I am with you there, I move a lot for work, and I try to stay within a half hour of my office/jobsite location. Any farther than that and the commuting time just adds up so quickly.
An hour each way is another full work shift by the end of just one week. No thanks.
If you live more than 30 minutes away from the office, and it's self-evident that your physical presence isn't necessary to accomplish your day to day, I don't see why someone wouldn't refuse to come back excepting a few days here and there for a fun communal activity with your team. Especially if they have children.
This is pretty foreign to me. I put that line in because my team has actually organically suggested "Let's go have lunch!" or play a game together. Nothing mandatory or forced by a manager, just something because we do enjoy getting together from time to time.
obviously they wouldn't refuse if they want to keep their job... return to office will be a very convenient way of laying off people without saying you're laying off people. remember an economic slowdown is underway for 2 quarters and will last for quite a bit more.
you can always say that. the problem is, this happens slowly, then suddenly all at once. if it takes 6-8 months to get a new job, it might be in the middle of total hiring freeze everywhere.
The tech sector still seems red hot, but the pivot from revenue growth at any cost to margin-focused growth is what's squeezing a lot of B2C companies. I think if you're a startup or late stage private company in B2B, you're probably doing alright if you were cautious and conservative in growing your costs.
If you look at a lot of the recent layoffs, most are in tech companies doing B2C rather than B2B.
B2C reducing expenses means B2B reducing expenses, just on a lag. duration of that lag is anybody's guess; mine is 3+-1 quarter depending on purchasing cycles and license renewals.
Ah yes, one of those lay offs where you lose the people who can get a job at the drop of a hat and keep the ones that cannot. But of course, it would be initiated by somebody who wants to work from an office so, yeah, it all fits.
That's one reason for sure, but even if my house was a 10 minute walk from the office, I'd still rather only go in for meetings. At home I have my own private office with a nice view. I have a nice set of speakers and can play any music I like. If I want to go for a walk, I'm in a quiet suburban neighborhood with hiking trails nearby. The kitchen is always stocked with snacks I like plus freshly prepared healthy lunches (prepared either by myself or my wife). My dog spends most of the day in the office with me.
At the "new" office, no one has an assigned desk, so I have to take everything I need with me to my desk and pack it up at the end of the day. My company is distributed so I spend half the day on zoom meetings with people in other offices... and even with relatively few people in the office it's already hard to book a room for a meeting. There's enough background noise in the open office that I keep headphones on most of the time while I'm at my desk. We do get free lunches at the office which is a nice perk, but food is prepared off-site, so menus tend to be designed around food that stands up to this model of food that can be prepared hours ahead of time.
My commute is less than 30 minutes (one-way) and is a pretty pleasant drive.... it takes an hour out of my day, but it's not the primary reason I don't want to go to the office.
The magic of open space is the same for me... but without the "perks" (food is pretty horrible from the comment I have, and it's 1 hour of traffic jam to get there). All that to do Teams meeting at my desk, with the noise of my other colleagues also in call. That's, to put it simply, hell.
And then you have to be under constant surveillance, "why do you leave so early?" (I've been there for 8 hours already, so, fuck you very much)" and the "why do you go to a private cell for your meeting? (to not annoy you)"
The worst part? I sometimes do meeting with half of my colleague sitting right next to me in the same call. With my headset. Why?
There aren't any meeting rooms at your office? I think every place I've been, even the startups had some kind of conference call mic setup on the table, although I don't think every place had a cam. It's possible for the "room" to join the call and those who must join over video.
We have a number of those rooms and a greater number of one or 2 person "phone rooms", even now without everyone back in the office, those are fully booked at some times. It was a big problem before COVID too -- we'd usually do 1:1 meetings outside because it was easier than trying to find a conference room -- you'd have to find an open spot in each person's schedule and an open room at the same time, which was hard to get.
A conference room full of people is a nightmare for remote meetings - audio quality is horrendous and it’s very hard to make out what people in the speakerphone setup are saying. Everyone having their own headset makes for a much better experience for everyone. Unless the meeting is primarily in person with a few remote participants - then those get left out and have trouble catching up.
Hybrid remote doesn’t work - go either fully on-prem or fully remote.
I can't tell you how many times I've been on a call w/ a room full of people & a PolyCom system... and then the Zoom meeting is hosted on some asshole's laptop mic.
But you're still in a meeting room on a video call, so why not just be on a video call if the rest of your day is spent in isolation with headphones on with all the inconveniences of office travel. What is the upside? Especially when there are open office plans with no assigned desks (as has been mentioned above - luckily, I haven't actually worked at a "non assigned desk role yet), which is f'ing dehumanizing.
Sounds like you're asking what's the upside vs wfh. I'm saying if y'all are at the office anyway, get into a room for the meeting instead of taking the call at your desks.
If you're wfh anyway, yeah just call in over video.
Oh, I'm just asking, if you have to set up a video call in the office anyways (which is often the case, these days, due to multiple teams working in other parts of the country and off-shoring) and the rest of your time is spent siloed with headphones to block out noise, due to office distractions - the reported upsides of the office (collaboration, community, teamwork, shared sense of purpose, closeness to fellow coworkers, etc.) all seem to fall away. What then, becomes the real argument for having an "only work at the office" policy and reviews not be based on the metrics of work done and quality of work?
And you are correct, my question was horribly phrased before =)
EDIT: and just for reference, I lead a small team and am not really management and we're still remote. We seem to do well and these are the metrics we go by, so I'm generally kind of curious about this. Occasionally my manager asks about hours worked, and I'm vague about it, but our output is better than most teams and of a high quality, so she doesn't peak inside too often =/
> My commute is less than 30 minutes (one-way) and is a pretty pleasant drive.... it takes an hour out of my day, but it's not the primary reason I don't want to go to the office.
Focusing on "reasons why I don't like the office" is missing the point, IMO. A lot of folks are betting on the long-term results of a short-term dislocation, but ignoring why things were as they were before the dislocation. It's sort of like the commentariat who come up with hot-takes in the aftermath of a natural disaster, and conclude "life will never be the same"...but within a few years life is, almost always, pretty much the same.
Yes, there are obvious upsides to working from home, but there are also fundamental reasons that we used to go into the office, and dismissing them all as "the old way of doing it" is facile. I think, in the "long" run (i.e. the next few years), the same forces that led humans to form cities throughout all of human existence will prevail.
Said differently: offices sucked before the pandemic too. The technology existed for remote work before the pandemic, too. Yet even in the most remote-friendly work environments, we went out of our way to make time for in-person communication. There was no sudden shift in technology or quality here. We did some short-term things to deal with a short-term circumstance, and now we're seeing the hangover of those choices. But the forces at play are largely unchanged.
If I had to wager, I'd bet that being in the office will be how you get noticed and advance in your career. Making on-site visits will be how you get the sale. Having in-person communication will offer productivity gains over video chat. The incentives to in-person communication will therefore accumulate over time, until we're back to where we started.
The exception makes the rule. If you're truly working a job where you only advance by leaving, then you likely aren't in a position where you can advance at all. Or you are in such a job, but you've neglected the value of visibility to your career growth (PSA: this is far too common amongst programmers).
It certainly happens, but it's not a counterargument to what I'm saying.
If you want to make big advances in your career and/or compensation, getting a new job will get you there faster. Advancing within a company is almost always a very slow process with minimal rewards - you get to move to a new salary band, but that doesn't result in a big jump in salary.
Sure. But there are other steps that matter on the way. Want to get on the interesting project, which lets you put the big accomplishment on your resume? Want to get more responsibility, which lets you tell the recruiter that you've done the $essential_thing they're seeking for that better job?
It always helps to be visible, even if your long-term plan is to job hop into infinity (though I have to say this as another PSA: job-hopping will eventually stop working. It's a notably programmer-since-2012 phenomenon to assume that leaping from place to place will result in a monotonic increase in your salary and/or prestige forever and ever.)
>Want to get on the interesting project, which lets you put the big accomplishment on your resume?
Smart managers pick the best people if the project is important, they certainly won't pick a mediocre developer just because he shows up in the office every day. Attendance is no replacement for hard work and aptitude, unless you are in high school.
>It always helps to be visible
It does, but filling a seat in a cube isn't the best way. The best way is to solve business problems.
>It's a notably programmer-since-2012 phenomenon to assume that leaping from place to place will result in a monotonic increase in your salary and/or prestige forever and ever.
I don't think anyone thinks it's forever. There's certainly a cap to how much you can earn as a software developer/engineer/architect/x working for someone. There are exceptions where you can negotiate some equity or percentage of revenue, but you almost certainly can't do that outside the initial offer phase. In other words, you won't get it at the company where you are already employed; the negotiation window is most likely closed forever.
I doubled my salary 2x from 1998-2001. Then the dot bomb happened, but it's not a new phenomenon. Companies that hire for x amount only give y% when giving out raises. It's pretty close to inflation. The trick to having a larger salary is to get hired with a larger salary, full stop.
I wish it wasn't that way, I usually like staying at a company for a while, but as long as traditional raises are 2-5%, that's what the hiring market wants.
> being in the office will be how you get noticed and advance in your career
That's a classic move. Businesses could offer a significant premium over remote roles to attract candidates, and could easy afford it if you take their in office productivity claims at face value, but that costs money, much easier to make handwavy, unfalsifiable (at least with the information you have as an employee) claims about how you will be rewarded someday in the future.
I'm not complaining that the people in the office are getting promoted faster. Far from it, I hope they get something for all that wasted time.
However I know how promotions tend to go in most companies, and 9/10 you are better off interviewing at another firm and getting promoted that way on a hours worked/pay received basis. With that knowledge I see this as a rather empty incentive.
> I'd bet that being in the office will be how you get noticed and advance in your career
I think this is true, somewhat. But I also will say that as remote work has become more commonplace, it is less true. In my mind, it's mostly about social norms, more than some universal absolute. It used to be the word on the street that if you wanted to get ahead at any FAANG you had to move to the Bay, rather than working in NYC, Austin, et al. That's hasn't been true for awhile, and with remote work now commonplace it's no longer true you need to be in the office to get ahead.
I've been perm remote for quite some time, and in that time I've shifted from Eng to PM, and have moved ahead in my career quite significantly. A lot of that is due to remote becoming more socially acceptable over time, and part of that is that I learned remote skills in how to appropriately communicate my successes so others know about them without needing to hear about it at the watercooler.
Different work environments require different processes for self-promotion to be noticed, but it's still definitely possible while remote, and it becomes more possible the more remote work becomes the norm rather than the exception. I see no reason that we require RTO for people to advance their careers other than butt-seatism managers who mostly should just retire at this point.
>Focusing on "reasons why I don't like the office" is missing the point
Well, that depends on whether the point is my own job satisfaction, or my employer's belief that making me work in a different environment is better for him.
I'm at the point in my career where I can focus on the first point.
The status quo was never to attempt remote work by default as much as to get employees to be productive even when they're at home, on vacation, when there's bad weather etc.
I agree that the technology have fundamentally changed and that it's difficult for companies to revoke the benefit of working from home after it was granted. I do think the needle has shifted now that there are metrics to support or oppose permanently working from home for specific positions.
Knowledge workers went to the office because we didn’t have the internet and computers. You had to access paper and people to get work done. That’s it. It’s not deeper than that. If Peter Drucker saw what was happening today with the Cloud / video / etc he would think it absurd to spend a ton of money on office space and hours sitting in traffic draining energy from the system.
I think this is a wrong take which will be proven by time.
The past is not a predictor for the future; if so we would still all be using horses instead of cars.
Big reason that there will likely be a fundamental shift to more remote and hybrid working options is that just there is a mountain of inertia from the Industrial age which carried over to the Information Age.
The pandemic has initiated a great experiment which individual companies would have never tried for risk-avoidance reasons.
>There's enough background noise in the open office that I keep headphones on most of the time while I'm at my desk.
I still don't get how we as a species went "this is fine". The complete loss of audiovisual privacy is such an immense drain. I'll buy the "being close together works better" argument, but I still can't grasp how that offsets all the distractions in the modern office.
I did the same and I barely function before the sun is up. Got a solid 1-2 hours in doing way better work than the hours spent not half asleep but with the noise.
Was able to do it the other way around a few times and found my late hours were even better, but managers were a little eager to apprehend me for coming in "late".
I feel like the unicorn where I both enjoyed my colleagues in the office and had a lot of fun. Was it _more_ productive? Hard to say but I could easily put on my headphones and work. The lack of visual privacy I realize but I would never say it hindered my work. Then again nobody was on me if I went on reddit for a bit because the tests are running.
I think a bunch of people on hacker news are discounting how much more you can learn in an office with helpful colleagues. When I was a new developer I absorbed so much information in the office just from being able to ask people questions in person. Just from people overhearing a conversation I was having and saying "I think you probably want to do it like X instead" and explaining! In my opinion many people are discounting the development of newer engineers. I'm sure it can happen remotely but remote work requires more intentional coordination and that's one area that I doubt it's happening more effectively than in an office (on the whole). I'm not saying in person meetings are awesome but comparatively, interacting with other people is easier and more enjoyable as opposed to having the same meeting digitally.
I'm with you. I was at least as productive, and much happier. I never had audiovisual privacy, and it never bothered me. If I really needed to do something in private I could go to an empty meeting room or booth, or even just find a secluded couch spot or something.
I was also able to learn a lot more from my peers and to build work type relationships much more efficiently, many of which have paid dividends over the course of my career.
I can also clearly see that the junior engineers at my company are developing much slower than they did when we were in office. I'm pretty sure that can be rectified with better process, but I think it's really significant that being remote makes those sorts of things much harder, and when things are hard orgs will often get them badly wrong.
If individuals can function under these circumstances or even like it, cool, fine, great. I just don't think it should be assumed everyone functions under these circumstances, or that someone who doesn't is dysfunctional, as pre-COVID almost made it seem. Managers seemed all to eager to discount anyone as "not a viable programmer" the moment they balked at the sound of an open office.
>I think a bunch of people on hacker news are discounting how much more you can learn in an office with helpful colleagues
It's tradeoffs, which I alluded to. It's not "you're forgetting X", it's more "are you really, really sure trading X against Y is the better deal here?" I'm young enough to have started in open offices, it was okay in the first few weeks and afterwards I started wondering whether being open to literally any passerby was worth the upgrade from IM to physical presence.
The moment I heard open offices reduced personal interaction compared to cubicles was the moment I casted doubt on anything regarding open offices and their efficacy.
Sure I totally agree that people have different preferences. Do you have a link to the study which showed that open offices reduced personal interaction? That wasn't my experience and I'm wondering what their methodology was.
I loved aspects of my open office job. I had a few really good friends, and we'd play ping pong, video game, Frisbee, just goof off a whole lot. But I hated actually trying to work there.
I think this varies dramatically based on many factors, such as ADHD, introversion, etc. When I really wanted to get work done, I'd go home even though work from home wasn't allowed. They never fired me or even reprimanded me because I think they knew the office environment was BS. Also, I was one of the most productive employees in the entire company, and that was due largely to me working from home.
I agree entirely. As a relatively misanthropic person, this was one of the many reasons why working in the office was miserable for me, and why the covid era has been the best time of my entire life. Moving forward I will exclusively consider remote positions, and I think other people should consider the benefits of doing so too.
Because "we as a species" evolved to work in groups. Humans are not loners. We eat, work, recreate and live in groups. To ship any complex groundbreaking product, you have to collaborate closely with a big group.
Only in the last few decades, and only a minority of Human population in that period, has there been so much emphasis on "privacy".
To ship any complex groundbreaking product, you have to collaborate closely with a big group.
My company shipped several ground breaking projects during COVID enforced WFH where there was not even the possibility of getting together in person.
And now as we've grown we've added teams all over the globe (3 offices in the USA, one in Canada, 2 in Europe and one coming online soon in Australia), so collaboration on a complex project means communicating with teams that are asleep during your working hours.
During COVID, we relied on the existing relationships and the shared context to get things done. In fact, it was a once in a century event and was easy to rally troops, the same way it is easy to unify a society when there is a war.
Now that most of the team is churned, I am observing a steep drop in productivity. New members have neither any shared context nor any meaningful bonds between them. If I were to bet, I would put my money on in-person teams easily outperforming fully-remote teams. Looking forward to see some data in the next few years.
Family and pets are some of the greatest form of companionship.
Online collaboration is pretty lame. It is very transactional, builds very shallow relationships and takes immense effort to agree on complex decisions. I have been doing fully remote since March 2020 (duh) and have met almost all the new colleagues since then in person for work offsites. Most common sentiment is that no one misses commute but otherwise, in-person is so much better to work with each other.
Funnily enough, my company toots the horn of fully-remote. But execs have started meeting in person regularly. It’s just not advertised broadly, but bumping into one of them occasionally and being friends with their assistants reveal so much about “remote for proles but in-person for execs” setup.
I think you’re right that humans work best in groups, but there is a difference between collaborating with a group and being physically proximal to a group. You can collaborate with dozens of people over the internet, or you can be the only programmer in an open office with dozens of co-workers who can’t help you.
Many of the most complex (software) products in the world are open source: web browser engines like Blink and Gecko, operating systems like Linux and its various distributions, compilers like GCC and LLVM, nearly every programming language, etc. Nearly all of that work is done collaboratively within a group, but it is not done in physical proximity to the rest of the group. Which works fine!
For the open source work I am familiar with, the initial work to get the project off the ground is done by a small group of people who are physically collocated. Same with startups - I am seeing a lot of founding teams these days where founders are physically near each other and eventually plan to scale up with remote teams once the product has some traction.
Happy to bookmark this comment and check back in 2025 if startups are getting created in person or are fully remote right from the genesis.
> I still don't get how we as a species went "this is fine". The complete loss of audiovisual privacy is such an immense drain.
Throughout history a huge chunk of us as a species did not have audiovisual privacy at work, and a massive percentage of the jobs throughout history never had it and still don't. Its immensely rare for us as a species to have full audiovisual privacy at our workplace, and has been for a long, long time. Do teachers have audiovisual privacy for the majority of their workday? Chefs? Construction jobs? Factory workers? Retail workers? Even back in the day tons of white collar jobs had large spaces with open desks for "computers" (the people, not the machines) or typists or drafters.
Do these scenes of design spaces and other offices seem like quiet places with private offices for each worker?
Sure, doing repetitive thoughtless work is more fun with other people milling around. But when you are at your cognitive limit trying to consider various ways this code could be failing, conversations about weekend plans are immensely distracting and rage inducing.
I'm mostly going against the extreme hyperbole of "we as a species" as if software developers in private offices are a species on to themselves. The percentage of humanity who did not have a private office for their main workspace vastly outnumbers those who did, and its been this way since probably the beginning of civilization. Its absurd to suggest that "open offices" are some recent fad from the 90s or even 80s...offices have had open spaces with multiple people in them since we've had workplaces! And even then, many of those offices had highly skilled people working on difficult engineering problems, and they often didn't have private offices either. Plus, its not like non-repetitive thought-engaging work is only done in offices, tons of challenging work is also done in the field or in labs or elsewhere.
Are brickmakers and steelworkers and mechanics and factory workers and lab techs and pharmacists a different species because they never gave up the loss of audiovisual privacy at their workplace? No. Its an absurd and vastly insulting statement BlargMcLarg was making.
agreed. My favorite office environment was a cube farm, and I’d argue that it was less “soulless” than the myriad open offices I’ve worked at since because people actually personalized their spaces.
I hated cubicle offices back in the days when I had one -- and we had the nice high cubes that you couldn't easily see over. It didn't offer much auditory privacy (I could easily hear coworker's calls), and limited real privacy since it had no door and anyone could stand on their toes and peer over the top. But at least I had my own personal space, I could pin photos to the wall and make it my own.
Now when I go to the office, I sit in a row of 6 desks, with nothing blocking me from the person in front of me but a monitor, I long for the days of cubicles
> I'll buy the "being close together works better" argument
No, it's some real estate agents convincing spineless C-level execs that they need a new office because Facebook did it. Having a small team, say less than 8 in the same sufficiently large room may work great, assuming that synergy translates to 30+ people who neither know nor care for each other is beyond daft.
> At the "new" office, no one has an assigned desk, so I have to take everything I need with me to my desk and pack it up at the end of the day.
Which is the opposite direction. I don't mind being in the office, especially on a hybrid scheduled. But I hate not having my own office. I hate having to share a giant room with people.
Pretty sure most workers don't have ideal working conditions at home.
For me, it's the separation of work/home and seeing people in person. That said, there are also nice benefits - view, lunch/snacks, EV charging, better lighting and ventilation.
I had a small house that happened to be in different years: at a 10 minutes walk from my office, at a 1h 15m commute from my next job, the place where I've been working when I became self employed. With hindsight (which I didn't have) I would go to the office close to home for meetings and probably go out to lunch with colleagues (it foster careers.) But nothing beats working from home with one's own customers.
With high cost buildings in NYC it would seem companies would be happy to sell their billion dollar building and make like 2 small satellite offices closer to where the people live -- one say in eastern New Jersey and one in Brooklyn when you need to meet with clients or have big meetings or for the people who need to have a workspace away from home and save a ton of money having a large percentage of the company work from home. If it ends up being a competitive advantage, then you can imagine a wave of it happening.
One, most US companies don't own their buildings - they lease for the tax advantages. It comes down to capital expenditures vs operational expenditures. They're happy to reduce OpEx, but it's not like it's a billion dollar windfall.
Two, satellite offices often aren't any more convenient for commuters, and often don't save as much money as you expect. You have to duplicate infrastructure in more locations. My son worked in Manhattan. His coworkers lived in Connecticut and Long Island; travelling to Brooklyn or New Jersey wasn't substantially easier for them. Even commuting between adjacent boroughs can be a pain if mass transit is oriented around getting people from the suburbs to the city core.
Employee opposition to commuting ... may require investing in housing, highways, public transportation and other infrastructure necessary to reduce commute times.
Yet another benefit for investing in housing and public transportation. Based on my proximity to public transportation, too, I have many job options close by, so I'm not likely to get stuck in a bad spot.
Agreed, and look at how fragile we are when gas prices go up. If we just built medium-density, mixed use development with appealing architecture and sensible transit options (walk, bike, ride street cars or light rail) with the option of still owning a car (ideally around 1 per family) we'd be in such a better place.
Sounds like you're describing towns or small cities. And now that people can work remotely, that may be more viable, since we're no longer forced to migrate to tech hubs for competitive salaries. Maybe cramming in to huge cities will become a thing of the past.
In America, yea. I think the issues we face with other American cities, like Columbus, or Austin, or Nashville, etc. is that they're not built like small cities - in that they try to be a New York City, when they should instead model after Copenhagen or perhaps Amsterdam.
Even those are huge cities in my eyes. I was thinking something more along the lines of Portsmouth NH, or Ellicott City MD. Places small enough where you can walk from end to end in short enough time, but large enough to have plenty of shops and events. These places are exceptionally nice areas to live.
Yea they're big no doubt. If we were starting from scratch I think we'd have lots of Portsmouth, New Hampshires and only a few New Yorks (you need that level of density for certain specializations - think quantum physics or neurosurgery).
So imagine the US, but maybe 5 New York level dense cities, and the rest of the country like Portsmouth.
Unfortunately though, I think we can't really undo the damage that's been done so far, so the best we can do is try to heal these cities and make them dense in a nice way. Hong Kong is an anti-pattern, and so is Houston. IMO.
My remote org had an onsite this past week. I forgot how much I hate 'socializing' and how useless water cooler talk is.
They tried their best to make it enjoyable but I am so much happier in my home office with no background noise, no need to get dressed up, and being able to define my own schedule (I eat lunch at 3-4pm and bay tech orgs serve lunch at noon with all the smells disturbing me).
I expect the vast majority of Return-To-The-Office managers are extroverts who have no understanding of the energy toll that socializing requires from the introverts who work for them.
> Cities are full of drug addicts, homeless people, and empty shops. And crime. I don’t even like going downtown for leisure.
That doesn't at all describe the cities I've seen post-pandemic. Cities are full of restaurants, arts, people, and energy. I don't see many empty shops, though more than usual (I assume businesses went bankrupt at higher rate during the pandemic). It does describe the beliefs of people who listen to reactionary commentary but don't go to cities, or believe the talk shows rather than simply looking around them.
There are people who are homeless or addicted to drugs, but they have no impact on me and never have. Try just talking to someone - they are just people, not monsters, no different than the other people I meet except in their clothes.
> It does describe the beliefs of people who listen to reactionary commentary but don't go to cities, or believe the talk shows rather than simply looking around them.
Anyone with a different experience or opinion is ignorant. Got ya.
I’ve done plenty of travel recently to plenty of cities, in various countries.
For a lot of people, their companies don't pay for a gym membership or don't have an office gym, and if the gym is part of their lifestyle not working from home means needing a gym membership in the city near the office.
The logic is pretty simple, if you are going to be stuck in rush hour commute home for 2 hours or you can walk to a city gym and work out for an hour, then jump into your commute and be home in an hour and 45 minutes, so it costs you 45 minutes of total time for 1 hour of gym time + you arrive home to take a shower and get ready for the evening vs trying to work out after the drain of a commute.
Meanwhile if you work from home, you can afford the space to have a home gym that you can use whenever you have time and don't need the drain of the commute at all, because you live farther from the city.
Very well said. Don't even need a home gym at home, you can do bodyweight workouts, go for a run etc. Good luck doing that in many offices, rare to find even showers there.
> Empty offices in city centers may be replaced by apartment buildings. “The end result is more balanced communities,” Mr. Florida said. “But—and it is a big but—the adjustment will be painful.”
The institutional owners of property may end up taking a haircut. This ultimately means pension funds in large part. Alongside deglobalisation, renewables (with stranded assets) and creeping automation, I wonder what options people and governments have to protect their wealth amidst creative destruction.
>The institutional owners of property may end up taking a haircut.
This is exactly why Mayor Adams wants people to come back to the office in NYC. NYC derives a big chunk of change from taxing corporate offices, and if the value goes down then NYC loses out on a lot of money.
This is a point that seems to be conveniently left out by most return to office advocates. My coworkers in Boston, DC and SF often had hellish commutes, up to 2 hours each way. That is a serious chunk of the waking hours of the day to spend on the road, not to mention the huge cost and environmental impact of the fuel, the emissions, and the additional roads that needed to be built to support these commutes. The status quo in major American cities was well beyond the point of insanity and the frog had truly been boiled over time.
For every person that took a jaunty walk down the block, or a breezy bike ride to work, there were many others that had to make a major sacrifice to come in each day. We can't go back to the way things were, it just didn't make any sense.
I enjoyed my time in the office, but those days are behind me. I have more money in my pocket, more time, and more quality of life. I get to be near my family all year instead of in a random city where I am rootless. I'm not going back.
>This is a point that seems to be conveniently left out by most return to office advocates.
In my experience these tend to be executives who can afford to live on expensive real estate close to the city center. And therefore, have a very short commute.
That's how cities where I live and people who I talk to live are laid out anyways. Downtown core is most expensive, and then the further out you go the cheaper it gets and the more painful the commute to the downtown core is.
The exaggerated adjective is the argument. Your co-workers could choose to live elsewhere, so I wonder if the commute was so bad from their perspective. Those cities in particular have good public transit, which lets you live further away and commute conveniently. Many millions of people live in those cities, and choose to - the real estate prices reflect the demand.
You don't have to want that, but I don't see how we can tell everyone else what is good and bad for them.
> not to mention the huge cost and environmental impact of the fuel, the emissions, and the additional roads that needed to be built to support these commutes.
Plus a decent chunk of the 43,000 road deaths a third of all spinal injuries and a million days spent in the hospital every year from collisions.
All of my career I prioritized short commutes, which led to living in tiny apartments (as small as 25 sqmt) within a short commute from work. When Covid hit we had just moved to a new 1 bed flat and were paying our highest rent yet, but hey, 15 minutes commute!
When it became evident we were in for the long haul we started looking to move again. We ended up moving to a 3 bed house with garden in a tiny village close to our family paying much less rent, but across the country from the office.
I can't understate the massive increase in quality of life this brought us. Being closer to the family I don't feel the need to socialize with colleagues at work, and I didn't need to meet anyone in office for about 2 years.
Everyone on HN who loves urban density should read things like this. Quality of life cooped up in a dense urban setting, especially with a family, is awful. There's so much space in the world, we don't need to pack ourselves in tiny urban centers near "tech hubs" at all.
I grew up with one parent in the burbs and the other in the boonies, and today I live in a city and I'll never go back to anywhere that isn't eminently walkable. I don't value space, I value proximity to lots of people. I'm happy that WFH allows people who value the opposite to vacate the cities that make them miserable in order to free up room for people who crave density.
For me, what I want has changed a lot over my life. In my 20's I craved density. I loved the energy and options of cities. 30 years later, I'm the opposite. I live in the suburbs in a house big enough to give me a home gym, workshop, office, etc... but if I had a self-driving car and could get great internet, I'd move way out of the city. I want a little more space and a lot less noise.
Many people follow the same pattern as they age. I think many in this discussion are attributing to WFH and other things what is a common outcome of just getting older.
Regarding noise, I've told this story before on HN, but the loudest place I've lived was the aforementioned house in the boonies, where the noise from passing trucks and motorcycles at all hours of the night was intolerable. My place in the city is far quieter, ironic given that it's literally a hundred yards or so from a turnpike and a rail line (never once heard the train passing in all these years, somehow).
As for the gym, the workshop, the office, I'd personally rather share those with the community. As mentioned, I'm in the city because I enjoy being around people, which isn't to say that I want to work in an office (hell no), but I do want to work in public among people doing their own work (and who, unlike co-workers, won't be constantly pestering me with questions).
Which is to say, my riposte is that the older I get the more I realize that community is what I crave, and that I was dissatisfied with the community that I found in my rural and suburban lives: finding a community in the city is harder, because you actually have to try, but much more fulfilling IME.
Yeah, it's definitely going to be situational. I grew up in rural southwestern Ontario and it was very, very quiet. I moved to a city to go to university and at that time the extra noise didn't bother me (I definitely was responsible for my fair share of it), but I did miss being able to see the night sky.
If I'm honest, a big factor for me is probably related to my financials. When I was young, I was pretty poor and lived in shitty neighborhoods in low quality but high density buildings. Thirty years later, I live in a pretty great suburb in my own house with my best friend/wife, dog and my kids (who are home from university for the summer). The night sky here is decent, but I know it could be even better.
Having lived in many different types of cities, it is always the car-centric downtowns and suburban main-streets that are loudest. Well designed & walkable cities are actually pretty mild when it comes to noise.
To be fair there is a lot more to do in urban centers. I felt cooped up in less dense places, that's why I moved away from there and into a denser place with no shortage of things to do throughout the year.
This comment makes no sense. Folks who love urban density... love urban density. Why would reading a comment from someone who feels differently be important to us? I totally respect the parent comments opinion, but their lived experience differs from mine entirely.
> Quality of life cooped up in a dense urban setting, especially with a family, is awful.
This is unbelievably subjective, and you simply cannot state this as if it's a fact. I have lived in rural, suburban, and dense urban settings, and my quality of life was by far, by far, the highest in the city. Almost every aspect of my life was improved when I moved to a dense urban center.
Urban centers are not simply desirable because of jobs! Many of us simply prefer the lifestyle they afford!
The people on HN want to push their preferences on everyone and change cities to appeal to their usually single-ish, 20s-ish lifestyle of appreciating a 600 sq ft apartment
Do they? When I was that age, I read all the time in tech-friendly press about how much I wanted those things, but I assure you I never did. It's always seemed like a narrative pushed by people who have just assumed the next generation will line up to spend even more money for less. I suspect if 25-35 year olds could reasonably afford 3 bedrooms in the Bay Area we wouldn't be having this issue at all, ignoring density of this area.
But don't make the mistake of conflating 700 sqft apts w/urban centers. On today's remote wages, an engineer can afford the kind of modest home in a walkable urban area in many parts of the US, but affording that on even NY and Bay Area Big Tech wages is looking out of grasp for that next generation. It certainly looks a lot riskier.
Do they? Do you have examples? I really don't think that's something that actually happens on here.
Frequently you get people pointing out that highly dense areas require different approaches to planning and transportation, but that's hardly pushing some lifestyle on anyone who isn't interested in it.
>I have lived in rural, suburban, and dense urban settings, and my quality of life was by far, by far, the highest in the city. Almost every aspect of my life was improved when I moved to a dense urban center.
Same here, and the other families that lived in the dense urban center with us would agree. In fact, when we were thinking of moving from suburb back to city, we literally stopped families at parks in the city and asked them. Literally every one of the 10+ families we asked told us we should absolutely move!
Yes, we didn't have a driveway or big yard, but we did have a nearby park which became our yard, and most of our adventures didn't require a car, anyway. We'd simply walk out the door and go to one of the parks, restaurants, museums, etc. within a short walk. We'd bike or take the subway for longer distances. Without a yard or house to take care of, I had both weekend days available.
I could go on and on. My family and I found the energy of the city invigorating and I'm totally cool with the fact that others may not, or that going out and about all the time is not their idea of awesome.
We moved to the countryside to be closer to my wife's family. My family lives in a big city in another country, so we could have moved there instead, if that didn't involve a massive pay cut.
There are lots of suburban neighborhoods that will give short commutes. They just cost a bit more. I have a 7 minute commute, but live in a house with a yard - and walking distance to an Arboretum.
As others say, the density means you are walking distance - and otherwise public transit or bicycling distance - from all sorts of services, arts, etc. that aren't in the suburbs. I'll add that those services, arts, etc. include much that is far better than what is in the suburbs - better food, art, music, etc. etc. That doesn't appeal to everyone, of course, but if you care about it, then there is no substitute.
Look up a listing of music playing this weekend in NYC, for example. Look up arts and museums. etc.
People who want to and can work remotely should move to suburbs, dropping rents and housing costs in the dense urban centers.
Suburbs should also be redesigned with more neighborhood commercial so that they're less designed around driving for miles to massive clusters of big box stores.
It would also be interesting to have more decentralized density, so clusters of density out in present-day suburbia. That could provide a bit more population density to support the commercial real estate for the surrounding low density residential.
But I do love urban density! I grew up and lived 90% of my life in big cities. Moving to a village was a big shift for me. I love the space but I also appreciate it's boring AF.
If I could choose I'd probably go for a house, not as big, within 1 hour trip to a big city. That way I could get the best balance for my lifestyle.
Most of the US has outlawed the 'middle housing' [1], leaving us with massive crammed skyscraper concrete jungles or sprawling suburbia.
Cities in developed countries around the world do not have to made this trade-off between space and walkability. Apartments are sufficiently big for families, while having everything within arms reach.
If anything, public spaces allow for more amenities available for more people. Unless your definition of space is 'private' space (private gardens, private yards, private gyms), there is plenty of space in well planned cities.
Lastly, suburbs simply do not pay their fair share in taxes. [2] They are incredibly inefficient and deplete city resources such that the city goes bankrupt the second a recession hits. I would be fine with suburbs if that's what people want. But, pay your fair share in taxes, renounce any high ground on the climate change debate and for the love of God, stop making anything that isn't a suburb illegal to build. (looking at you Berkeley...and every other deep-blue liberal suburb)
As far as the Bay goes, it feels like decisions about office placement are made with things like management or prestige in mind, rather than the average worker. For all the growth in the East Bay and Tri-Valley area, it seems like most office buildings continue to be built on the peninsula. Hayward is one of the most central locations in the bay and is largely used for... logistics and distribution?
I miss the office, but there's no way I'd give my current remote lifestyle for the way things were before (average 1.5 hours of commute time per day). Mind you, this is _after_ optimizing my home buying process to shorten my commute as much as possible. I have a neighbor that bought a Tesla mainly for the tag that lets you use it in carpool lanes. Everyone has better things to do than sit in cars (or other transport) for hours a day, and its a sad thing that more effort hasn't been expended to improve this before now.
>it feels like decisions about office placement are made with things like management or prestige in mind
Our company made that management focus explicit - our main office is on the Peninsula and before COVID hit we opened an east bay (Pleasanton) office, which happened to be close to the homes of the CEO, CFO and a couple other C-level execs.
Employees that lived in the East bay thought "Great! We can go to that office and avoid that long cross-bay commute", but no, "Finance and Marketing are moving to the East Bay Office along with senior leadership, it is not available for drop-in by other employees". Which didn't please a lot of people that had organized their life around the Peninsula commute and now have to go to the East Bay
In one of the meetings this week, we were talking about changing how a program works, to allow the user better access to the diagnostics information in the event of a hardware failure. When the program was first designed, the idea was that the program would exit, and the system would either take corrective action or restart. Easy, simple.
Now, if the program continues to run in the event of hardware failures, we need to re-examine the assumptions we made when writing it in the first place. Especially with regards to different operating modes. I tried to emphasize this repeatedly during the meeting.
It is the same thing with our economy and work in general. In the past, there was expensive infrastructure needed to carry out the company's functions. Even if we're not talking about industrial equipment, the typical office worker would still need a typewriter, access to lots of file cabinets, other office equipment, telephones, and so on. Almost none of that could easily be replicated if the worker wanted to work from home.
And so everyone got used to the idea of going into the office or factory on work days. That became the norm, and until recently it wasn't widely questioned.
But nowadays, you basically just need power and Internet, which is widely available to most workers at home anyway.
I'd have preferred to live in a world without pandemics, but if having a pandemic causes more people to question the assumption you have to commute to work, that is a side benefit.
> But nowadays, you basically just need power and Internet, which is widely available to most workers at home anyway.
The power and Internet part is easy - a quiet room can be a challenge for some though. At one point in the pandemic, a friend tried coming over and working in my basement because her family was so distracting at home (2 parents + 3 kids in a 3-bedroom house with virtual work and school and a baby crying, etc). I'm told homebuyers are emphasizing having enough space for home offices these days, but that's easier to attain for some than others, especially with the run-up in housing prices over the past couple of years.
So yeah, for some people it's easy ... for others, not so much.
Lots of people do not have home computers beyond their phones. When the pandemic began, one urban school district discovered that half their students didn't have a computer (desktop or laptop) at home.
Yep. Business need to take that into account. Considering that they will in general be spending less on office buildings and equipment, it shouldn't be hard to justify enough budget for each home worker's equipment and Internet connection.
Beancounters gonna bean count. Our company feels that contributing $20/month for a mandatory smartphone plan is generous. They pretty much laughed when people wanted to be comped for Internet, or be able to take their work chairs home during COVID.
I’ve started commuting back to the office more regularly because I honestly need the exercise! My commute pre-pandemic was about a half hour walk each way. I moved just as the pandemic was starting, and now it’s about a 40 minute walk, or 20-25 minutes by bike or transit.
I wouldn’t want to give up the ability to work from home, but I did really miss the physical activity.
As the exception that proves the rule, I missed my commute terribly and its absence was having a negative impact on me. However, I have a 30 minute bicycle commute, which I think changes everything. The daily exercise, change of scenery, and fresh air made all the difference in the world. I'm probably more productive for my employer at home but I feel way better as a human being when I commute in.
When WFH, there were days where I wouldn't even leave the house. I had no idea what the weather was outside. Now I know what you're thinking but no, I couldn't maintain a habit of getting out of the house to do exercise for exercise's sake. The bike commute always felt different because it wasn't primarily about exercise and if you're committed to going to the office, you can't skip it no matter how much you want to.
Now that all said, I don't believe any level of car commuting is healthy. Kill that with fire and WFH!
I had a 30 - 40 minute bike commute pre-COVID (almost all of it was on off road trails, it was great), and still preferred WFH (which was only allowed one day a week).
I moved and no longer have the bike option (taking bike friendly roads would lead to a 90+ minute bike commute), but even an easy bike commute would not make me want to return to the office.
I've replaced the bike commute with an indoor spinning bike.
I hated my old commute but I still liked the idea of a commute. So now I walk around my neighborhood for 15 mins or so with a mug of coffee and that's my commute. Maybe for you, you can try and simulate a bike commute by riding a fixed route around your neighborhood every morning.
"Simulating a commute" seems a little silly compared to just commuting as normal? Once you've committed to the time, there's nothing critically deficient with my work-office or my commute that they need replacing.
Maybe I also understated how the change of scenery from working in a different place was also helpful. It marks a mental shift between work and home but downtown is also just more visually exciting and interesting than home.
Imo because rarely is a commute to work perfectly ideal. Mine is risky on a bike, so if I were to bike around my neighborhood instead its a lot safer. Also, imo, walking around my mostly residential neighborhood with a warm mug of coffee is a lot less stressful than piling in a car and sitting on a congested freeway for 50 minutes.
Switching from in office to WFH turned biking from one of my favorite parts of the day into a dreaded chore. I still do it, but I hate it now. You can't just discount the psychological impact of having to force yourself to do the activity instead of it being an integral part of your daily life.
> You can't just discount the psychological impact of having to force yourself to do the activity instead of it being an integral part of your daily life.
You're talking about your own subjective preferences and motivations like they're universal constants of the human condition that apply to everyone.
That's an incredibly uncharitable interpretation of what I said. I'm just saying that that the impact something being part of your routine can be a real thing as it is for me, and that the comment I replied to might have missed some of the reason that the commenter they replied to misses their bike commute.
best part of asia is that there's huge cities with nice condos everywhere
you can always find a nice place to stay near work or your favorite spots in a very short time and for reasonable prices
in western cities (tech capitals) you spend months looking for the "least worse" overly expensive option and you're stuck there, too often you're living one city away and spend 1h each way on commuting
The workplace is going to a hybrid schedule soon which I am not too pleased about, but I'm going to be considering my commute as working time versus personal time this go around. I'll leave for work at 9am and aim to be home from work by 5pm. This seems more logical than having me front the free time for commuting if its something my employer is demanding of me anyhow. If they would prefer to not pay for commuting hours they could just have me go back to a remote schedule, but no longer am I giving these hours to my employer for free.
Am I the only one happy to see this? I love suburb for its quietness and access to nature. And I hate that my coworkers prefer socializing in bars or even discussing technical questions in bars. It would be so much better if companies move out of SF. In that way, SF residents will be happy too and will stop hating techies for destroying their way of life.
Currently the main issue is the cost of gas. Pay $5.49/gallon (and I don't live in California where it is even more expensive!) to drive in, or work from home where over the past 2+ years I have shown that I can do my job perfectly well. Hmmm, such a hard decision.
Working from home I have better computer equipment, I don't have to waste time getting ready and driving in, half our team is remote so any meetings have to be over zoom anyway, our office doesn’t have assigned seating so I have to spend time wandering around looking for somewhere to work, etc. Such a no brainer.
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[ 0.21 ms ] story [ 375 ms ] threadAn hour each way is another full work shift by the end of just one week. No thanks.
https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20220517-the-death-of-m...
If you look at a lot of the recent layoffs, most are in tech companies doing B2C rather than B2B.
At the "new" office, no one has an assigned desk, so I have to take everything I need with me to my desk and pack it up at the end of the day. My company is distributed so I spend half the day on zoom meetings with people in other offices... and even with relatively few people in the office it's already hard to book a room for a meeting. There's enough background noise in the open office that I keep headphones on most of the time while I'm at my desk. We do get free lunches at the office which is a nice perk, but food is prepared off-site, so menus tend to be designed around food that stands up to this model of food that can be prepared hours ahead of time.
My commute is less than 30 minutes (one-way) and is a pretty pleasant drive.... it takes an hour out of my day, but it's not the primary reason I don't want to go to the office.
And then you have to be under constant surveillance, "why do you leave so early?" (I've been there for 8 hours already, so, fuck you very much)" and the "why do you go to a private cell for your meeting? (to not annoy you)"
The worst part? I sometimes do meeting with half of my colleague sitting right next to me in the same call. With my headset. Why?
Hybrid remote doesn’t work - go either fully on-prem or fully remote.
Idk, I guess I haven't experienced major issues with that personally.
It's hard to do the right thing sometimes.
If you're wfh anyway, yeah just call in over video.
And you are correct, my question was horribly phrased before =)
EDIT: and just for reference, I lead a small team and am not really management and we're still remote. We seem to do well and these are the metrics we go by, so I'm generally kind of curious about this. Occasionally my manager asks about hours worked, and I'm vague about it, but our output is better than most teams and of a high quality, so she doesn't peak inside too often =/
Focusing on "reasons why I don't like the office" is missing the point, IMO. A lot of folks are betting on the long-term results of a short-term dislocation, but ignoring why things were as they were before the dislocation. It's sort of like the commentariat who come up with hot-takes in the aftermath of a natural disaster, and conclude "life will never be the same"...but within a few years life is, almost always, pretty much the same.
Yes, there are obvious upsides to working from home, but there are also fundamental reasons that we used to go into the office, and dismissing them all as "the old way of doing it" is facile. I think, in the "long" run (i.e. the next few years), the same forces that led humans to form cities throughout all of human existence will prevail.
Said differently: offices sucked before the pandemic too. The technology existed for remote work before the pandemic, too. Yet even in the most remote-friendly work environments, we went out of our way to make time for in-person communication. There was no sudden shift in technology or quality here. We did some short-term things to deal with a short-term circumstance, and now we're seeing the hangover of those choices. But the forces at play are largely unchanged.
If I had to wager, I'd bet that being in the office will be how you get noticed and advance in your career. Making on-site visits will be how you get the sale. Having in-person communication will offer productivity gains over video chat. The incentives to in-person communication will therefore accumulate over time, until we're back to where we started.
In every job I had working from the office I didn't have to get noticed before quitting for a better job and advancing my career.
It certainly happens, but it's not a counterargument to what I'm saying.
It always helps to be visible, even if your long-term plan is to job hop into infinity (though I have to say this as another PSA: job-hopping will eventually stop working. It's a notably programmer-since-2012 phenomenon to assume that leaping from place to place will result in a monotonic increase in your salary and/or prestige forever and ever.)
Smart managers pick the best people if the project is important, they certainly won't pick a mediocre developer just because he shows up in the office every day. Attendance is no replacement for hard work and aptitude, unless you are in high school.
>It always helps to be visible
It does, but filling a seat in a cube isn't the best way. The best way is to solve business problems.
>It's a notably programmer-since-2012 phenomenon to assume that leaping from place to place will result in a monotonic increase in your salary and/or prestige forever and ever.
I don't think anyone thinks it's forever. There's certainly a cap to how much you can earn as a software developer/engineer/architect/x working for someone. There are exceptions where you can negotiate some equity or percentage of revenue, but you almost certainly can't do that outside the initial offer phase. In other words, you won't get it at the company where you are already employed; the negotiation window is most likely closed forever.
I doubled my salary 2x from 1998-2001. Then the dot bomb happened, but it's not a new phenomenon. Companies that hire for x amount only give y% when giving out raises. It's pretty close to inflation. The trick to having a larger salary is to get hired with a larger salary, full stop.
I wish it wasn't that way, I usually like staying at a company for a while, but as long as traditional raises are 2-5%, that's what the hiring market wants.
That's a classic move. Businesses could offer a significant premium over remote roles to attract candidates, and could easy afford it if you take their in office productivity claims at face value, but that costs money, much easier to make handwavy, unfalsifiable (at least with the information you have as an employee) claims about how you will be rewarded someday in the future.
As you note, you can do things to try to fight our fundamentally social nature, but it's like fighting the tides.
However I know how promotions tend to go in most companies, and 9/10 you are better off interviewing at another firm and getting promoted that way on a hours worked/pay received basis. With that knowledge I see this as a rather empty incentive.
I think this is true, somewhat. But I also will say that as remote work has become more commonplace, it is less true. In my mind, it's mostly about social norms, more than some universal absolute. It used to be the word on the street that if you wanted to get ahead at any FAANG you had to move to the Bay, rather than working in NYC, Austin, et al. That's hasn't been true for awhile, and with remote work now commonplace it's no longer true you need to be in the office to get ahead.
I've been perm remote for quite some time, and in that time I've shifted from Eng to PM, and have moved ahead in my career quite significantly. A lot of that is due to remote becoming more socially acceptable over time, and part of that is that I learned remote skills in how to appropriately communicate my successes so others know about them without needing to hear about it at the watercooler.
Different work environments require different processes for self-promotion to be noticed, but it's still definitely possible while remote, and it becomes more possible the more remote work becomes the norm rather than the exception. I see no reason that we require RTO for people to advance their careers other than butt-seatism managers who mostly should just retire at this point.
Well, that depends on whether the point is my own job satisfaction, or my employer's belief that making me work in a different environment is better for him.
I'm at the point in my career where I can focus on the first point.
I agree that the technology have fundamentally changed and that it's difficult for companies to revoke the benefit of working from home after it was granted. I do think the needle has shifted now that there are metrics to support or oppose permanently working from home for specific positions.
The past is not a predictor for the future; if so we would still all be using horses instead of cars.
Big reason that there will likely be a fundamental shift to more remote and hybrid working options is that just there is a mountain of inertia from the Industrial age which carried over to the Information Age.
The pandemic has initiated a great experiment which individual companies would have never tried for risk-avoidance reasons.
I still don't get how we as a species went "this is fine". The complete loss of audiovisual privacy is such an immense drain. I'll buy the "being close together works better" argument, but I still can't grasp how that offsets all the distractions in the modern office.
https://youtube.com/shorts/4whlr2dVDws?feature=share
I think a bunch of people on hacker news are discounting how much more you can learn in an office with helpful colleagues. When I was a new developer I absorbed so much information in the office just from being able to ask people questions in person. Just from people overhearing a conversation I was having and saying "I think you probably want to do it like X instead" and explaining! In my opinion many people are discounting the development of newer engineers. I'm sure it can happen remotely but remote work requires more intentional coordination and that's one area that I doubt it's happening more effectively than in an office (on the whole). I'm not saying in person meetings are awesome but comparatively, interacting with other people is easier and more enjoyable as opposed to having the same meeting digitally.
I was also able to learn a lot more from my peers and to build work type relationships much more efficiently, many of which have paid dividends over the course of my career.
I can also clearly see that the junior engineers at my company are developing much slower than they did when we were in office. I'm pretty sure that can be rectified with better process, but I think it's really significant that being remote makes those sorts of things much harder, and when things are hard orgs will often get them badly wrong.
>I think a bunch of people on hacker news are discounting how much more you can learn in an office with helpful colleagues
It's tradeoffs, which I alluded to. It's not "you're forgetting X", it's more "are you really, really sure trading X against Y is the better deal here?" I'm young enough to have started in open offices, it was okay in the first few weeks and afterwards I started wondering whether being open to literally any passerby was worth the upgrade from IM to physical presence.
The moment I heard open offices reduced personal interaction compared to cubicles was the moment I casted doubt on anything regarding open offices and their efficacy.
I think this varies dramatically based on many factors, such as ADHD, introversion, etc. When I really wanted to get work done, I'd go home even though work from home wasn't allowed. They never fired me or even reprimanded me because I think they knew the office environment was BS. Also, I was one of the most productive employees in the entire company, and that was due largely to me working from home.
A hot desking setup where you can't sit next to your colleagues like OP described is a total waste of time.
Only in the last few decades, and only a minority of Human population in that period, has there been so much emphasis on "privacy".
My company shipped several ground breaking projects during COVID enforced WFH where there was not even the possibility of getting together in person.
And now as we've grown we've added teams all over the globe (3 offices in the USA, one in Canada, 2 in Europe and one coming online soon in Australia), so collaboration on a complex project means communicating with teams that are asleep during your working hours.
Now that most of the team is churned, I am observing a steep drop in productivity. New members have neither any shared context nor any meaningful bonds between them. If I were to bet, I would put my money on in-person teams easily outperforming fully-remote teams. Looking forward to see some data in the next few years.
At the start of the pandemic, my company (a large well known Bay-Area tech company) saw improvements in our developer productivity metrics.
Over 2020, they faded.
I'm at a new company now, we have done a lot of hiring, seen a lot of churn, and it is really hard to get "think big" projects running.
Meanwhile family and pets provide social companionship. Why do you consider that inferior?
Online collaboration is pretty lame. It is very transactional, builds very shallow relationships and takes immense effort to agree on complex decisions. I have been doing fully remote since March 2020 (duh) and have met almost all the new colleagues since then in person for work offsites. Most common sentiment is that no one misses commute but otherwise, in-person is so much better to work with each other.
Funnily enough, my company toots the horn of fully-remote. But execs have started meeting in person regularly. It’s just not advertised broadly, but bumping into one of them occasionally and being friends with their assistants reveal so much about “remote for proles but in-person for execs” setup.
Many of the most complex (software) products in the world are open source: web browser engines like Blink and Gecko, operating systems like Linux and its various distributions, compilers like GCC and LLVM, nearly every programming language, etc. Nearly all of that work is done collaboratively within a group, but it is not done in physical proximity to the rest of the group. Which works fine!
Happy to bookmark this comment and check back in 2025 if startups are getting created in person or are fully remote right from the genesis.
Throughout history a huge chunk of us as a species did not have audiovisual privacy at work, and a massive percentage of the jobs throughout history never had it and still don't. Its immensely rare for us as a species to have full audiovisual privacy at our workplace, and has been for a long, long time. Do teachers have audiovisual privacy for the majority of their workday? Chefs? Construction jobs? Factory workers? Retail workers? Even back in the day tons of white collar jobs had large spaces with open desks for "computers" (the people, not the machines) or typists or drafters.
Do these scenes of design spaces and other offices seem like quiet places with private offices for each worker?
https://i.pinimg.com/originals/cb/02/98/cb02981dccefb68f67cd...
https://i.pinimg.com/originals/99/d5/b9/99d5b92533e332fbaa5c...
https://i.pinimg.com/474x/8d/c1/45/8dc145b0a90fb4509238aa145...
https://i.pinimg.com/originals/30/17/07/3017075666fb55b875bc...
https://www.officemuseum.com/IMagesWWW/UWA_Dexter_Horton_Nat...
And those are just of "white collar" office workers. Do these look like private spaces?
https://www.tshaonline.org/images/handbook/entries/TT/textil...
https://www.history.com/.image/t_share/MTU3ODc5MDg2NDM0NzU1O...
Are brickmakers and steelworkers and mechanics and factory workers and lab techs and pharmacists a different species because they never gave up the loss of audiovisual privacy at their workplace? No. Its an absurd and vastly insulting statement BlargMcLarg was making.
Now when I go to the office, I sit in a row of 6 desks, with nothing blocking me from the person in front of me but a monitor, I long for the days of cubicles
No, it's some real estate agents convincing spineless C-level execs that they need a new office because Facebook did it. Having a small team, say less than 8 in the same sufficiently large room may work great, assuming that synergy translates to 30+ people who neither know nor care for each other is beyond daft.
Which is the opposite direction. I don't mind being in the office, especially on a hybrid scheduled. But I hate not having my own office. I hate having to share a giant room with people.
For me, it's the separation of work/home and seeing people in person. That said, there are also nice benefits - view, lunch/snacks, EV charging, better lighting and ventilation.
Yeah, somehow management has conveniently forgotten that an "office" has a door. If it doesn't have a door, it's not an "office".
With open floor plans, it's hardly a surprise that nobody wants to come back to the office.
Two, satellite offices often aren't any more convenient for commuters, and often don't save as much money as you expect. You have to duplicate infrastructure in more locations. My son worked in Manhattan. His coworkers lived in Connecticut and Long Island; travelling to Brooklyn or New Jersey wasn't substantially easier for them. Even commuting between adjacent boroughs can be a pain if mass transit is oriented around getting people from the suburbs to the city core.
The NYC subway system doesn't go to Jersey, it's often subway => commuter train, you're lucky if it doesn't involve a bus at some point.
Yet another benefit for investing in housing and public transportation. Based on my proximity to public transportation, too, I have many job options close by, so I'm not likely to get stuck in a bad spot.
So imagine the US, but maybe 5 New York level dense cities, and the rest of the country like Portsmouth.
Unfortunately though, I think we can't really undo the damage that's been done so far, so the best we can do is try to heal these cities and make them dense in a nice way. Hong Kong is an anti-pattern, and so is Houston. IMO.
They tried their best to make it enjoyable but I am so much happier in my home office with no background noise, no need to get dressed up, and being able to define my own schedule (I eat lunch at 3-4pm and bay tech orgs serve lunch at noon with all the smells disturbing me).
Cities are full of drug addicts, homeless people, and empty shops. And crime. I don’t even like going downtown for leisure.
House prices and rents have rocketed so people who moved the last 2 years to upsize have done so even further from the office.
Not to mention presenteeism spreading viruses.
Not to mention awful noisy offices designed by sadists.
It’s far more complicated than just the “commute”.
Was it always like this or has this gotten worse because of the pandemic?
That doesn't at all describe the cities I've seen post-pandemic. Cities are full of restaurants, arts, people, and energy. I don't see many empty shops, though more than usual (I assume businesses went bankrupt at higher rate during the pandemic). It does describe the beliefs of people who listen to reactionary commentary but don't go to cities, or believe the talk shows rather than simply looking around them.
There are people who are homeless or addicted to drugs, but they have no impact on me and never have. Try just talking to someone - they are just people, not monsters, no different than the other people I meet except in their clothes.
Anyone with a different experience or opinion is ignorant. Got ya.
I’ve done plenty of travel recently to plenty of cities, in various countries.
The logic is pretty simple, if you are going to be stuck in rush hour commute home for 2 hours or you can walk to a city gym and work out for an hour, then jump into your commute and be home in an hour and 45 minutes, so it costs you 45 minutes of total time for 1 hour of gym time + you arrive home to take a shower and get ready for the evening vs trying to work out after the drain of a commute.
Meanwhile if you work from home, you can afford the space to have a home gym that you can use whenever you have time and don't need the drain of the commute at all, because you live farther from the city.
That sounds like a nightmare.
> work out for an hour, then jump into your commute and be home in an hour and 45 minutes
Still terrible.
> 1 hour of gym time + you arrive home to take a shower
1h45m of sweaty commute after 1h of gym? I don't think so.
The institutional owners of property may end up taking a haircut. This ultimately means pension funds in large part. Alongside deglobalisation, renewables (with stranded assets) and creeping automation, I wonder what options people and governments have to protect their wealth amidst creative destruction.
This is exactly why Mayor Adams wants people to come back to the office in NYC. NYC derives a big chunk of change from taxing corporate offices, and if the value goes down then NYC loses out on a lot of money.
For every person that took a jaunty walk down the block, or a breezy bike ride to work, there were many others that had to make a major sacrifice to come in each day. We can't go back to the way things were, it just didn't make any sense.
I enjoyed my time in the office, but those days are behind me. I have more money in my pocket, more time, and more quality of life. I get to be near my family all year instead of in a random city where I am rootless. I'm not going back.
In my experience these tend to be executives who can afford to live on expensive real estate close to the city center. And therefore, have a very short commute.
That's how cities where I live and people who I talk to live are laid out anyways. Downtown core is most expensive, and then the further out you go the cheaper it gets and the more painful the commute to the downtown core is.
The exaggerated adjective is the argument. Your co-workers could choose to live elsewhere, so I wonder if the commute was so bad from their perspective. Those cities in particular have good public transit, which lets you live further away and commute conveniently. Many millions of people live in those cities, and choose to - the real estate prices reflect the demand.
You don't have to want that, but I don't see how we can tell everyone else what is good and bad for them.
Plus a decent chunk of the 43,000 road deaths a third of all spinal injuries and a million days spent in the hospital every year from collisions.
When it became evident we were in for the long haul we started looking to move again. We ended up moving to a 3 bed house with garden in a tiny village close to our family paying much less rent, but across the country from the office.
I can't understate the massive increase in quality of life this brought us. Being closer to the family I don't feel the need to socialize with colleagues at work, and I didn't need to meet anyone in office for about 2 years.
As for the gym, the workshop, the office, I'd personally rather share those with the community. As mentioned, I'm in the city because I enjoy being around people, which isn't to say that I want to work in an office (hell no), but I do want to work in public among people doing their own work (and who, unlike co-workers, won't be constantly pestering me with questions).
Which is to say, my riposte is that the older I get the more I realize that community is what I crave, and that I was dissatisfied with the community that I found in my rural and suburban lives: finding a community in the city is harder, because you actually have to try, but much more fulfilling IME.
If I'm honest, a big factor for me is probably related to my financials. When I was young, I was pretty poor and lived in shitty neighborhoods in low quality but high density buildings. Thirty years later, I live in a pretty great suburb in my own house with my best friend/wife, dog and my kids (who are home from university for the summer). The night sky here is decent, but I know it could be even better.
Cities Aren't Loud: Cars Are Loud [1]
Having lived in many different types of cities, it is always the car-centric downtowns and suburban main-streets that are loudest. Well designed & walkable cities are actually pretty mild when it comes to noise.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CTV-wwszGw8
> Quality of life cooped up in a dense urban setting, especially with a family, is awful.
This is unbelievably subjective, and you simply cannot state this as if it's a fact. I have lived in rural, suburban, and dense urban settings, and my quality of life was by far, by far, the highest in the city. Almost every aspect of my life was improved when I moved to a dense urban center.
Urban centers are not simply desirable because of jobs! Many of us simply prefer the lifestyle they afford!
But don't make the mistake of conflating 700 sqft apts w/urban centers. On today's remote wages, an engineer can afford the kind of modest home in a walkable urban area in many parts of the US, but affording that on even NY and Bay Area Big Tech wages is looking out of grasp for that next generation. It certainly looks a lot riskier.
Frequently you get people pointing out that highly dense areas require different approaches to planning and transportation, but that's hardly pushing some lifestyle on anyone who isn't interested in it.
Same here, and the other families that lived in the dense urban center with us would agree. In fact, when we were thinking of moving from suburb back to city, we literally stopped families at parks in the city and asked them. Literally every one of the 10+ families we asked told us we should absolutely move!
Yes, we didn't have a driveway or big yard, but we did have a nearby park which became our yard, and most of our adventures didn't require a car, anyway. We'd simply walk out the door and go to one of the parks, restaurants, museums, etc. within a short walk. We'd bike or take the subway for longer distances. Without a yard or house to take care of, I had both weekend days available.
I could go on and on. My family and I found the energy of the city invigorating and I'm totally cool with the fact that others may not, or that going out and about all the time is not their idea of awesome.
We moved to the countryside to be closer to my wife's family. My family lives in a big city in another country, so we could have moved there instead, if that didn't involve a massive pay cut.
I think the big kicker is that city living in the US is drastically overpriced.
Look up a listing of music playing this weekend in NYC, for example. Look up arts and museums. etc.
People who want to and can work remotely should move to suburbs, dropping rents and housing costs in the dense urban centers.
Suburbs should also be redesigned with more neighborhood commercial so that they're less designed around driving for miles to massive clusters of big box stores.
It would also be interesting to have more decentralized density, so clusters of density out in present-day suburbia. That could provide a bit more population density to support the commercial real estate for the surrounding low density residential.
If I could choose I'd probably go for a house, not as big, within 1 hour trip to a big city. That way I could get the best balance for my lifestyle.
Most of the US has outlawed the 'middle housing' [1], leaving us with massive crammed skyscraper concrete jungles or sprawling suburbia.
Cities in developed countries around the world do not have to made this trade-off between space and walkability. Apartments are sufficiently big for families, while having everything within arms reach.
If anything, public spaces allow for more amenities available for more people. Unless your definition of space is 'private' space (private gardens, private yards, private gyms), there is plenty of space in well planned cities.
Lastly, suburbs simply do not pay their fair share in taxes. [2] They are incredibly inefficient and deplete city resources such that the city goes bankrupt the second a recession hits. I would be fine with suburbs if that's what people want. But, pay your fair share in taxes, renounce any high ground on the climate change debate and for the love of God, stop making anything that isn't a suburb illegal to build. (looking at you Berkeley...and every other deep-blue liberal suburb)
[1] https://missingmiddlehousing.com/
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Nw6qyyrTeI
As far as the Bay goes, it feels like decisions about office placement are made with things like management or prestige in mind, rather than the average worker. For all the growth in the East Bay and Tri-Valley area, it seems like most office buildings continue to be built on the peninsula. Hayward is one of the most central locations in the bay and is largely used for... logistics and distribution?
I miss the office, but there's no way I'd give my current remote lifestyle for the way things were before (average 1.5 hours of commute time per day). Mind you, this is _after_ optimizing my home buying process to shorten my commute as much as possible. I have a neighbor that bought a Tesla mainly for the tag that lets you use it in carpool lanes. Everyone has better things to do than sit in cars (or other transport) for hours a day, and its a sad thing that more effort hasn't been expended to improve this before now.
That actually makes perfect sense for logistics and distribution… but yes, it would make sense for office commutes as well.
Our company made that management focus explicit - our main office is on the Peninsula and before COVID hit we opened an east bay (Pleasanton) office, which happened to be close to the homes of the CEO, CFO and a couple other C-level execs.
Employees that lived in the East bay thought "Great! We can go to that office and avoid that long cross-bay commute", but no, "Finance and Marketing are moving to the East Bay Office along with senior leadership, it is not available for drop-in by other employees". Which didn't please a lot of people that had organized their life around the Peninsula commute and now have to go to the East Bay
Now, if the program continues to run in the event of hardware failures, we need to re-examine the assumptions we made when writing it in the first place. Especially with regards to different operating modes. I tried to emphasize this repeatedly during the meeting.
It is the same thing with our economy and work in general. In the past, there was expensive infrastructure needed to carry out the company's functions. Even if we're not talking about industrial equipment, the typical office worker would still need a typewriter, access to lots of file cabinets, other office equipment, telephones, and so on. Almost none of that could easily be replicated if the worker wanted to work from home.
And so everyone got used to the idea of going into the office or factory on work days. That became the norm, and until recently it wasn't widely questioned.
But nowadays, you basically just need power and Internet, which is widely available to most workers at home anyway.
I'd have preferred to live in a world without pandemics, but if having a pandemic causes more people to question the assumption you have to commute to work, that is a side benefit.
The power and Internet part is easy - a quiet room can be a challenge for some though. At one point in the pandemic, a friend tried coming over and working in my basement because her family was so distracting at home (2 parents + 3 kids in a 3-bedroom house with virtual work and school and a baby crying, etc). I'm told homebuyers are emphasizing having enough space for home offices these days, but that's easier to attain for some than others, especially with the run-up in housing prices over the past couple of years.
So yeah, for some people it's easy ... for others, not so much.
I wouldn’t want to give up the ability to work from home, but I did really miss the physical activity.
When WFH, there were days where I wouldn't even leave the house. I had no idea what the weather was outside. Now I know what you're thinking but no, I couldn't maintain a habit of getting out of the house to do exercise for exercise's sake. The bike commute always felt different because it wasn't primarily about exercise and if you're committed to going to the office, you can't skip it no matter how much you want to.
Now that all said, I don't believe any level of car commuting is healthy. Kill that with fire and WFH!
I like driving, lots of people do. A nice 20 minute drive is a good commute. Bumper to bumper traffic for more than 40 is hell.
I moved and no longer have the bike option (taking bike friendly roads would lead to a 90+ minute bike commute), but even an easy bike commute would not make me want to return to the office.
I've replaced the bike commute with an indoor spinning bike.
Maybe I also understated how the change of scenery from working in a different place was also helpful. It marks a mental shift between work and home but downtown is also just more visually exciting and interesting than home.
You're talking about your own subjective preferences and motivations like they're universal constants of the human condition that apply to everyone.
What you said is that you can't handle the freedom of choice and need a manager to force those decisions upon you.
Sometimes people need a forced window to do something. The commute was a nice window for reading, listening to podcasts, disconnecting.
you can always find a nice place to stay near work or your favorite spots in a very short time and for reasonable prices
in western cities (tech capitals) you spend months looking for the "least worse" overly expensive option and you're stuck there, too often you're living one city away and spend 1h each way on commuting
Working from home I have better computer equipment, I don't have to waste time getting ready and driving in, half our team is remote so any meetings have to be over zoom anyway, our office doesn’t have assigned seating so I have to spend time wandering around looking for somewhere to work, etc. Such a no brainer.