble and it's harder to make work in physical space anyway.
I use a Blue Snowball mic but any decent USB mic will work. I have a dedicated office and I haven't found using a headset makes it better though YMMV. I'd just as soon not wear a headset unless necessary.
Computer is just a 27" iMac with a 2nd monitor. (Though I actually usually work with video on my main screen and do any work with shared docs etc. on a MacBook.)
Also have an Elgato keylight to get the lighting a bit more even.
ADDED: Probably at least as important is that you're not backlit by a window and you have the camera at maybe a bit above eye level. I've also done a bit of "set decorating" of my background.
If I had the extra space and time to set it all up I would probably use a regular SLR camera on a tripod, and lavalier mic. But the Logitech is a lot more convenient - connects over a single USB through the docking station and just works with zero set up.
The screen is just a regular LG 4K 55" TV mounted on the wall which connects to the laptop docking station, allowing video conferences, slides, etc. to be "thrown" over there when it's convenient.
I’m not the parent poster, but I agree with their preference. It’s psychological. I focus better with a clear delineation of work in a work setting and personal life in a home setting. Even the physical transition of the commute helps me switch over. This is something that has eroded in the last six months even though I’ve tried to substitute it with practices like an “office” room.
Additionally, I am definitely a person who prefers in person meetings and conversations. It’s not that I can’t do remote conversations - I’ve even managed remote employees for years - but I value water cooler conversations as a place for spontaneous idea generation or just relationship building, which is just harder remotely. You have to go out of your way to send ideas into the ether, without the physical signs that someone might be receptive to random, possibly stupid musings, or non-sequiter stuff about personal life.
Count me among the people who are fine with others choosing to stay remote, but once it’s feasible and safe to go into the office I would want to do it.
I get the want for distinct physical spaces to change contexts, though considering we're 20+ years into a world of employer issued laptop and mobile phones, making the delineation between work and non-work is very much up to each of us as individuals. This is as a small as not checking work email outside of work hours and as large as finding a space that you yourself work best in even if that means not home or your employer's office.
The issue is while you're on the clock; I don't take those longer breaks to get a coffee, it's right behind me. I take shorter lunches, it's right there behind me. (etc.) People who are not tenured remote employees are still struggling to find a healthy life balance as they've spent 20 years working in an office.
My company (~10k, global, mix of hourly and salaried) has multiple times sent out pandemic guidance asking people to take more time off and stop working so much, they see the extra hours in their time tracking tooling upstream (and it's not a financial play, they're targeting the salaried).
The office I work in is open plan, which I would imagine is the case for the significant proportion of individual that do their work in an office. There are constant interuptions and it's way too loud. In order to focus, I have to shut off the background noise with headphones, and even they don't deter most people from interupting my flow. As my customer base is wide spread, I'm in vidoe calls anyway. This means that it really doesn't matter where I work. I do miss some of my collegues, I do miss some of the interactions and technical discussions that go on, as much as a little bit of the banter. Slack/Teams can be very impersonal and nuance is totally lost with text based media. With that said, I'm definately more productive at home. I can definately get more done and I definately do not miss the commute. I see much more of my kids and my wife, which to me at least, is the most important thing. Work-life harmony seems to me to be easier to atain if the choice of working from home is available.
Not OP, but many reasons. I miss socializing with colleagues, I also like sitting in a room surrounded by other people also working and finally my office has better ergonomics.
- I get far too distracted by my apartment. The things I hung up on my wall to give myself a sense of personality are the things that I will be distracted by if I have my work laptop open.
- I want a clear separation between being at work and being at home. Otherwise I will make excuses that because I happen to be at home I can do X or Y without consequence. At home I have my personal computer and television within walking distance at all times. By being in the office I deliberately prevent myself from having those options.
- My job requires me to use a specific model of laptop for remote work. The laptop itself is not an ideal environment for getting things done. It is a Lenovo-era ThinkPad with the chiclet keys and they are awful to type on. I have other hardware in my room to plug in, but on top of that I have to RDP to my machine in order to access corpnet things, and the latency is plainly awful. It takes several minutes to just launch it and render the entire desktop completely, control key combinations will frequently not register because of the latency, I'm unable to use my laptop's microphone half the time over RDP, and there are frequent disconnections. And if I'm working at home, all of these annoyances will just pile on top of each other and make me lose motivation to do work entirely.
- On top of that my access credentials expired while I was taking shelter early on, so to use my work laptop from home at that point I had no choice but to go to the office to get them unblocked. I went in and immediately wondered why I hadn't been working from there in months. It was night and day.
I got certified to go into the office as "essential staff," because for me being in the office is what determines if I am productive at all or not. In fact the amount of work that ended up piling up because I was unable to work effectively anymore caused an anxiety episode that I had to take off a few months for. It truly felt like I had been pushed into a corner. Thankfully my team was understanding, it being a devastating pandemic and all.
Half of your problem sounds like infrastructure issues and possibly not having a good workspace setup. I am super lucky and have fiber internet at home and we have an awesome VPN at work, so I can get <10ms ping to almost everything lol. I keep my work computer plugged into a desktop setup (mouse/keyboard/monitors) so I don't have to deal with that.
1. Work/life separation. Even with a separate computer, getting it shut away and Slack gone is easier said than done. Now everyone knows you're probably around somewhere and will read their e-mail or see their Slack message, even early in the morning or later in the afternoon.
1b. I work better in a dedicated environment. My home office has all kinda of other distractions. Homework from my OMSCS classes beckons to be done, personal projects, not to mention kids. The psychological difference of being in a dedicated workspace is significant.
2. Social connections. There are many people I was friendly with but only at the office. Now I only interact with people on my own team or in closely related teams when we are working on some project that overlaps. My 'work world' has shrunk dramatically.
3. Zoom. Just make it stop. My company has dedicated Thursday to be 'no meeting day' but it hasn't really stuck yet. I'm brought onto way more calls now than I ever was when we were in the office. It feels like Zoom has become the substitute for the random communications we used to have, except instead of taking 5-10 minutes everyone schedules 30-60 minutes at a time. And they always find a way to use up every minute plus 2 or 3 after the end time.
I don't actually want to go back full time. I am thinking seriously of selling my Model 3 because having a 60K depreciating asset in the garage that only gets driven a couple hundred miles a month is not the best use of my money. But when the office opens back up eventually, I do think I'll try to spend at least one day a week there. Maybe two.
> Social connections. There are many people I was friendly with but only at the office. Now I only interact with people on my own team or in closely related teams when we are working on some project that overlaps. My 'work world' has shrunk dramatically.
I echo this sentiment. As a junior engineer in a large office, being able to keep track of other projects, who is working on what, what's coming up in a different business area, etc., has been very important for career development. Working from home, I've been "siloed" into my own team to a much larger extent.
My company started up an internal newsletter describing what is going on as well as a quarterly meeting about what has happened and what will happen. I honestly feel like I know more about what is going on before even if I don't speak to other teams at all outside of this.
Just book meetings with others in the company. I think school has trained us for structure and rarely are we willing to initiate without formal processes in place.
Send a meeting invite for 30 minutes to someone in the org with:
"Hi. I'm new and I try to meet one new person every week in areas I'm not familiar."
Pro tip: Either pick someone who seems to have a cult following, looks to be untouchable in the org and or very active on internal company GitHub/Gitlab.
re: 3, it is completely acceptable to require a plan before joining a zoom meeting. If you put something on my calendar without telling me, it gets declined.
I've been told "You have no instinct of self preservation at this job" but being stuck in meetings and not being able to get things done is not what I was hired to do. Tuesdays and Mondays I concede to meeting hell because those are regular team meetings but your little attempt at showing the marketing department is still doing work by scheduling meetings is not that fun :(
> Even with a separate computer, getting it shut away and Slack gone is easier said than done. Now everyone knows you're probably around somewhere and will read their e-mail or see their Slack message, even early in the morning or later in the afternoon.
But... why? Just don't look at work messages outside of work hours. Is that so hard?
Exactly. This line has always puzzled me. My work laptop is the only one with IM/Email on it. When I close the lid at the end of the day people can email me all they want, I won't see it.
I have many of the same reasons as others have outlined already and also have some specialized equipment at the office that is a hassle to work with remotely.
Probably because lurkers have a topic they're finally passionate about. Also, doesn't this site have a rule about assuming the best intentions from posters?
I'm with you on that one. I actually want to go back to the office.
I don't have a dedicated workspace at home, and I'm definitely feeling it. The line between working from home, and living at work, is getting very blurry. Our living room has become an office, our kitchen has become the other office. The bedroom is now the only space sacrosanct.
It's not so much that I miss the office, but I certainly miss "going to work" and "leaving work". That's very difficult to replicate in the space I have - here I am on a lazy saturday afternoon, and "work" is the sleeping thinkpad just to the left of me.
Obviously if this persists, I'm going to need to look into a larger living space. Either going from a 1 bedroom to 3, or somewhere large enough to have a separate dining room we can repurpose (and "young-couple flat with an actual dining room instead of a table floating in the middle of an open-plan room" seems to be quite rare.)
So whenever I hear talk of how much our employers could save by not needing anywhere near as much property - in the back of my head I'm starting to realise it's just shifting that property cost from them to me.
This is the big thing for me. I already pay more than is reasonable for a 550 sq.ft. apartment which obviously doesn't have a separate office. To get a 2 bedroom place I would have to double my rent to get a place that is even close to where my current apartment is.
Yup. My 10,000 company in the Bay Area did an employee poll and it was overwhelming “I’d like the opportunity to work from the office again”.
Keep in mind it wasn’t “I want to be there 8 hours a day, Monday through Friday”. But they definitely wanted the option to work from an office for part of the work week, at a minimum.
> I’d like the opportunity to work from the office again
Is that a useful answer? Of course people would like that opportunity, even if they never used it - it's pure bonus.
More useful question would be "how many times a week (or how many hours) do you plan to work from the office given the opportunity to work from both home and the office?"
It is useful because the company was trying to gauge how many wanted to work from home permanently and wouldn’t care if they never had an office to go to.
I’m not sure it’s that useful though. Someone who wishes it was like it was on 2019 would answer affirmatively to “would you like the opportunity to work from the office again?”
I like working from home right now, but I’d sure love the world to be working such that we could reasonably go back to the office.
I'm not banging any drums but I was excited to get back to an office. I think it's similar to the saying "Dress for Success", in that, when I'm in the office, I focus on work and get more done. Everything around me is work related and focused, there are no distractions, and I really get stuff done.
My situation may be a bit unique, in that I work in an office alone (we are a remote work team, but I still keep an office), and my commute is very short. Still, I've always found it hard working at home and being as productive as at an office.
Same here. I am remote, but, up until the shutdown, I worked out of a coworking space.
Some things have improved. For example, my office-based colleagues' videoconferencing etiquette has improved dramatically. Nowhere near as many people doing things like leaving their camera off and blatantly working on other things instead of paying attention to the meeting.
But my own sense of wellbeing has suffered, all the same. I find it much easier to maintain work-life boundaries when work happens somewhere else.
Yeah, he might as well be rolling from his bedroom to his guest bedroom where he keeps his laptop.
...
In any case, if anyone else here has worked in a nice office setup (4 walls + door, no uptight manager, no long commute, and no army boot camp style communal bathrooms) then you'll know that the main problem with working from an office is those particulars. WFH is nice simply because everybody's house is nicer than a trash office build-out.
CEOs do most of their time: meetings & talking to people. This is their job, they don't do Powerpoint, coding or anything else beside talking and meetings. Both is more draining if you do this 10h a day remotely. To my coachees there is a big push amongst CEOs to get people back in the office, they haven't defined their remote role yet.
Understandable. A lot of family relationships are under a lot of strain right now and enjoying 8hours a day with someone doesn't mean you'll enjoy spending 24/7 with them.
Hopefully, offices open up as an option for people who want separation for various reasons.
Yeah I’d like to go back but 2 days a week. Any more and it’s over kill really. 3 other days can be used for deep work at home. I’m tech guy working in marketing...these type of people love to appear at your desk every so often in the office. Now with Slack I can just not sign in or set my status as away and reply when I want. It’s asynchronous communication and really good for “me”.
And truth is. Everyone is different. I can respect the person that prefers office environment. What we will see is greater flexibility and just less office space in the future.
The real winner outs of all this will be local communities and businesses.
From a government/economy perspective, office workers do contribute a lot to local businesses when they pop out for lunch, coffee, etc. While furlough schemes are gradually wrapping up (eg in the UK), reducing redundancies does depend on some level of normalcy in people's day to day spending.
But why try to support that, instead of allow the economy to adapt?
I spent £180 per week on transport before this, and another £50+ on coffee and meals.
At the end of the year I will have saved enough to get my bathroom refitted, benefitting local tradespeople. I also go out and buy coffee and food locally more often.
The spending won't be lost, it'll change. And if we're lucky it'll change in a way that spreads the money out beyond London.
The real sector that's f*cked is commercial property.
I think that viewpoint definitely does have some validity, but in this case I think rests quite heavily on the idea that post-covid will closely resemble the current way people do things.
Clearly there will be some significant change, but I'm sure it will be a balance between what we had and how things are now.
Once that happens, we don't really want to have lots of businesses to have gone bankrupt. At least not the ones we will still want when things have reached that balance.
Encouraging people to commute just so the coffee joint near the office can survive is economically and ethically disproportional. Commuting is, for most people and at least for a large part of the commute, a waste of time.
I think ideally it should be up to the employee to return when they feel safe.
That being said, I look forward to going back to the office. It’ll be nice to see people again —- few people bother to turn on their video on zoom anymore for anything other than one-on-ones, myself included, and that is starting to feel alienating to me. I don’t think it’s wise having a policy that you must have video enabled, though, it’s nice being able to sprawl out on the couch and get comfortable for a particularly long, boring meeting.
Edit: to address the actual contents of the article, I think below is a better read that doesn’t reduce people’s concerns about remote working to wanting to save sandwhich shops:
Interesting. For whatever reason my team keeps video on for all meeting unless there are bandwidth issues. But I agree now that it would be far worse if folks didn’t show their face regularly.
Same here, I have my own desktop, camera is unplugged and I put it on only for skype with parents. Company didn't give us laptops, so has 0 lever to ask for anything. Most folks on our conf call system (webex) use audio only.
I made tons of other, more useful things (meals, real work, babysitting etc.) during those dull calls that are not really about me (or they cover me for 1 minute in 30-60 minutes). It would be really tiring to keep looking engaged while I couldn't care less about the topic (self pressure is a bitch), 3-6x per day.
For me I always have my camera off. My PC desk is in my bedroom my bf usually has to walk behind me to get to the door. If I had a dedicated office room I'd leave the camera on.
> I think ideally it should be up to the employee to return when they feel safe.
agree, but not as an explicit company policy. what I mean is, if the company officially says something like "the office is open, but you don't have to come back until you feel safe", this can put pressure on employees to agree that they feel safe. if you're one of the last people to return, maybe you start feeling pressure to give some sort of concrete reason why. I think it would result in a lot of people returning when they don't actually feel safe.
imo there are three reasonable positions: a) office is closed, only essential staff allowed on premises; b) office is open, but physical attendance is strictly optional (without any caveats about "feeling safe"); or c) office is open and you have to come back.
edit to address the article you linked: I do feel for those people who do office support work and suddenly have no customers. but doesn't it suggest that a lot of that work wasn't really necessary in the first place? I just can't see how it can be a net harm for remote workers to cook themselves hot lunches every day (or just spend less for a similar cold cut sandwich).
when I went to the office, my choices were leftovers/sandwich from home or takeout. I still have the option of takeout, but I choose it much less often now that I have the option to cook something.
> I don’t think it’s wise having a policy that you must have video enabled
In my anecdotal experience it is good to strongly encourage video use. Well before the pandemic, I noticed that our colleagues in Hyderabad were far more involved and engaged when we made it nearly a requirement that everyone on the call turned on video. Especially once you've visited in person at least once so you have a little bit of a personal connection, video can help preserve some of that. Disembodied voices on zoom calls are the worst thing ever.
Because there are a surprising number of employees and managers who don't produce customer-usable value, and are less important when all the value is being produced from "home" or elsewhere.
The most fascinating thing about this crisis is how it has laid bare the importance of flexible, forward thinking leadership at every level, in every form of organization. Entities that have/will successfully adapt to the new reality we live in are the ones who have given up on the notion of a "return to normal". There will never be a "normal" again. The COVID-19 outbreak was an epochal event. Whether you embrace that and seize the new opportunities it has opened up, or determinedly force your outmoded mindset onto a world that no longer exists will determine who are the winners and losers out of all of this.
The long term shakeout of this will be that everybody realizes that yes, we need offices. They are spaces literally built for working. The required footprint will be smaller, people won't need to be in the office for absolutely everything, the demand for square footage of commercial real estate will decrease a bit—good news for cities who don't build b/c they can convert excess commercial inventory to residential.
But we have also found a vast increase in productivity that we probably won't see in the numbers until we can separate it out from all the other crazy shit that's been happening. The efficiencies gained in every white collar business being forced to make remote work to some degree are significant, and I think as of yet underrated.
So no we're not all going to be sipping cocktails on the beach (though more of us might) but we will be better off. Big exogenous shocks tend to find hidden productivities, even if the shock part really sucks.
I am not so sure productivity has definitely improved.
I agree there was a good head of steam where people were able to quietly and independently work through their "list" of stuff they wanted to do for ages but never had the chance to etc, or whatever had previously been planned out.
Now months later I feel like things are starting to grind a bit and productivity is starting to wane because the "pipe" is starting to dry up. Those ad hoc conversations that lead to a new feature, bumping into someone in the corridor who mentions some big issue they're having, meeting and talking to end users, the offsites to work out the strategy for next quarter, day-long workshops with UX and management and users and post-it notes galore where we thrash out ideas and concepts are a distant memory. Instead we have stilted video calls where people sit on mute 95% of the time and there simply is not as much collaboration as there was before.
Sure stuff still happens, but it feels like to me that the "spark" from people who usually generate ideas and set the agenda/work items is reduced significantly - if not entirely gone - and people are just going through the motions somewhat mechanically and "doing the best they can given the circumstances" etc.
I'm talking about macro level gains. When your small local accountant figures out how to manage work from home a few days per week that creates small, cumulative gains over the whole of the economy. Hard to quantify right now, especially because of all the noise going on. i.e. GDP is currently getting slaughtered for reasons other than lack of productive business practices. I do think that it's harder to notice from the vantage of tech since it is probably the most remote-ready industry. Talking to finance bros I get a very strong sense that people are getting a lot more done in some regards and suffering in others. When offices come back, they'll divide up the tasks appropriate to the milieu and gain some incremental productivity as a result.
Similarly distance education sucks. It's sucked forever buuuuut, with whole countries attempting to manage distance education at the same time across all educational institutions, I am very optimistic that we will find some new techniques that will have huge returns but it will take a while for those techniques to gain dominance.
I could be totally wrong about this, but we'll find out for sure in the next few years.
> When your small local accountant figures out how to manage work from home a few days per week that creates small, cumulative gains
But what are those gains you get from working from home? The only "real" one I can think of is no commute ... but that removes productivity from the businesses now failing and going bankrupt because they have no/reduced customers.
Plus the commute is not just dead time, at least for me I usually triage my inbox before I arrive at the office. Now I just waste time and have an extra bowl of cereal it read the internet for half an hour instead of doing anything useful.
for me the no commute is huge. I went from putting more than 200 miles a week on my car to barely doing that in a month (and a lot of that is just driving for pleasure). I used to spend $120-150 a month on gas; now I don't even visit a gas station every month. I'm also cooking lunch at home instead of going out several times a week for mediocre takeout. saves me a good chunk of change and I'm eating healthier and tastier food.
> Plus the commute is not just dead time, at least for me I usually triage my inbox before I arrive at the office. Now I just waste time and have an extra bowl of cereal it read the internet for half an hour instead of doing anything useful.
this one is kinda on you. you get to decide what to do with the extra time. I wake up a little later now to stay up talking and playing video games with my friends that live further west. not very productive, but I value having a slightly more relaxed work week.
> I'm also cooking lunch at home instead of going out several times a week for mediocre takeout. saves me a good chunk of change and I'm eating healthier and tastier food.
I watched a McKinsey presentation last week which, among other things, went into what ways of doing things forced by the pandemic did they want to carry forwards and what they didn't want to carry forward.
A couple of things that people most plan to carry forward were increased home cooking and online grocery delivery.
You've identified it. We're talking about productivity gains, so that accountant gets as much done as they did before, minus the commute time. At a bare minimum, that's doing 8 hours of work in 8 hours, versus 8 hours of work in 10 hours, or whatever your commute is. People who drive (most people) cannot usually perform economic activity during their commute. Better yet, maybe that accountant figures that they really work for 4-6 hours of the day and the rest is kind of wasted on chitchat or looking busy. The autonomy to quietly get work done in less time will grant that worker even more hours in the day.
There may be GDP effects that counterbalance this. Less money spent on gas or at small businesses near the employer. However, as suburbs have more at-home workers, more lunch spots will pop up nearby so I doubt the GDP effects are big. Sure, some might spend their productivity gains enjoying an extra bowl of cereal, but there's nothing wrong with that.
I think the economy and productivity and everything else that makes economy and work tick are way more complex than your simplification to no commute = massive gains for economy, companies and happy new future for everybody is coming.
I see it in abundance in every single discussion here and elsewhere - people who hate commute but for whatever bad/stupid reason ended up far far away and were wasting hours every day on it suddenly have extra time and its great. These people keep praising current state as the best invention since fire. Most companies aren't organized around that last time I checked.
Maybe its a very US thing and true there on really massive scale. But here in Europe its not like that, not that much at least. Most folks commute 20-50 minutes. That is for 2nd biggest city in the country, smaller are more effective.
There are massive issues right now. Physical fitness is rapidly declining. People are going less out, less sun exposure. Amount of mental issues is understandably shooting through the roof (saw some firures about 5x increase in some cases). Economy is going down the toilet, some parts of it will crash very hard, possibly unrecoverably in current generation. These are effects that will be around for very long time even if we have 100% cure for covid tomorrow for 1 cent per dose.
Plus what parent wrote is absolutely, 100% true - I see people tired from constant conf calls and full remote. Mailboxes are exploding, it becomes hard to track emails even few weeks old. Brainstormings are mostly gone, people became more robot-like. Whatever you gain from not commuting from that middle of nowhere you live in means nothing compared to all this. For companies and for economies.
Future generations should be gaining an incalculable amount from the reduced fuel consumption resulting from the reduced travel and related consumption.
Try to give a generous reading, we're speaking in short paragraphs on the internet. My argument was that a shortened commute is a real productivity increase. That's one of any number of hypotheticals that depend on industry by industry specifics.
If you'll read the thread all the way through, you'll notice that I'm a big fan of offices. I think the issues you and mattlondon raise are real—fitness, mental health, etc.—but those are temporary issues since people will eventually start going back to the office.
We will gain because through this experience, many firms will discover efficiencies from remote work and be able to apply them in a judicious way when things are back to normal.
> There are massive issues right now. Physical fitness is rapidly declining. People are going less out, less sun exposure. Amount of mental issues is understandably shooting through the roof (saw some firures about 5x increase in some cases). Economy is going down the toilet, some parts of it will crash very hard, possibly unrecoverably in current generation. These are effects that will be around for very long time even if we have 100% cure for covid tomorrow for 1 cent per dose.
It'll be really hard to discuss remote work productively if you keep conflating it with COVID-induced issues.
I think it's more that the ability to work remotely has been unlocked for pretty much every business that operates online (which, as I type it, sounds kind of crazy that it didn't already work that way).
At the very least, for the most part, businesses won't forget that possibility, even if they don't rely on it heavily post-pandemic. We've removed a significant blocker, that doesn't necessarily mean that we've reinvented the office dynamic or anything like that, but we've at least opened up a new channel for some businesses that didn't have it before, which IMO is objective improvement.
The same here. In addition, I see social problems accumulate slowly and the team seems to be failing apart. Interpersonal issues are nit solved until they boil in the home office, in person people were more eager to speak up about issues faster and more often.
Now months later I feel like things are starting to grind a bit and productivity is starting to wane because the "pipe" is starting to dry up.
My employer mandated a return to the office about 2 weeks ago. Productivity has declined compared to when we were all WFH for 6 months and I have the stats - pull requests, builds pushed to prod, tickets opened, all are down.
This whole thing is so multifaceted I think it’s hard to draw any conclusions from it. In CA, we have COVID and fires so I’m essentially a prisoner in my house. If you locked me in my office, my productivity might go up too. But now that’s school is on and my kids are locked in here too. Productivity goes down. All in all, it’s a bumpy ride.
Is it possible that folks substituted their commute for extra work hours? There’s really not much to do, socially, when everything is locked down. Some people might take it as a chance to be a workaholic (with the possible burnout not in mind). In the office, I am pressured by folks walking by into leaving “on time” (they don’t realize I often start later than them).
Some people I have talked to are seeing this in their workplaces. They are having to tell the engineers not to work too hard so they don't burn out. Seeing 2+ hours a day of extra work.
I think you may have misunderstood my post. I was asking how that particular employer handled the topic with its employees.
I'm trying to understand how much negotiating power software developers have with their employers these days; in general and on this topic in particular.
Remote work is massively inefficient for some things, even if it is much more efficient for others. Smart firms will do the efficient thing in the most efficient place and see gains across the board as a result.
Sounds like you’re arguing for WeWork not offices as usual.
We don’t need corporate offices full of cubes and butts and chairs.
We need co-working spaces sometimes.
Personally, my employer of 92 is doing fine remote. So, you know, anecdata and all that
There’s that personality though that needs a group to help them decide on the color of a button, and how thick a drop shadow should be.
Let’s hope those folks are able to power through making such difficult decisions alone, without free lattes followed by yoga class to ease the chemically induced anxiety, and over thought fear of making the wrong palette choice.
My goodness, tech millennials might have to move on from college life! For shame.
No. I'm saying many (most) firms will still require offices. The shape of the office will change as firms realize which business functions work best in the office and which are best remote. This will take many years to shake out because not every firm will correctly identify these functions.
If anything, I'd expect offices more built around sometimes meeting and collaborating--not butts in seats all day. I can imagine hot-desking plus a lot of enclaves and meeting rooms.
Hot desking is a damn plague on offices, and the reason WFH has been so nice. No hot-desking. My space is my own and I can make it the way I want, leave what I want around and not worry about theft etc.
I am not sure I think covid will for force a rethink of the cramped open plan hot desking trend of the last - so you might have less desks in the same footage
Needing offices doesn't mean needing them centralized neccessarily. It depends on domain as usual for how close it actually has to be. A doctor's office? Yeah. But if you have accounting siloed off anyway why not just go full remote? They aren't needed there.
I’m all for choice. I would probably do part time in the office but I’ve been living my best life remotely working. My productivity is way up. No driving 2-3 hours a day. Helping my kids with school cooking. Been great.
The expectation from the fortune 500 company I work at is we will eventually go back to normal. Though we are slowly starting to come around to COVID as being potentially a multi-year situation. We’ve got a small number of people in management roles that will return a few days a week in office soon. I’m personally a bit worried this will create an expectation or disadvantage for others not in office. In my observation there is a political commonality to the management returning to office in our company that may be a driver for them.
The best answer I've heard of is a company opening up the offices but mandating that all meetings are over videoconference anyway. Need to get out of the house? There's an office for you. But you don't have an inherent in-person advantage in a meeting.
Data point: Most of my single co-workers, most of whom have roommates, would like to return to working in an office. They miss the social aspect of work, and for some of them it’s hard to work from home.
It's about control. Many managers like to micromanage everything and everybody very much, but that does not work very well remotely. They want to make sure, or at least to be able to make sure, that their workers, well, work. Many are afraid to loose that kind of control, because that's the only thing they can do best.
Is this restricted to first line managers? Or do second line managers micromanager first, directors second, etc. Thankfully have managed to avoid this sort of manager so no first hand experience.
I think, the second level management is the unluckiest of them all. It's impossible to micromanage several lower level managers at the same time. Whoever tries, fails or burns out.
Yeah if anything this pandemic made that abundantly clear. Those in favor of control ran out of any scapegoats. The remote work debate was never about location.
Ironically, working remotely actually made many office workers more productive, but I cannot recall where I've read that. Maybe lack of management interruptions is not as bad as they say.
It completely depends on your home situation. If you have a quiet home office with fast broadband then why not work from home.
If however you and your partner are squeezed round a small table in a studio flat with no air con fighting over crappy WiFi the office makes a lot of sense.
The author finally comes to this point at the end of the article. It’s not all back to the office or the death of the office, it’s somewhere in between. Unfortunately that’s not a good headline.
My question to those stuck two to a studio - are you doing that in a large, expensive city?
Would you not be happier able to be completely unchained from an office location, and able to choose to live anywhere? Then you could likely have a bigger place too.
The thing is, you can get all of what they say they want in any large city in the world much cheaper than large cities in the US if one does their research… my 3br apartment with a home office in Jakarta is still cheaper than the 1B in in any city in US, or in my personal experience, compared to the 3br apt I split with two other grown men in Boston 5 years ago when I first started working remotely (and way nicer and more amenities too).
And now, way more companies open to hiring remote workers!
Yes, but I’m not about to give up my lease and start shopping around for rural real estate during the pandemic. Most of the upside of living in the city is gone for now, but I expect those advantages to come back next year.
“ Kirsty Allsopp led the anti-remote work charge on Twitter, suggesting that if your job can be done from home, it can be done from anywhere in the world. Who would have thought that a couple of months of working in shorts and a T-Shirt has made us more susceptible to being replaced by less expensive folk in India, Myanmar and China?”
It doesn’t matter if they are American or live halfway across the world. If you want amazing talent, you are going to have to pay them well. Talented people are usually well aware of the salary differences between American vs local companies of their region.
The people that tend to take the low offer are usually not in the best position to do the best work compared to their counterpart.
I have met and worked with amazing talent from all across the world. At the same time I have also worked with people that should have never been in the business and were the root cause of project delays caused by buggy features and constant rework. Whether they are American or not, the people in the latter group tended to be in a group that was not happy largely due to their pay. In the cases I probed for more information, I discovered amongst the contracting companies that placed bids, the company took the lowest bid that was offered. No fucking surprise that 8-12 months later that the project is behind by at least half a year.
Moral of the story companies need to pay well - regardless of the location of the person - in order to get a quality product that is pushed to the masses in time and remain competitive.
Maybe management keeps saying this to scare the operations people into working harder. Lots of arsehole managers think this is the way to hold onto staff and make them work harder. Of course it really doesn't work that way, but maybe some managers benefit from this shitty tactic in orthogonal ways.
1. I do wonder why in the US we permit discrimination based on place of residence and place of birth. You can legally discriminate based on accent or other indicators of your place of birth or development, but not legally discriminate for race, gender, sexual orientation. And similarly we are also permitting employers to discriminate based on where you choose, or life exigencies compel you, to live, modulo objective work-related collocation requirements. Maybe a pivot by SJWs is in order.
2. The very largest US companies learned long ago about the importance of a significant geographic economic presence all over this great country aka USA. Alternatively 90+ Members of Congress explained the virtue via anti-trust actions and other targeted legislation. With telework, FANG and the like get the political benefit of constituencies across Congressional districts and States without the overhead of managing a lot of real estate for offices.
3. There are a lot of edge cases being thrown around in this thread. It’s good to hear those voices, but it can make it hard to gain a sense of how many people actually now experience telework as a good thing or a bad thing, especially if/when some fraction of infrastructure cost savings are directly shared with the employees.
4. To the question of the original post, businesses dependent on commuters (including those who own real estate in the commercial area) call up the Mayor, and the Mayor calls CEOs and begs/threatens/pleads/flatters/seduces/cajoles and it is easier to send the droids back to the grind than to hear the Mayor’s minions whine and complain, unless the droids push back hard. [Purely personal guess]
> And similarly we are also permitting employers to discriminate based on where you choose, or life exigencies compel you, to live
Presumably this works both ways. Google does not pay 500K/year to developers in the Portland office. Why should SF developers get paid more? Nobody cared until engineers out of SF wanted to take advantage of remote work but keep the big paycheck.
There is a certain mindset - turns up all the time in economic discussions too - where if a change is made and doesn't lead to a metric-observable consequence in 6 months then that is the end of the discussion.
Working from home is crippling for forming new social connections. Promotions are done based, primarily, on social connections. Hiring too. There is very strong pressure for ambitious people who know how the world works to get back into the office.
And the social aspect of a supervisor understanding what their reports are doing is also easy to underestimate. Offices will be back as soon as it is practicable.
Perhaps we'll see a lot of those 'ambitious' people who talk a good game get overlooked in favour of those who actually deliver?
Supervisors can understand what their reports are.doing without physical presence.
I don't think "the office" will become a thing of the past, but I will welcome it being downgraded as the be-all and end-all for work that is not location sensitive.
I think that you are exactly right. But it is also something that people dont want to admit out loud. Many people need to believe that promotions and hirings are fair. Admitting it is often not, or that it is actually semi fair only had other implications and hurts motivation.
> Working from home is crippling for forming new social connections.
This is really strange to me as someone who has worked remotely for the past several years, because I've made more social connections outside of work than I ever did while working.
> And the social aspect of a supervisor understanding what their reports are doing is also easy to underestimate. Offices will be back as soon as it is practicable.
Sounds like offices will be back as soon as possible for workplaces where supervisors feel compelled to micromanage.
People who want to succeed in management need to play the social game of making friends, showing support, taking an interest in what is going on and getting a feel for what the unofficial power structures in a company are doing.
It is possible to do all that remotely. But people in physical proximity have a massive advantage. If two roughly equal people are trying for a promotion, the one with more face time in the office is quite likely to get it. That is how human social activity works.
Now if literally everyone is at home then it doesn't matter. But as soon as anyone is in the office, everyone who wants a promotion will end up in the office.
I think what this is taught me is that we need both.
It is too much to be in the office all of the time because sometimes "life" happens or you need the ability to have some silence and concentrate.
It is too much to be remote all of the time because software is a team sport and to function optimally, we need to have great human relationships and communication, and those are better done face to face.
We need to find the "happy midpoint" between these two extremes as a working culture.
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[ 4.6 ms ] story [ 331 ms ] threadI personally believe that we're all running on the trajectory and direction we scoped before the shut-down, and as we move into H1 planning next year, things are going to get much slower and more complicated.
Instead of a bunch of programmers spouting group think, I get to interact with writers, artists, indie game devs, etc. Way more innovative than any programmer group I've been in.
We need something to simulate this kind of shared reality somehow. Video conferences don’t do that. I’m sure there will be some innovation that might, I’m betting on cheap, high quality AR headsets. Right now it feels like in 2007... internet on cellphones was a thing but an iPhone with touchscreens had to be invented for something revolutionary to happen...
Working from home has been amazing for my concentration levels.
The latter can be done remotely but definitely isn't anywhere near as smooth or natural I find.
I also miss the social interactions, discussion with colleagues is much easier in person. Lastly, I hope it will reduce the amount of video conferences that crept up considerably.
edit: Not OP obviously.
edit2: Note: Just to make sure, I know this is personal preference and I am perfectly happy with other people being super happy and productive at home!
I've had time to get my head around the separation you talk about, I guess. Also helps that I'm on a small team and we all slack something like "Signing off now, catch you tomorrow" at around 5.30. Puts an end on the day.
What used to be going to work in the morning became exercise. Then, when it was end of day, we went outside. I have kids which made it making more sense. But you can go outside for walk or read book outside etc. The point is that you leave room and do something that causes mental switch.
But I'm not convinced a corporate office is the only, let alone, best option. Have you considered alternatives?
I know this is a personal preference, but for me, physical distance makes my work more productive and my private time more relaxing.
Can you recommend your camera, mic and screen setup? And what brand/model they are? TY!
I use a Blue Snowball mic but any decent USB mic will work. I have a dedicated office and I haven't found using a headset makes it better though YMMV. I'd just as soon not wear a headset unless necessary.
Computer is just a 27" iMac with a 2nd monitor. (Though I actually usually work with video on my main screen and do any work with shared docs etc. on a MacBook.)
Also have an Elgato keylight to get the lighting a bit more even.
ADDED: Probably at least as important is that you're not backlit by a window and you have the camera at maybe a bit above eye level. I've also done a bit of "set decorating" of my background.
If I had the extra space and time to set it all up I would probably use a regular SLR camera on a tripod, and lavalier mic. But the Logitech is a lot more convenient - connects over a single USB through the docking station and just works with zero set up.
The screen is just a regular LG 4K 55" TV mounted on the wall which connects to the laptop docking station, allowing video conferences, slides, etc. to be "thrown" over there when it's convenient.
Additionally, I am definitely a person who prefers in person meetings and conversations. It’s not that I can’t do remote conversations - I’ve even managed remote employees for years - but I value water cooler conversations as a place for spontaneous idea generation or just relationship building, which is just harder remotely. You have to go out of your way to send ideas into the ether, without the physical signs that someone might be receptive to random, possibly stupid musings, or non-sequiter stuff about personal life.
Count me among the people who are fine with others choosing to stay remote, but once it’s feasible and safe to go into the office I would want to do it.
My company (~10k, global, mix of hourly and salaried) has multiple times sent out pandemic guidance asking people to take more time off and stop working so much, they see the extra hours in their time tracking tooling upstream (and it's not a financial play, they're targeting the salaried).
- I get far too distracted by my apartment. The things I hung up on my wall to give myself a sense of personality are the things that I will be distracted by if I have my work laptop open.
- I want a clear separation between being at work and being at home. Otherwise I will make excuses that because I happen to be at home I can do X or Y without consequence. At home I have my personal computer and television within walking distance at all times. By being in the office I deliberately prevent myself from having those options.
- My job requires me to use a specific model of laptop for remote work. The laptop itself is not an ideal environment for getting things done. It is a Lenovo-era ThinkPad with the chiclet keys and they are awful to type on. I have other hardware in my room to plug in, but on top of that I have to RDP to my machine in order to access corpnet things, and the latency is plainly awful. It takes several minutes to just launch it and render the entire desktop completely, control key combinations will frequently not register because of the latency, I'm unable to use my laptop's microphone half the time over RDP, and there are frequent disconnections. And if I'm working at home, all of these annoyances will just pile on top of each other and make me lose motivation to do work entirely.
- On top of that my access credentials expired while I was taking shelter early on, so to use my work laptop from home at that point I had no choice but to go to the office to get them unblocked. I went in and immediately wondered why I hadn't been working from there in months. It was night and day.
I got certified to go into the office as "essential staff," because for me being in the office is what determines if I am productive at all or not. In fact the amount of work that ended up piling up because I was unable to work effectively anymore caused an anxiety episode that I had to take off a few months for. It truly felt like I had been pushed into a corner. Thankfully my team was understanding, it being a devastating pandemic and all.
1. Work/life separation. Even with a separate computer, getting it shut away and Slack gone is easier said than done. Now everyone knows you're probably around somewhere and will read their e-mail or see their Slack message, even early in the morning or later in the afternoon.
1b. I work better in a dedicated environment. My home office has all kinda of other distractions. Homework from my OMSCS classes beckons to be done, personal projects, not to mention kids. The psychological difference of being in a dedicated workspace is significant.
2. Social connections. There are many people I was friendly with but only at the office. Now I only interact with people on my own team or in closely related teams when we are working on some project that overlaps. My 'work world' has shrunk dramatically.
3. Zoom. Just make it stop. My company has dedicated Thursday to be 'no meeting day' but it hasn't really stuck yet. I'm brought onto way more calls now than I ever was when we were in the office. It feels like Zoom has become the substitute for the random communications we used to have, except instead of taking 5-10 minutes everyone schedules 30-60 minutes at a time. And they always find a way to use up every minute plus 2 or 3 after the end time.
I don't actually want to go back full time. I am thinking seriously of selling my Model 3 because having a 60K depreciating asset in the garage that only gets driven a couple hundred miles a month is not the best use of my money. But when the office opens back up eventually, I do think I'll try to spend at least one day a week there. Maybe two.
I echo this sentiment. As a junior engineer in a large office, being able to keep track of other projects, who is working on what, what's coming up in a different business area, etc., has been very important for career development. Working from home, I've been "siloed" into my own team to a much larger extent.
Send a meeting invite for 30 minutes to someone in the org with: "Hi. I'm new and I try to meet one new person every week in areas I'm not familiar."
Pro tip: Either pick someone who seems to have a cult following, looks to be untouchable in the org and or very active on internal company GitHub/Gitlab.
I've been told "You have no instinct of self preservation at this job" but being stuck in meetings and not being able to get things done is not what I was hired to do. Tuesdays and Mondays I concede to meeting hell because those are regular team meetings but your little attempt at showing the marketing department is still doing work by scheduling meetings is not that fun :(
But... why? Just don't look at work messages outside of work hours. Is that so hard?
I wonder why that is 🧐
Edit: weirdly it seems to just be that specific emoji, others don't work
I submitted my comment using Hack (iOS) but the emoji is coming though for me as the black box as well.
Different people have different preferences.
(Please stick to text here too.)
I don't have a dedicated workspace at home, and I'm definitely feeling it. The line between working from home, and living at work, is getting very blurry. Our living room has become an office, our kitchen has become the other office. The bedroom is now the only space sacrosanct.
It's not so much that I miss the office, but I certainly miss "going to work" and "leaving work". That's very difficult to replicate in the space I have - here I am on a lazy saturday afternoon, and "work" is the sleeping thinkpad just to the left of me.
Obviously if this persists, I'm going to need to look into a larger living space. Either going from a 1 bedroom to 3, or somewhere large enough to have a separate dining room we can repurpose (and "young-couple flat with an actual dining room instead of a table floating in the middle of an open-plan room" seems to be quite rare.)
So whenever I hear talk of how much our employers could save by not needing anywhere near as much property - in the back of my head I'm starting to realise it's just shifting that property cost from them to me.
Keep in mind it wasn’t “I want to be there 8 hours a day, Monday through Friday”. But they definitely wanted the option to work from an office for part of the work week, at a minimum.
This doesn’t surprise me in the least.
Is that a useful answer? Of course people would like that opportunity, even if they never used it - it's pure bonus.
More useful question would be "how many times a week (or how many hours) do you plan to work from the office given the opportunity to work from both home and the office?"
I like working from home right now, but I’d sure love the world to be working such that we could reasonably go back to the office.
My situation may be a bit unique, in that I work in an office alone (we are a remote work team, but I still keep an office), and my commute is very short. Still, I've always found it hard working at home and being as productive as at an office.
Some things have improved. For example, my office-based colleagues' videoconferencing etiquette has improved dramatically. Nowhere near as many people doing things like leaving their camera off and blatantly working on other things instead of paying attention to the meeting.
But my own sense of wellbeing has suffered, all the same. I find it much easier to maintain work-life boundaries when work happens somewhere else.
...
In any case, if anyone else here has worked in a nice office setup (4 walls + door, no uptight manager, no long commute, and no army boot camp style communal bathrooms) then you'll know that the main problem with working from an office is those particulars. WFH is nice simply because everybody's house is nicer than a trash office build-out.
CEOs do most of their time: meetings & talking to people. This is their job, they don't do Powerpoint, coding or anything else beside talking and meetings. Both is more draining if you do this 10h a day remotely. To my coachees there is a big push amongst CEOs to get people back in the office, they haven't defined their remote role yet.
Hopefully, offices open up as an option for people who want separation for various reasons.
And truth is. Everyone is different. I can respect the person that prefers office environment. What we will see is greater flexibility and just less office space in the future.
The real winner outs of all this will be local communities and businesses.
I spent £180 per week on transport before this, and another £50+ on coffee and meals.
At the end of the year I will have saved enough to get my bathroom refitted, benefitting local tradespeople. I also go out and buy coffee and food locally more often.
The spending won't be lost, it'll change. And if we're lucky it'll change in a way that spreads the money out beyond London.
The real sector that's f*cked is commercial property.
Clearly there will be some significant change, but I'm sure it will be a balance between what we had and how things are now.
Once that happens, we don't really want to have lots of businesses to have gone bankrupt. At least not the ones we will still want when things have reached that balance.
That being said, I look forward to going back to the office. It’ll be nice to see people again —- few people bother to turn on their video on zoom anymore for anything other than one-on-ones, myself included, and that is starting to feel alienating to me. I don’t think it’s wise having a policy that you must have video enabled, though, it’s nice being able to sprawl out on the couch and get comfortable for a particularly long, boring meeting.
Edit: to address the actual contents of the article, I think below is a better read that doesn’t reduce people’s concerns about remote working to wanting to save sandwhich shops:
https://marker.medium.com/remote-work-is-killing-the-hidden-...
I made tons of other, more useful things (meals, real work, babysitting etc.) during those dull calls that are not really about me (or they cover me for 1 minute in 30-60 minutes). It would be really tiring to keep looking engaged while I couldn't care less about the topic (self pressure is a bitch), 3-6x per day.
agree, but not as an explicit company policy. what I mean is, if the company officially says something like "the office is open, but you don't have to come back until you feel safe", this can put pressure on employees to agree that they feel safe. if you're one of the last people to return, maybe you start feeling pressure to give some sort of concrete reason why. I think it would result in a lot of people returning when they don't actually feel safe.
imo there are three reasonable positions: a) office is closed, only essential staff allowed on premises; b) office is open, but physical attendance is strictly optional (without any caveats about "feeling safe"); or c) office is open and you have to come back.
edit to address the article you linked: I do feel for those people who do office support work and suddenly have no customers. but doesn't it suggest that a lot of that work wasn't really necessary in the first place? I just can't see how it can be a net harm for remote workers to cook themselves hot lunches every day (or just spend less for a similar cold cut sandwich).
How is it not net harm to have to do a chore that you didn't have to do before?
I'm pretty sure that free onsite lunch is rather exceptional. People that don't like to cook can still buy lunch or whatever.
In my anecdotal experience it is good to strongly encourage video use. Well before the pandemic, I noticed that our colleagues in Hyderabad were far more involved and engaged when we made it nearly a requirement that everyone on the call turned on video. Especially once you've visited in person at least once so you have a little bit of a personal connection, video can help preserve some of that. Disembodied voices on zoom calls are the worst thing ever.
But we have also found a vast increase in productivity that we probably won't see in the numbers until we can separate it out from all the other crazy shit that's been happening. The efficiencies gained in every white collar business being forced to make remote work to some degree are significant, and I think as of yet underrated.
So no we're not all going to be sipping cocktails on the beach (though more of us might) but we will be better off. Big exogenous shocks tend to find hidden productivities, even if the shock part really sucks.
I agree there was a good head of steam where people were able to quietly and independently work through their "list" of stuff they wanted to do for ages but never had the chance to etc, or whatever had previously been planned out.
Now months later I feel like things are starting to grind a bit and productivity is starting to wane because the "pipe" is starting to dry up. Those ad hoc conversations that lead to a new feature, bumping into someone in the corridor who mentions some big issue they're having, meeting and talking to end users, the offsites to work out the strategy for next quarter, day-long workshops with UX and management and users and post-it notes galore where we thrash out ideas and concepts are a distant memory. Instead we have stilted video calls where people sit on mute 95% of the time and there simply is not as much collaboration as there was before.
Sure stuff still happens, but it feels like to me that the "spark" from people who usually generate ideas and set the agenda/work items is reduced significantly - if not entirely gone - and people are just going through the motions somewhat mechanically and "doing the best they can given the circumstances" etc.
Similarly distance education sucks. It's sucked forever buuuuut, with whole countries attempting to manage distance education at the same time across all educational institutions, I am very optimistic that we will find some new techniques that will have huge returns but it will take a while for those techniques to gain dominance.
I could be totally wrong about this, but we'll find out for sure in the next few years.
But what are those gains you get from working from home? The only "real" one I can think of is no commute ... but that removes productivity from the businesses now failing and going bankrupt because they have no/reduced customers.
Plus the commute is not just dead time, at least for me I usually triage my inbox before I arrive at the office. Now I just waste time and have an extra bowl of cereal it read the internet for half an hour instead of doing anything useful.
Those businesses may fail, but the money will go somewhere else, somewhere else that doesn't involve me wasting four hours a day.
I occasionaly worked on my commute, but most of the time was wasted, and now I'm free to use the time how I want.
> Plus the commute is not just dead time, at least for me I usually triage my inbox before I arrive at the office. Now I just waste time and have an extra bowl of cereal it read the internet for half an hour instead of doing anything useful.
this one is kinda on you. you get to decide what to do with the extra time. I wake up a little later now to stay up talking and playing video games with my friends that live further west. not very productive, but I value having a slightly more relaxed work week.
I watched a McKinsey presentation last week which, among other things, went into what ways of doing things forced by the pandemic did they want to carry forwards and what they didn't want to carry forward.
A couple of things that people most plan to carry forward were increased home cooking and online grocery delivery.
There may be GDP effects that counterbalance this. Less money spent on gas or at small businesses near the employer. However, as suburbs have more at-home workers, more lunch spots will pop up nearby so I doubt the GDP effects are big. Sure, some might spend their productivity gains enjoying an extra bowl of cereal, but there's nothing wrong with that.
I see it in abundance in every single discussion here and elsewhere - people who hate commute but for whatever bad/stupid reason ended up far far away and were wasting hours every day on it suddenly have extra time and its great. These people keep praising current state as the best invention since fire. Most companies aren't organized around that last time I checked.
Maybe its a very US thing and true there on really massive scale. But here in Europe its not like that, not that much at least. Most folks commute 20-50 minutes. That is for 2nd biggest city in the country, smaller are more effective.
There are massive issues right now. Physical fitness is rapidly declining. People are going less out, less sun exposure. Amount of mental issues is understandably shooting through the roof (saw some firures about 5x increase in some cases). Economy is going down the toilet, some parts of it will crash very hard, possibly unrecoverably in current generation. These are effects that will be around for very long time even if we have 100% cure for covid tomorrow for 1 cent per dose.
Plus what parent wrote is absolutely, 100% true - I see people tired from constant conf calls and full remote. Mailboxes are exploding, it becomes hard to track emails even few weeks old. Brainstormings are mostly gone, people became more robot-like. Whatever you gain from not commuting from that middle of nowhere you live in means nothing compared to all this. For companies and for economies.
If you'll read the thread all the way through, you'll notice that I'm a big fan of offices. I think the issues you and mattlondon raise are real—fitness, mental health, etc.—but those are temporary issues since people will eventually start going back to the office.
We will gain because through this experience, many firms will discover efficiencies from remote work and be able to apply them in a judicious way when things are back to normal.
It'll be really hard to discuss remote work productively if you keep conflating it with COVID-induced issues.
At the very least, for the most part, businesses won't forget that possibility, even if they don't rely on it heavily post-pandemic. We've removed a significant blocker, that doesn't necessarily mean that we've reinvented the office dynamic or anything like that, but we've at least opened up a new channel for some businesses that didn't have it before, which IMO is objective improvement.
My employer mandated a return to the office about 2 weeks ago. Productivity has declined compared to when we were all WFH for 6 months and I have the stats - pull requests, builds pushed to prod, tickets opened, all are down.
I'm trying to understand how much negotiating power software developers have with their employers these days; in general and on this topic in particular.
IMHO now is probably a good time to invest in meeting-place providers like Regus.
You said this, and then wrote the rest of your post about the opposite? Why do you think we'll need offices?
We don’t need corporate offices full of cubes and butts and chairs.
We need co-working spaces sometimes.
Personally, my employer of 92 is doing fine remote. So, you know, anecdata and all that
There’s that personality though that needs a group to help them decide on the color of a button, and how thick a drop shadow should be.
Let’s hope those folks are able to power through making such difficult decisions alone, without free lattes followed by yoga class to ease the chemically induced anxiety, and over thought fear of making the wrong palette choice.
My goodness, tech millennials might have to move on from college life! For shame.
If however you and your partner are squeezed round a small table in a studio flat with no air con fighting over crappy WiFi the office makes a lot of sense.
The author finally comes to this point at the end of the article. It’s not all back to the office or the death of the office, it’s somewhere in between. Unfortunately that’s not a good headline.
Would you not be happier able to be completely unchained from an office location, and able to choose to live anywhere? Then you could likely have a bigger place too.
And now, way more companies open to hiring remote workers!
Great article. I recommend taking out the word "cynically". That is what this is about.
“ Kirsty Allsopp led the anti-remote work charge on Twitter, suggesting that if your job can be done from home, it can be done from anywhere in the world. Who would have thought that a couple of months of working in shorts and a T-Shirt has made us more susceptible to being replaced by less expensive folk in India, Myanmar and China?”
It doesn’t matter if they are American or live halfway across the world. If you want amazing talent, you are going to have to pay them well. Talented people are usually well aware of the salary differences between American vs local companies of their region.
The people that tend to take the low offer are usually not in the best position to do the best work compared to their counterpart.
I have met and worked with amazing talent from all across the world. At the same time I have also worked with people that should have never been in the business and were the root cause of project delays caused by buggy features and constant rework. Whether they are American or not, the people in the latter group tended to be in a group that was not happy largely due to their pay. In the cases I probed for more information, I discovered amongst the contracting companies that placed bids, the company took the lowest bid that was offered. No fucking surprise that 8-12 months later that the project is behind by at least half a year.
Moral of the story companies need to pay well - regardless of the location of the person - in order to get a quality product that is pushed to the masses in time and remain competitive.
2. The very largest US companies learned long ago about the importance of a significant geographic economic presence all over this great country aka USA. Alternatively 90+ Members of Congress explained the virtue via anti-trust actions and other targeted legislation. With telework, FANG and the like get the political benefit of constituencies across Congressional districts and States without the overhead of managing a lot of real estate for offices.
3. There are a lot of edge cases being thrown around in this thread. It’s good to hear those voices, but it can make it hard to gain a sense of how many people actually now experience telework as a good thing or a bad thing, especially if/when some fraction of infrastructure cost savings are directly shared with the employees.
4. To the question of the original post, businesses dependent on commuters (including those who own real estate in the commercial area) call up the Mayor, and the Mayor calls CEOs and begs/threatens/pleads/flatters/seduces/cajoles and it is easier to send the droids back to the grind than to hear the Mayor’s minions whine and complain, unless the droids push back hard. [Purely personal guess]
Presumably this works both ways. Google does not pay 500K/year to developers in the Portland office. Why should SF developers get paid more? Nobody cared until engineers out of SF wanted to take advantage of remote work but keep the big paycheck.
Working from home is crippling for forming new social connections. Promotions are done based, primarily, on social connections. Hiring too. There is very strong pressure for ambitious people who know how the world works to get back into the office.
And the social aspect of a supervisor understanding what their reports are doing is also easy to underestimate. Offices will be back as soon as it is practicable.
Supervisors can understand what their reports are.doing without physical presence.
I don't think "the office" will become a thing of the past, but I will welcome it being downgraded as the be-all and end-all for work that is not location sensitive.
This is really strange to me as someone who has worked remotely for the past several years, because I've made more social connections outside of work than I ever did while working.
> And the social aspect of a supervisor understanding what their reports are doing is also easy to underestimate. Offices will be back as soon as it is practicable.
Sounds like offices will be back as soon as possible for workplaces where supervisors feel compelled to micromanage.
>There is very strong pressure for ambitious people who know how the world works to get back into the office.
It is possible to do all that remotely. But people in physical proximity have a massive advantage. If two roughly equal people are trying for a promotion, the one with more face time in the office is quite likely to get it. That is how human social activity works.
Now if literally everyone is at home then it doesn't matter. But as soon as anyone is in the office, everyone who wants a promotion will end up in the office.
It is too much to be in the office all of the time because sometimes "life" happens or you need the ability to have some silence and concentrate.
It is too much to be remote all of the time because software is a team sport and to function optimally, we need to have great human relationships and communication, and those are better done face to face.
We need to find the "happy midpoint" between these two extremes as a working culture.