Poll: Do you prefer the office or work from home?
@bckr submitting this as an Ask HN[1], but I think we would all get better insight if this were a poll
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30239283
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30239283
370 comments
[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 373 ms ] threadI get more work done at home than I ever did in an office and I have 7 kids and we homeschool.
I started my career in an office - a very fancy one at that with an incredible view and great coworkers. But office life has never been for me.
> I have 7 kids and we homeschool
Impressive.
For me? Never again.
I like the office and am currently working in the office but I just... get up and leave whenever I want. Come back whenever I want. No need to pretend to work 9-5.
The programmer then informs the manager that this is what it is like to write code all day. But since programming looks like you are just sitting there not doing anything for much of the time, then you have to pretend to be doing something whenever someone walks by so it doesn't look like you are just goofing off (otherwise they feel that they can interrupt you breaking your train of thought). And that makes programming less efficient.
The manager was then enlightened.
But like the real fix is a path to a much better optimum, which is giving employees autonomy, trusting them, rewarding them adequately, getting them to actually care, so that they don't need to be watched over as individual code monkeys.
I am a hard worker because I send 2AM emails (which I may have scheduled in advance to give that impression).
> Why are you pretending to program the full 9-5?
I'm not, because I now work from home. Where people value my actual work output, and not the hours I'm sitting in a chair, where my manager can see me.
At home, I get a "guilty" feeling if I don't work 100% effectively for the whole day. At the office, I never felt pressured to "code" the full eight hours, as I could see nobody was doing so (in Slack it seems everyone else is always green/present.)
At the office, I'd fill the day with conversations, lunch and coffee breaks, and other meaningful interactions with other programmers, managers, designers and various other stakeholders.
At home, when I need to take a mental break I just get bored and start procrastinating with the computer. If I go see my family to the other room we talk family business.
I look forward to returning to the office. Immense amounts of information just never get communicated over Slack & Zoom. I feel like working in a dark tunnel for the past 2 years and going.
If I wanted to sharply focus on a specific task for the whole eight hours I could do unlimited remote already pre-Covid. I used this option rarely, as these days could get quite exhausting.
When WFH I'll often just check out for multiple hours in the middle of the day. Go on a walk, take a nap, whatever... Sometimes I'll just do more hours later that night to make up for it, or sometimes I'm just on top of everything anyway, and the break helps keep my mind fresh.
I never felt like I had the ability to do things like that when in the office
In my experience, remote work typically has no direct productivity downsides, but team cohesion absolutely can take a hit. I find being in the same room with someone doesn’t help us work any better, but having been in the same room with them at some point (ideally not all that long ago) absolutely does, likely even more so having had a beer with them.
I'm sure this varies based on the type of work you're doing, but I found the hit to team cohesion led to long term productivity losses. At first we were getting more done than ever. As time went on our raw work output day-to-day did not decrease but a lot of unneeded work that previously would have been headed off at planning and discussion stages would get through.
This was on a team that is specifically doing speculative high risk/reward work so that might be applicable to a lot fewer people than I imagine.
It obviously ought to, right, or else why does (should) anyone care about team cohesion in the first place?
Of course, in the end this all affects the company productivity, but it's really not as straight-forward [0] as the productivity of a single team.
[0] "straight forward" is a bit of an overstatement for measuring team productivity, but that's a different discussion.
Why?
Writing software, especially in a large organization, is often an inherently social job, just like many others. You often need heads down time to actually get into flow and produce code, but that doesn't mean interaction with others isn't a significant part of it as well.
I don't know much about the nitty gritty of what kernel deving looks like, but it's possible that the work there looks more like longer stretches of heads down time than average. E.g., I can imagine you could be pretty impactful being heads down for weeks or months at a time micro-optimizing the performance of various components. I think this tends not to be true of most software.
One thing I do know about the social dynamics of Linux development is that Linus can be an asshole and flame at people a lot. You could worry that this would be more intense and thus worse in an office, but IME this kind of stuff tends to get better once people can see each other as actual humans and not just text on a screen.
I mean that e.g., software in large organizations often needs to fit in with the rest of the software the organization is writing, and that producing code is only part of the work; there's also working with others to find out what the right code to produce is.
I can only imagine the amount of institutional knowledge that is being lost right now. Workers that are low to the ground and sociable who form informal bonds between departments are hurt by being limited to only online interactions, and as a result, the organization suffers too.
Now in 2022 it sort of feels like living at the office, and the lack of separation between the two can be annoying. The flexibility to pick when I want “intense focus” time at the office has been working really well for me. (Thank goodness my company allowed us to be hybrid.)
Other great reasons: not spreading germs. get chores done during lunch break. see more of kids. look after pets. easy take holidays where you work from another location. own office space. decent coffee machine. not being caged in a city centre during lunchtime. bring in washing if it rains. be near school if there is a problem (like kid is sick). conversation over zoom means both of you get to work at a desk and have good ergonomics while solving an issue.
Working in a remote first organization is better. No asses to kiss. Just results. And ample amounts of free time.
Unless the hybrid schedule is optional, expect to be back full time in under a year! You'll know you're about to go back when your managers manager has an all hands and mentions something about people being confused or not knowing when their team will be in the office.
They'll manufacture consent by doing a bunch of surveys that they claim people want to go back.
Then 3 months later they'll mandate teams return to work full time (with a flex alternating friday off or something) for 'team cohesion'.
You can actually be a change management consultant. It's big money.
Now, I know that I badly need some amount of in-person time with my coworkers on a weekly basis, or I go crazy.
It's a motivational thing for me. I thrive on solving problems for and with other people, and there's an "out of sight, out of mind" effect for me over zoom. It's just harder for me to get my brain going.
I wish I were better at WFH - maybe with the right type of work I would be. I love everything else about it! My home office setup is awesome, I always hated commuting, I love the flexibility of doing chores during the day or getting some work done at 11pm because I don't feel like sleeping.
But man, I miss people.
I've always loved working from home (and was doing it for almost a year before the pandemic started), I'm quite self-driven, but I do recognize that it can be difficult to get back into the groove once you've been out of it for a while - meeting colleagues in person would help with that aspect.
Ideally, if my colleagues weren't some 3000 km away, I wouldn't mind going to the office once a week or something.
I agree I think the best of both worlds would be some sort of schedule, maybe ~1-ish day a week on average. Personally I'd love something like Monday-Tuesday in the office every other week. But everybody is different, which in turn makes it really hard to coordinate and make everyone happy.
Yeah this would be fine/nice as well.
If nothing else there's at least been a strong step towards the potential of WFH with all of this, even though it hasn't lead to ideal outcomes.
But that is not without difficulties.
This is the sort of honesty I’d love to hear when interviewing candidates.
There are good and bad fits for that attitude
But I don't know, I only learned recently that my own team members had been working around a broken feature that I maintain for over a year without telling me. I kind of feel like I've been abandoned.
I keep getting this happen. Someone wants an improvement/fix to something and just doesn't communicate that, probably because it has to be very intentional now, whereas it used to be something you'd mention over coffee when you saw the right person.
If I could offer some unsolicited advice - tell them that you feel that way! I am quite confident that no one wants you to feel abandoned, and they would be unhappy to know they're making you feel that way. They might not be able to fix the situation all at once, but I hope you're able to get a better situation soon, one way or the other.
My employers are getting half the efficiency they used to get. Anything I used to find enjoyable about the work is now gone.
I'm probably going to go on a looong sabbatical soon.
On the other hand, the pandemic really took the fun from meeting people all day, so I don't think I'd be happy in an office either, at least under the current circumstances.
On the flip side, being able to drop everything and go to the DMV without feeling the social pressure to skip lunch or work late is nice. I feel like I only have a finite number of super productive hours a day, and it's not eight, and they're not always squished together back to back.
Although, it's doubly tough when things aren't good at home. Because during those times, the office provided some solace. But overall it's been positive.
Have you gotten at least some kind of positive tradeoff in terms of more friends+family time, exercise, etc?
But at some point I realized that I really missed work people! I got into software engineering because I love talking about engineering with other really smart engineers. Took me a while to realize that was what was missing.
One company was absolutely abysmal. No video chat ever. None. Never saw my coworkers' faces. Who can work like that? Obviously they can, but man that sucked.
Second company was a bit better, but not great. Avoided collaboration and/or video chat pretty strongly but not entirely. Which was weird because when we did do it, everybody was very chatty and they were also good working sessions.
Current company has been great. Strong collaborative culture but they also respect if somebody just needs to focus solo.
I would say that overall this company scratches like, maybe, 80% of my itch as far as being immersed with other engineers (in terms of actual collaborative work, and random tech talk bullshit) is concerned.
Any companies not offering remote now that instead want me to commute to an office and lose all of that personal time, are an immediate rejection.
On the other hand, young professionals who have moved into a city and our just developing their career, they want to be among peers, socializing , learning and building a network.
Now I almost long to get off work and do some choirs outside instead.
I would like to talk about it but I'm kind of sick of seeing the discussion framed in term of people who only socialize at the office.
The fact is, in the office we have many in-person interactions spread throughout the day. Socialization isn't fungible, we can't simply replace interactions in one context with interactions in another context and assume people will be happy with it.
I got into software engineering because I like solving problems, but also because I love solving problems with really smart people. Turns out that it feels really good to do that in person!
Coffee breaks, lunch outings, being able to stop by someone's desk and shoot the shit or see what they're working on -- I've realized that these things are not only enjoyable for me, but critical for both the actual quality of my work and my motivation to do it. Not to mention any kind of whiteboarding / collaborative discussion, which I think is pretty obviously nicer in person.
So far, nothing I have tried remotely gives me the same kind of satisfaction that just physically being with my work partners does. I do think there's something very deeply ingrained in me that's responsible for that, and I know it's definitely not something everyone wants or needs.
So long as the other person feels the same way. One of the reasons I enjoy working from home is people can no longer wonder by and shatter my concentration because they're on a break. They can ping me in chat and I'll get to it in my break.
thanks to hybrid work, ppl can hide at home all they want.
ps: pls also consider parents that get interrupted far more frequently when working from home.
But why do such people say such silly things if it's not true?
Do I think it's 100% true?
No, but it feels that way for them.
I f*king hate useless meetings where my time is wasted. I had a coleague express the same thing about a topic.
Business replied "well, we only had 4 meetings and at least 2 were really required so it was not excessive".
So who was right?
Everybody was right, business did not feel it was excessivez the developers felt it was excessive.
WFH works, 2 years of pandemic proved it does. Some people like it and some people don't, it's not about arguments but about preferences.
I used to really hate it, now I just hate it -- like letting someone else sample my food.
I really hated it because of all of the pollitics and egos and because I was really passionate and brought a lot of insight to the table while 90% the time the others just brought their egos to the table.
Now I'm just jaded and I hate it because 90% of the time the solution really doesen't matter and people just waste eachothers times in endless meetings about details that really don't matter.
Just let them do it before you taste it, and then pretend you're royalty and thank them for testing it for poison.
What worked for them was therapy, creating a morning routine of moving their work forward and demoing their progression with short <2 minute Loom/Slack video clips. They also invested into one of those drawing tablets for $80.
Like another commenter said, I find it easier to care about the concerns of people around me, so if that's a bunch of people at my company then I'll care more about them and what they need. It makes a difference for me if physical presence and work presence are aligned.
Probably for a similar reason, I've found that I can't reach 100% productivity consistently (over weeks) unless I'm in an environment where people around me are working. So that means finding a coworking space wherever I go.
Also, in-person conversation is so much higher bandwidth than anything else. Those couple hundred ms of latency do matter. Being able to party on the same physical whiteboard is really nice.
I have this sentiment, yet I hang out with one or two friends once or twice a week, occasionally some family every couple weeks or so, and constantly on a daily basis get to socialize with the parents of my dog's friends while on walks.
None of that makes up for working alongside people. And I don't just mean work specifically but forming connections with my coworkers. I'm a huge proponent of making real social connections with coworkers so that it's easier to be collaborative with them. There will be times when your work is not siloed and you either need context about something that your coworker has contributed to before but you haven't, vice versa, etc. and it helps if you both have some kind of connection and stake in the work relationship. If there's no stake in it, then other than the bare minimum (such as not wanting someone to totally screw up something owned by the team), nothing will be contributed. It can make gathering context brutal, work more competitive (resource starvation where one coworker can let their coworker have more trouble which results in them getting a better pick of things to work on, etc.).
I work remotely for a U.S. company with coworkers from Ethiopia and other countries.
Pre-pandemic, they flew me to the U.S. and I met the U.S. and Indian coworkers, and we went to a conference together. It was a HUGE help - but I think it's something that can be done a few times a year or even once a year, doesn't need to be an everyday thing.
I miss the office for..
- Free and convenient food.
- Social chatter & engagement.
- Making friends with employees who I don't know and connecting with new employees.
- Work life separation (balance).
- Proper workstation, climate controlled environment.
- Sense of belonging - team outing, after hours beers..
- Intra and inter company sports and games.
- Meeting potential dates.
That's the problem with people that doesn't want WFH: they also want their coworkers to work at the office so they don't "go crazy".
What I do know is that I did work from home for four months and I was miserable. Any job where the norm is at least three weeks at the office would be a huge plus for me, and if choosing between jobs that are mostly remote and jobs that are mostly in the office, I would take a paycut for the job that is mostly in the office. I realize it may be the other way around for other people and am really curious what the norm will be in the end.
Personally just being lifted from a 1h + 1h car commute has dramatically increased the quality of my day to day life, so much that friends and relatives noticed an uplift in my mood.
I’m the opposite. Part is that I irrationally hate lifestyle change. Part is that I work with so many teams.
I hated switching. I liked my busy workspace and being able to jump in and help people around me, get info, etc. I had the benefit of also having a private office I could retreat to when I needed long focus time.
I also love routine. I like predictability of my schedule.
But so much of the teams I primarily work with had been spread across the country. 3 cities at the time. They missed out on the hallway chatter and always felt behind.
After a couple months, I got into my groove. I was collaborating with the folks outside my city (and building) much better. But I was overwhelmed by notifications, and was working too many hours.
I disabled all chat notifications on my phone. I started enforcing a beginning of the day and my kids pop in to remind me it’s over (I lose track of time when I’m focused).
Those teams are now in 6 cities. I’ve learned to schedule collab time, offer myself up to teach new folks when I have time and jump in on things I don’t know the same way.
I also schedule 1 hour meetings with close coworkers for 10 minutes of decision just so the conversation can wander. We have an open biweekly call to just joke and wander into something brilliant.
Folks got super aggressive with meetings. So I block off focus time on my calendar and reject meetings that should be emails. I reject emails for things that should be public. I ignore “good morning” chat messages from people I don’t know. When I’m focusing, I disable notifications and turn my speakers off.
I’m more productive and collaborative now. I have more control with people not able to just walk up to my desk. I’m not distracted by others’ more appealing problems except when I plan to be. Folks in other cities have equal access as local.
I also switched to waking up early for my quiet time at home, before the kids wake up, and not staying up late. I stopped eating lunch out, but always take an hour away. Sometimes I just eat a snack and take a power nap. I quit drinking soda. I stopped caffeine after noon. COVID got me doing outdoor activities that I love regularly out of necessity.
I’m 60lbs lighter than when COVID hit, and just feel a lot healthier. It wasn’t an arching intentional goal, just a change here and there to feel better.
Also, I’m naturally an introvert. At work people don’t see that because I am jovial, kinda loud, and opinionated. But when I clock out, I’m done. I just want to chill with my family.
I’ve dabbled in hobbies. Outdoors stuff like fishing and hiking. Picked up sewing bags and masks. Small home improvements. Goofing around with guitars and drums. Making my own guitar pedals. I just don’t force myself to finish anything, it’s just entertainment.
We’re starting back “hybrid” soon, with “team days.” For some that’ll mean 2-3 days per week in office.
But my teams aren’t local, so I really only see that happening when we can get folks traveling again for planning events. I’m not going to the office to Zoom, when I can do it at home without shoes. Maybe the occasional whiteboarding session. I haven’t found an adequate digital replacement for that.
I don't miss the office-loud-laugher, or the drive-by-tell-you-a-dumb-joke guy when "I'm just trying to get my work done please". My manager wisely scheduled a daily team meeting so I get to see my team every day via Teams.
But I've noticed that our jr programmers haven't improved since 2 years ago.
I've been working from home for over six years. I never want to return to the office. I will change careers before I return to a software development office.
Everyone is different, but my ideal work environment is library quiet. No music and certainly no overheard conversations or people constantly walking past. I’ve never worked in an office that was willing to provide such an environment, but I have it at home.
Another colleague reused his earmuffs and earplugs from the gun range, but I think most of those are pretty uncomfortable.
Ideally, everybody struggling to work in an office would wear big, absurd earmuffs.
Maybe if management looked around and saw that 80% of their employees were geared up like they were working on the tarmac of a busy fucking airport just to get some work done, they would rethink the hell of open offices.
Nah. They wouldn't.
The only people I've met who seem to like them are people who do sales for a living or the exact kind of coworkers who I would really not like to be in an open office with.
I have a really nice office in Seattle. Since I am the second most tenured person on the team, I even have a water view and am right next to the snacks. I haven't seen the inside of this office since May 2020, and probably never will again.
All of my colleagues and I have agreed that we don't see the need to go back and our employer is likely going to sell our admin building (we have several other buildings for actual patient services) and distribute some of the money to those of us who worked in that building as a bonus or as an allowance to buy equipment for home.
I've visited the open offices at friends who work for Microsoft and Google and they're just awful hives of noise. I would rather have my own door and own bathroom.
Can walk, get some exercise/sunshine, nap, even have a quickie with your partner or look at porn, etc. No matter how awesome one's office is, those things are generally not options.
And even if you bike to work that latter point still stands due to the passively homicidal assholes driving cars out there.
I get the occasional day off to go do things that don’t require brain. They only pay for bites of the donut with the jam in them.
It’s a net win for everybody.
I think of the benefit of the office being the opportunity for continuous partial attention. It affords the ability to be aware of what's going on about you, to learn & see a lot more. But one has to be attentive-ish, have some receptivity, to benefit from this. I feel like I can work without interruption in an office. But it's a risk or a sacrifice to do so: giving up my option of awareness, giving up the chance to share, the chance to learn or teach, the chance to discuss, to focus on my own things.
Rather than argue against open office as a bad construct, my main grievance is that most engagement points are synchronous & exclusive. Those not in the room at the time are not included, in most organization. Most learning, most deciding happens in the moment, in confidence. The open-office works because people are unable to find good forums for important conversations, and so ad-hocracy is an acceptable all-connected fallback.
Remote tends to be way more deliberate. Ad-hoc interaction is replaced by smaller networks of who-wants-to-talk-to-who. Most actions are private & hidden. It's even less communicative.
I'd far prefer an organization that can find more enduring, participatory, accessible ways of communicating. True for organizations which are remote, and those that are in person.
Exactly this.
The "hmm I should get lunch WHAT DO YOU MEAN IT'S THREE O'CLOCK? CRAP" days are the most productive.
I absolutely cannot get anything done with open office floor plans. And commuting is life wasted.
I get way more work done in a lot less time, save time and stress due to the commute, see my family more, and have significantly better mental health due to all those previous points.
I did miss the office a bit earlier in my WFH career when video conferencing wasn’t as common, but these days it’s not an issue at all and you still get face time with your colleagues etc.
This is extremely situational. When I was in a larger house and had no kids, WFH was an easy way to avoid interruptions.
Moving to a smaller house (more expensive city) and having kids flipped the situation around. Avoiding interruptions at home was extremely difficult because I was always only a door away from someone asking a “quick favor”.
It’s not just me: As a remote manger I can almost always tell when summer break starts for everyone’s area because there’s a stepwise decline in productive when people’s kids aren’t in school.
Likewise, the office environment makes all the difference. I’ve worked in open-office spaces where everybody respected each other and concentration was the default. I’ve also worked in private-office spaces where I could expect knocks on my door every 15 minutes or less because the culture was so bad that interrupting the engineers was the default practice.
Lately, I’ve felt that fully remote has been the worst of all worlds. Once Slack becomes the default I’m pinged from every angle all day long. It’s hard to push back against people who want answers now now now and know they can get your attention by typing the right few characters into Slack. Comes down to culture, but Slack makes it easy for people to quietly interrupt people directly whereas it was much easier to police the interruptions (as a manager) when I could literally see the offenders bothering the engineers.
I lived in an 800 square foot home with one bathroom for five of the last six years, with my wife and two children. My desk was beside the front entryway, with no door.
> Avoiding interruptions at home was extremely difficult because I was always only a door away from someone asking a “quick favor”.
That's a problem of setting boundaries. It never gets easier, but at least the spouse works and the kids go to school and day care.
> I’ve felt that fully remote has been the worst of all worlds. Once Slack becomes the default I’m pinged from every angle all day long. It’s hard to push back against people who want answers now now now and know they can get your attention by typing the right few characters into Slack.
More setting of boundaries. Be firm and say no. Better, don't respond outside of your core hours unless you're explicitly on pager duty.
Whenever I hear about somebody's hellish Slack culture at their workplace and they blame Slack I always think, "That sounds like a bad office culture that would be bad even if Slack was removed from the equation."
Slack builds a culture of hyper-immediate distraction which seems difficult to avoid.
With effort it can be tamed. Filters and so on. But I've never gotten to a great place with it in modern times. With new sources of crap pouring into my inbox every day it is, at best, something that can be tamed but requires constant attention and maintenance.
Of course, this is all subjective and personal. It's working for you! Kudos. =)
Yes, that is the key.
Beauty of email is that it can be done because it's all open protocols.
I've been dragged into a signal channel and that's one untamable firehose. Sequential stream of messages via proprietary UI so there is nothing I can do to automatically file messaged into various folders. Nothing I can do to auto-process certain messages, nothing I can do to mark some things read and some unread, etc..
Email allows for infinite flexibility in configuring it just how you need to work best.
If you have just one inbox and everything lands there all the time, I can see how that's a firehose that's not going to be pleasant. But with email the tools exist to customize this away.
(above paragraph edited for clarity)
It's been awesome. Very respectful environment. People @ you but you are not expected to stop what you're doing.
By the same token, I can @ others without fear that I'm causing them an undue interuption, because asynchronous messaging is the norm.
The point being, if you need an immediate reply, you're expected to explicitly mention that. Otherwise it's assumed to be async.
It's working well IMO.
Where I work people can call me on slack or otherwise of it is urgent (no one has abused it so far).
If I am in hyperfocus, anything in text is assumed asynchronous and won't get looked at until I resurface.
Thanks!
How does this work?
Becuase the problem as a recipient is that now I still need to read every.single.message.all.the.time to see what it says, which is ridiculous waste of time and source of continuous interruption.
I much prefer to check email + slack once or twice a day at most, batch process them then. It's the only way to get any work done.
When you have a moment, read the message.
Go back to what you were doing before.
It literally takes seconds to read a message and decide “is everything on fire and I need to respond to this or can it wait until later”.
Mostly, it can wait.
If it can wait, wait. Ignore it. Go back to what you were doing.
Take your time folk, you dont have to respond to every email or every message ten seconds after reading it.
…to be fair, it is a bit rude to leave it for 4 hours before you even look to see what it was.
But hey, as long as you set expectations with your coworkers, that’s fine too.
Slack is only a problem if you can’t control your Pavlovian response to the little red icon.
You’re not a dog; you can choose how you respond to this stuff.
You make it sound like this part is zero-cost, when it absolutely is not.
This comic expresses it more clearly than I could in words: https://heeris.id.au/2013/this-is-why-you-shouldnt-interrupt...
I guess your company has a lower message rate than what I've seen. In current company there are 30+ channels and a message arrives on average about every minute.
Each of those "few seconds to read" is a mental interrupt. Happening every minute. This leads to not being able to switch onto concentration mode to do actual work all day long.
The only solution is to switch it off entirely, only check at specific times. But if the company culture is to expect prompt response at all times, that's a conflict.
Regular vanilla channel messages should never be expected to be synchronous. As you noted, that's completely unworkable.
DM's and mentions should be IMO be "semi-synchronous." Don't expect an immediate reply unless you've explicitly told the recipient that there's a blocker or there's some other time-critical situation.
Admittedly yes, that does require some attention on the recipient's part, because they have to scan the incoming message to see if it's critical. And some discipline on the sender's part. And even a few seconds of interruption can (worst-case) result in 20-30 minutes of lost productivity if one has to dump their entire mental stack.
So, yes it doesn't scale up endlessly. Multiple "semi-synchronous" mentions/DMs per hour would be a real attention drain. Possibly appropriate for managers, but a real deal breaker for individual contributors.
But at that point I would see it as an issue with the role or with the culture itself.
How would you establish a healthy office communication culture? If everybody is always asynchronous, how could anybody be notified of time-critical stuff like blockers etc?It is unworkable! But becomes the expectation.
> How would you establish a healthy office communication culture?
The same way it has worked well for the ~30 years of my career before slack-obsession. Have something to discuss, put it on the calendar for the relevant people. For smaller things, send email and don't expect an immediate response. If things are truly on fire right now, make a phone call.
Curiously, in decades past we always used IRC which is basically same thing as slack. But IRC never grew this culture of obligated insta-response, it was more for chatter that one could read or ignore depending on how busy. Not sure why. Perhaps because slack is a paid product, it's now part of the business so everyone is expected to take it Very Seriously and be on it all the time.
1. Physically walked over to my desk and interrupted me in person
2. Sent me an email, often expecting a near-instant reply, requiring me to choose between "getting work done" and "monitoring my email."
This is why I feel that it's more about company culture than the tools themselves.
To be clear, a couple years back I did work at a company with a horrible Slack culture. I don't mean to defend Slack per se, and I definitely don't think it's the answer, but I don't think it's the problem either. Inconsiderate coworkers gonna be inconsiderate.
Amen. This is why I strongly feel it's a culture issue and not a technology thing."Back in the day," generally it was the tech/engineer types using IRC. We all generally understood the concept of focus time and understood that IRC should not be used with the expectation of synchronous responses.
Now, with Slack, we have a lot of corporate/managerial/whatever types using an IRC-like tool, and they often just don't "get it." Much like my elderly father initially struggled to understand that text messaging wasn't something that guaranteed an instant response.
IMO full remote can eliminate the need to live in a small house in an expensive city.
I wouldn't be surprised if there is a strong correlation between the number of people (partner,family,kids) and how much people enjoy working from home.
I live alone in my apartment and going the first year or two of the pandemic seeing people I know once every few weeks drove me mad.
I totally understand why some people would rather be in an office, even those who are “just” writing code. But I’m just not a very social person and I value time with my family over in-person social interactions with my coworkers (despite my current coworkers being very nice and awesome people).
There’s also just zero need for me to be physically colocated given the work that I do, so any benefits are greatly outweighed by the commute and lack of flexibility that comes with a requirement to be in an office everyday.
Along with that I didn’t have coworkers so things got pretty lonely.
Lacking both structure and socialization allowed me to be completely wiped out emotionally for a long time when I lost an important person in my life.
I got a job, luckily an office job… in the second half of 2019.
Covid hit and I was work from home again. But this time I had structure. I had some socialization with coworkers through messaging and occasional virtual meetings.
This was a really great middle ground. For awhile I suppose. My office is still closed and I would enjoy the option to go in, but only for in-person socialization.
That’s a pretty self-serving reason for an office though. I’ve recently found other means of feeling a sense of community, and I’ve literally have never felt better in my life.
I guess my tl;dr, in-person work had been a long term substitute for community for many people. Remote work is great, but try to maintain structure and become part of a true community.