About 10 years here, and I agree. At first I found myself missing the day to day interaction with co-workers, but after about 6 months I completely acclimated and can't imagine ever willingly going back to an office with bad privacy, commutes, coffee, smells and noise unless the need is extreme.
Not the OP but chiming in as someone who has worked remote almost exclusively since 2015.
In my opinion that's the crux of this debate: social needs vs social remedies.
If you have high social needs but don't have a strong personal social network, then an office is a great remedy. It solves the problem for you by default.
Remote only seems to work for the inverse. Lower social needs, or a strong social network outside of work, or some mix of the two.
I'm fairly extroverted (as far as engineers go) and I'm grateful to have a social network I've cultivated personally. So remote has fit well for me. I can get my work done to a high standard without the obligation, then turn around and spend purposeful time with friends and family.
It's perfect for me, but not for everybody, and you can see that in the comments here.
What remote really did was expose how many people were relying on office culture to meet their social needs. That's not a bad thing. It just surfaced something that went under-noticed for a long time.
Those aren't the same workers though. There's a dichotomy of remote workers - some are screwing off during the day and some are working more hours than they should be since it can be hard to unplug from the desk (especially if it's a full remote cmpany with people across four plus timezones).
Like everything, you remember the exceptions. Most people are in the middle, doing their 8. As remote workers they might take an hour to do a Costco run while it's not busy, and work an extra hour after the kids are in bed. Yes during COVID there were a lot of remote workers not doing much, but hopefully most companies with a good remote work culture have weeded those out by now.
Shoreline to downtown Seattle is not even close to 1 hour each way by car, maybe 35 mins, if you stretch it. That been said, I feel you, commuting sucks, consider living closer or finding a new gig.
There is plenty of alternative routes, I-5 is a dumb route to take because everyone thinks the same way, you could take aurora avenue, or cross the bridge from ballard, or even the other one close to UW. Google Maps is also wrong all the time btw.
Have you been doing the commute lately? All the routes are bad, it’s just a question of bad or worse. I have to make the drive sometimes and it typically takes 40 min or so just to north Seattle.
There are a thousand factors, but one of the biggest and simplest is getting commute time back. Gaining even one hour a day is life-changing. Imagine gaining two hours.
I know of a company where they want anyone within 90m to commute, so that's up to three hours lost in a day, making an 8 hour workday actually 11+ hours
I’m always confused why the default commute time in these discussions is always 60 or 90 minutes one way. 60+ minute commutes are outliers and I don’t understand why a person would take a job that far away without being aware of the commute or moving closer to the work. Does that make sense? Most American commute 10-30 minutes. That’s the middle of the bell curve.
> 60+ minute commutes are outliers and I don’t understand why a person would take a job that far away without being aware of the commute or moving closer to the work
60+ minute commute times are very common where I live. If you are anywhere outside of the downtown area you either pay for parking (expensive) and have a shorter commute, or you use public transit (cheap) and have a long commute.
When I used to commute to an office it was easily an hour to an hour and a half each way every day. I hated it
Yes, I get the sense that this varies a lot depending on area and economic strata.
In the poor rural area my hometown is located, 1-3h+ commutes aren't unusual, partially out of necessity (there aren't enough jobs nearby to sustain the population).
When I commuted semi-regularly into a downtown office, it was a good 90 minutes. Latterly, going into a newer company's customer briefing center was more like 2 hours each way. I had access to commuter rail which was more pleasant than driving so long as I didn't have an evening dinner/event. but it took about the same length of time.
One answer to the parent's question is that I owned/own a house which was a pretty manageable 25 minute suburban commute which I wasn't going to sell just because I got a new job. (Which didn't last that long anyway.)
We’re in a weird period where a lot of jobs went fully remote around COVID, many weren’t prepared for it, and now they’re doing the opposite over-reaction and forcing everyone back.
A lot of the people I know who went remote after COVID took remote jobs at new companies (remember “the great resignation”?) or moved to a new house because they thought they were done with commuting. Then their companies said they wanted everyone back.
I mean, in a lot of these cases people take those jobs because they're able to work remotely initially... and then get hit with an inflexible, top-down RTO mandate once they've settled into the role.
Most of the 60 minute travel time radius around a San Francisco or Silicon Valley tech HQ is water and nature preserve. The homes that come up for sale are few enough that they mostly go to the few thousand highest net worth households in the world. Some of which feature tech employees with highly appreciated stocks. But the average highly compensated tech employee living off a W2, if he wants to own a house, has to cross a bridge.
The Bay Area is two of the top five MSAs for software development jobs. The others are New York, Seattle, and Washington D.C. Hardly places where an income of $171,980 (75th percentile software developer) gets you a commute under an hour with a family.
BLS doesn't publish data at the right granularity, but it seems like jobs at tech companies are even more geographically concentrated in this way.
You're on a board full of technologists. Many are in SF or Seattle or NYC. A 10minute commute means you live in a 5-20 Million dollar home in SF. Not sure how realistic that is.
I work in NYC. The salary doesnt support having a home in the city. Yes, it can support a 1br apt, perhaps a 2br with roommates. Definitely not accomodations for a family.
Laptop professionals who make enough money to own and buy a nice house in the suburbs but not FU money to buy in the city. I count myself in this category.
If you don't make enough to consider buying, you might as well rent close. If you are super rich, you can buy in the city or don't have to worry about building home equity.
I could see the average commute being 20-30 minutes without traffic. I cannot see that being the average in any area with even a small amount of morning/evening traffic.
I somewhat frequently get recruiter mail from NYC-based companies. If it's clear the position is in office, I usually include the same bit in every response: I live ~75 minutes away by train. Make the commute free or heavily discounted for me and I'll come in the three days a week. Plus, since I won't be driving, I can do some work on the train.
Yes, definitely. Time management is a lot easier when it's all on your own terms apart from the required meetings.
You get to skip the commute and reap the benefits all day long. Even your diet improves. You can cook fresh or have delivered whatever you want. Your hygiene improves since nothing is preventing you from taking another shower or committing to more involved skincare. You clean your home more often. You're more likely to exercise throughout the day for natural stress relief. If you have any minor medical issues that need upkeep, you're already in the privacy of your own home.
This is not just a list of annoyances or frivolous luxuries for highly sensitive people. These are the basic building blocks for a better quality of life. These used to be the forever-deferred items at the bottom of my todo list stressing me out. Now they are integrated with my life and effortless. I'm no longer trapped in a cube and put on display. I can live like a human being and do whatever whenever wherever I want. My life is no longer oriented around running errands or physical presence.
And money spent on a more expensive house closer to the office vs the same home in an affordable place. It's the main reason I can't go back to San Francisco, once you get used to a less than one million four bedroom house in a pleasant neighborhood you can't go back to living in a shoebox for twice the price, even if it's the most beautiful city in the world.
Not having to plan my life around traffic patterns is the biggest advantage for me.
I enjoy working in the office at my current place of employment... nice office space, small company, everyone who works there is great and the office is only 15 minutes away if there is no traffic.
But I live in Southern California, so when there is traffic that 15 minute commute balloons to 45-60 minutes.
So I work from home most of the time. I still go in a couple of times a week (voluntarily, not required) but there are no expectations of a set schedule so it is very easy for me to avoid heavy traffic commute times.
I go into my company's Boston office with an hour and a half commute each way by train about once a month. Even doing that once a month sucks. I couldn't imagine doing that even three times a week. I regularly get LinkedIn messages from recruiters with hybrid offerings in Boston that pay less and will then suck an additional 9 hours a week out of my life. Biggest nope I can think of.
I'd have to get paid a lot more to sacrifice an additional 10 hours a week commuting. You can't just tack an additional ten hours worth of pay on, and even if the pay was excellent, I can't imagine this is something I can do long term. Losing three hours a day for a commute eats into so much social and sleep time.
I didn't have to do it every day and it wasn't for that long a period but I had sort of come to the conclusion that it wasn't sustainable, especially after the novelty of working in the city wore off. I live fairly far out but, even that aside, there's just a lot of traffic. Even coming in for something after work these days still takes me 90 minutes to get in and commuter rail is useless for an evening event.
Last sometimes commute (I traveled a lot) to a suburban office was much more manageable but the office shutdown at some point during COVID because of low use.
>one of the biggest and simplest is getting commute time back
Zoom out. Being full remote means I don't even need a car. I can live in a walkable city with passenger rail in a low cost of living location. I can reduce my living expense to just food and utilities with a paid off house and no automobiles.
It's funny, because talk about a 25% potential productivity improvement saving multiple hours per day per employee in literally any other context and management would be crazy for it. Like AI hype bubble crazy. But culturally they cannot come to terms with the idea of losing power / control / influence over how work is done, so WFH gets treated completely differently.
> Researchers analyzed survey data from 7,704 employees at a large healthcare organization.
I’ve been remote and worked for remote companies for a long time. In my observation, the well-being is bimodal. The people who adapt well to remote thrive. There are a lot of people who think they’re going to love remote who ultimately flame out from the loneliness, isolation, lack of visual boundaries between work and home life, and lack of externally enforced routine.
It’s really sad when the latter happens because it’s almost always someone who was hired for their great work and abilities. Then over time they get drained and you can see that the remote work wasn’t what they expected.
It’s basically impossible to predict who will fall into each category at the interview stage, or at least I can’t do it. Prior remote work success (not just experience) is the best indicator but it’s hard to evaluate, too. Some of the most difficult remote hires I’ve worked with had past remote work experience, but it’s only after being hired that you learn they struggled at those companies too.
I’ve talked with colleagues that have confirmed exactly what the parent comment is saying. They benefit from the external structure, routine, and separation of work/home life.
Some people just don’t want to work next to their gaming PC, completely unsupervised. Others live alone and don’t live near their friends and family. Both these groups (can) suffer from a fully remote environment.
I fully support coworking spaces for folks who need the in person socialization (especially in the context of entry level and juniors), but I will leave the labor force entirely before I ever go back into an office (~12 years remote, ~25 years in tech). I have a partner and kids, coworkers are not my friends (we simply share a paycheck provider and a body of shared work), but I understand other lives and the needs of others differs. Your social needs are not my needs. I get to eat lunch with my partner every day, see my kids more, no commute, etc.
You also share a professional social network which is something you own separately from any company and I have found to be very valuable and strengthened by in-person work.
I've worked remote most of my career. Starting in the late 90's if you squint hard enough.
I built my first little company as remote-first before we knew what to call it. I had to be very careful who I would hire, since only a relatively small percentage of folks (around a third, by my estimate) were ready and able to be self-motivated and disciplined enough to work remotely.
And my company was built with remote work in mind from the ground up. Asynchronous comms, everything written down, very well established information systems and work process, etc.
I then worked for a company that became remote by accident. They were obviously an in-person company that never once sat down to figure out a remote-first work culture. It was the most exhausting and unproductive work of my life. Constant meetings, almost no concept of async comms, etc. That company would have worked 1,000% better as an in-person traditional company and the lack of mature process or strict guidelines could have been papered over.
My rule of thumb now is that any company that expects you to be on more than a very small handful of Zoom calls a week is not worth working for. If you need meetings to sync up work like that, you likely have horrible remote work infrastructure, tools, processes, and culture.
It seems a number of companies somehow combine the absolutely worst aspects of in-person work with the worst aspects of remote work and expect to see good results.
Now - my absolute favorite way to work - was when my little company got acquired by a larger company and I effectively ran a small division where we worked remotely, but came into the office if/when we felt like it. That worked because everyone else had to be in the office though, so it wasn't exactly fair. But man, being able to take a 15 minute train ride downtown to spend a day or two in the office each week if I felt like it after I woke up each morning was by far the best of both worlds for me. I could do different types of work in each location to sort of break up my week, and get the benefits of the in-person socialization and relationship building with the lack of scheduling stress and deep focus time remote working gives you.
Still though. I cannot stress enough how shitty Zoom calls are. Anything to do with video calls will be completely banned from any org I run should I ever get the startup itch again. At least on the engineering side of things. Either in person meetings if you must, or phone calls so people don't need to be uselessly staring at a screen for hours each day.
I've found that following an Open Source model of collaboration works well for remote companies. And it gave me a hiring pool of talent with demonstrable abilities to get shit done without needing to be in an office. No open source project is running daily standup video calls.
The most undeniable examples were when we worked at a company that had offices, but allowed people to work remote at their discretion.
The people who were burning out at home would become revived and re-energized when they came into the office for something and would stay that way for a week or two.
Then they would slide back into burnout and social problems (assuming benign interactions were hostile in Slack or that people were backstabbing the. was common) the longer they were away from the office.
Some people had the self-awareness to start bringing themselves back to the office for a few days each week and would directly admit they struggled to work from home.
It’s really not uncommon and readily acknowledged in every offline remote work environment I’ve been in. It’s only on social media where you run into claims that remote works well for everyone.
Likewise online you run into claims that full remote or hybrid can't and doesn't work for anyone, and we all interpret observed dynamics at work to construct theories supportive of whichever configuration is our favorite (WFH/Hybrid/In Office) or as evidence the one we dislike is worse. In reality the situation is messy and complicated and heavily circumstantial, depending on team/company culture and dynamics and working styles.
For instance, I've observed dynamics like what you describe at various orgs, and what they had in common was a lack of psychological safety. If people are responding defensively to benign messages then it tends to mean they have a reason to expect hostile messages. Hostile messages are not a given.
One common way this arises: a company ostensibly offers flexible remote work, but in practice strongly prefers in-office work, and enforces this via social pressure. Remote work has a small social cost that accumulates each full day that one works remotely. These remote-oriented workers then have to periodically show up at the office primarily to ingratiate themselves to management and their peers. This is incredibly common, and might even be the default configuration for an org that permits flexible WFH.
I don't think this is intentionally malicious, BTW. It's simply what happens when you make a policy shift without considering your team culture as well so that both working styles are supported as first-class citizens.
I am doing well with remote because I'm pathologically introverted and find that being around people is exhausting. I can imagine things being the other way around for extroverts and that is saddening.
For me, the biggest thing was simply my ability to work in a quiet environment with little distraction. We went from an open office floor plan that was so loud I wore noise canceling head phones and a baseball hat to block the buzzy lighting to my own desk, in my own home, feet away from a bathroom and kitchen cleaned and stocked to my standards.
>There are a lot of people who think they’re going to love remote who ultimately flame out from the loneliness, isolation, lack of visual boundaries between work and home life
This used to be me but pair programming / in-call collaborative working solved 100% of all of those problems.
Even the work/life boundary was solved because as soon as I dropped off the call at the end of the day my brain immediately switched off work mode.
These days the first thing I do in a new team is try to suss out who else is a bit like this and try to work out a collaborative working pattern that works for all of us.
It's not just more fun it's almost unreasonably effective compared to solo working patterns.
Would love to hear more tips. This is me too, and I suspect some of my team members. I've been trying to build in more collaboration into tickets (e.g., an acceptance criteria that is "talk to the rest of the team about the decision you make on X aspect of implementation"), and I'm looking for more.
Those collaborative conversations are so often fruitful in ways I don't expect.
I mostly just focus on trying to find one or two people who like pairing and always suggest to do it with them. I always aim to be positive, anti judgemental, understanding, curious, etc. so theyll feel comfortable.
One of my coworkers set up a "slack" watercooler channel he would always pair in with an explicit invitation that anybody who wanted to drop in could at any time, even if it was just for a chat. That was cool.
Too bad so many companies insist on top-down management practices that actively make this harder: planning and tracking work in individually owned tickets, individual stack-ranked performance evaluations, "productivity" metrics that don't account for collaboration or shared learning...
(This is something I've repeatedly noticed in discussions about getting people in-office, and about open office plans vs individual offices: the same managers who push these changes through in the name of "collaboration" create a bunch of other management processes that strongly disincentivize collaborative work.)
But in environments where I've been able to do this effectively, it's always been great, far better than going of totally on my own!
this is enormously self destructive as well. when employees are stack ranked, pitted against each other, discouraged from collaborating the quality of work drops off a cliff and profits suffer.
executives are perfectly rational about this though. the profits don't matter to them anywhere near as much as having more power over the workforce does.
For some people, an office is an accommodation - they need that not-home space with other people in it. For others, a home office is an accommodation - a very convenient/local space with very few distractions.
It should come as absolutely no surprise that putting someone somewhere they do not feel accommodated is going to reduce performance.
I also really reject this boomer-esque idea that in-office helps underperformers underperform less. Instead I find it helps under-performers _appear_ to underperform less because they can chat up the boss and more visibly do performative stuff like showing up early or leaving late.
100% agreed. i flamed out while remote working at $LAST_JOB. it was a combination of a changing cultural dynamic, changing expectations of my role (which i wasn't comfortable with) and a lack of necessary staffing.
remote work was a blessing for me. but turned out the ceo didn't want us remote working.
i tried repeatedly to communicate what i needed to do my best with my boss and the ceo. but the ceo fought me on all of it.
In my situation above we were accommodating people. They got to choose where they worked.
The problem I was talking about was with people who asked to work from home but struggled with it.
Some of them did start coming in to the office more when they realized what was happening. Many did not, believing that work from home was best for them.
I think I like where you're going with the "accommodated" or not framing. I feel that most companies' offices, especially tech companies, have lately just taken to straight-up not accommodating people. The company crams nothing but minimal, 4ft desks in, edge to edge, with zero partitions whatsoever (… let alone an actual wall to form … an … office …) but want to pretend as-if that's somehow accommodating. Add in crappy chairs, bad keyboards¹, 3 hour commutes, etc. and it's just so "wtf?" that, yeah, remote work — for what flaws it does have — ranks higher. I have a better equipment, a better desk, more space, more quiet / room to concentrate — I can build an office that exceeds what my employer will provide — and I can do so in spite of today's ludicriously priced real estate market where I haven't even really got the room to do so.
And with RTO, it seems that wasn't even rock bottom, now that employers are straight-facedly suggesting things like "hot desking".
> It should come as absolutely no surprise that putting someone somewhere they do not feel accommodated is going to reduce performance.
I agree, but this required corporations to admit they're the problem in not properly accommodating employees. That is the problem: corporations would far rather blame performance on the employee than any sort of self-reflection.
(¹as accommodated by the employer. Even when I worked in an office, I did have a custom keyboard, but it's something I paid for.)
I’ve found the discourse around commute times to be incredibly hyperbolic. 90 minute one-way commutes are an extreme outlier for professionals (USA). Genuinely like two standard deviations from normal.
It's where you're in a pen with rows of desks and you just have to use whichever desk is free, you don't have your own desk. If you have any stuff you need to work beyond what's on the desk (say, accessibility equipment), you might get a locker (these are often underprovisioned) and you have to cart your stuff to and from the locker every day. It is awful.
I used to have a hybrid job. The company culture was oriented for 100% remote, because it was 100% remote until RTO happened. The office space felt like a coworking space where everybody was a remote worker who just happened to work on the same project in the same company. Nobody ever approached anybody, everything was over Slack. We did have meeting rooms but everybody preferred calling in from their desks. Even for the daily standup! Most miserable workplace experience of my life.
I interpret the study findings not as remote workers being happier, but on-site workers being less happy in remote-oriented companies than on-site workers in on-site-oriented companies.
I will say I dislike remote work in terms of how it serves me at work. But having a 100% remote job has made me far more able to maintain my house and be present for my children when they’re still very young. So if we were weighting overall life satisfaction that outweighs the extent to which it alienates me from my job.
Now maybe my employer has reason to dislike that I’m probably like 80% of the worker I would have been if we were in office, but the 80% has been enough to exceed expectations on my performance reviews so there doesn’t seem to be a problem.
Commuting wears you out. The energy and stress saved from not having to drive in bumper to bumper traffic or ride public transportation can add a good deal of productivity.
I'd probably feel different if I had a 5-10 minute walk to an urban office but I never had. (Did have a very short suburban commute for a while, but people I knew were always pulling dangerous stunts when they saw me walking to pick me up so I pretty much gave it up.)
I didn't hate the 25-30 minute driving commute I had at one point but I had to go in pretty much every day even in the snow which wasn't great. This was a time when you were pretty much expected to go into the office other than a rare state of emergency.
Latterly I had about a 30 minute driving commute again but I was doing so much travel that I wasn't consistently in the office that much.
I feel the opposite. Before the pandemic, I would have said I'd 100% want a fully remote job if I could have it. I even looked at applying to Gitlab because of that. And then the pandemic hit and I spent 2 years working from home all the time. One of the surprising things I learned in that was that I need a commute. I need a physical separation of work and the rest of my life that lets me mentally shift gears from thinking about work things to thinking about home things. I needed some time to just listen to music or a podcast or audio book without any other demands on my time.
And I found that going for a walk or something like that to replace the commute didn't have the same effect, for a number of reasons. There was the mental hurdle of forcing myself to try taking the walk instead of going straight from A to B since I was already there. There was the fact that while I could try to flush home concerns from my mind on the walk, coming back to my home where all those home concerns are right there for me to notice when I walk through the door meant that all that mental flushing was for naught.
Now I admit that I am fortunate enough to have a commute where I'm rarely in bumper to bumper traffic, and it's less than a 30 minute drive. But at least for me, a commute is a vital part of my work routine.
I'm the same way. I absolutely need a commute and a hard bifurcation of my work and personal environments. I've been paying for coworking services of some kind since COVID. That and having a separate work phone has helped a lot.
My best situation was a commute to work that was about 45 minutes door to door and involved a 30 minute bus ride. I mostly got to read novels on the bus. It was nice.
I was childless and petless then though. The thought of squeezing everything in between school drop-offs, pick-ups, after-school scheduled activities, and dog walks is when things get really annoying.
In the last twelve months ive had electricians, plumbers, kitchen renovators all work in my home while I was wfh. In an age gone by I would burn annual leave to deal with this. I dont know how I could handle the logistics of full in office again.
it says a large healthcare org but does not say if that's a care provider where on-site jobs will be completely different from remote-compatible ones, or an insurer where most jobs could be done mostly on a PC.
It really depends on the company culture. Where I work (in the bay area) people come to the office two days a week, but those days are when everybody schedule the important in person meetings. Focused work happens rest of the weekdays at home.
Some struggle regardless of remote or onsite because office job culture has become fucking stupid FOMO fueled social animal farm, not a meaningful economic contributor in real terms.
That never comes up though as the dogma must survive.
Exactly the same thing happens with in-office work. I've certainly had that experience! But it's hard to talk about because in-person work is the "default", and it feels like if you have problems with that it's a sign of problems with you.
(Not to mention that, in both contexts, it's very hard to pull apart being remote vs in-office from other aspects of the work and culture.)
I just flamed out exactly as you describe. It's my second time also. If anyone has any tips for some kind of counseling or coaching or anything else, would be much appreciated.
Get a few responsibilities in the outside world, or someone who'll make demands of you. Get a dog.
Half of group therapy is just being in a group. Groups that require you to be rested and fit and provide a local social network orthogonal to everything else in your life include intramural sports, hiking clubs, radio repeating, crafts and markets... and they're all comfortable with nervous individuals showing up.
It's worth being very honest with yourself about what you're feeling. If going into the office fills a void, you should realize that you are now handing a load bearing portion of your life and psyche to your employer. If you are laid off, you will be devastated. Doing the work to get your personal life to a place where you want to work from home because you enjoy your own company, friends, family, pets, environment... is very much well worth it in the long run.
> lack of visual boundaries between work and home life,
This was the major one for me, in addition to the other stuff you mentioned. The "always at work" feeling was reinforced by the management style of remote work being like, we expect you to be generally available to respond at any time in a 12 hour window, sometimes more (because everyone works their own schedules across multiple timezones). In an office this separation is clean, and if I'm responding to messages or working at home, it's generally accepted this is outside the norm and I'm perfectly free to just shut the laptop off until the next morning 99% of the time unless I am on-call. It's nice.
The first thing I did when I went back fully in-office was tear down my home office and turn it into a game room. I generally do not even use a computer in my home. Sometimes we have enforced WFH days due to various things or events, but I established the understanding with management that generally I will not be expected to work full days from home outside of emergencies and I take those days off.
I understand some people love it, and I have a good office environment which helps, but the downsides (general office annoyances, commuting, lunch expenses, clothing expenses, etc) way outweigh the downsides of working remote for me. I got severely depressed and burnt out very quickly.
I have my desktop computer where I do my own stuff like games in the same desk where I put my work laptop, and yeah sometimes it feels like I'm never really done as the transition is just closing the laptop and switch the monitor input, one thing I like though is that we do mob programming so when it's over it's truly over as we share responsibility rather than me having to finish something on my own before a deadline.
But yeah I'm thinking of putting a second desk in another room for work, I don't want my own house to feel like an office.
I find that what I usually do it just leave the house for a bit too, eithe for a walk, to the gym, or to the grocery store. Having a some moments away from the "bad screen" before the "good screen" is wildly helpful for me.
> The "always at work" feeling was reinforced by the management style of remote work being like, we expect you to be generally available to respond at any time in a 12 hour window
That's not a management style, it's a 12 hour on call which needs to be compensated without appropriately higher pay and comply with work time regulations.
>Prior remote work success (not just experience) is the best indicator but it’s hard to evaluate, too. Some of the most difficult remote hires I’ve worked with had past remote work experience, but it’s only after being hired that you learn they struggled at those companies too.
I often tell people that I'm unusually well suited to remote work because I've had a lot of practice. Starting in high school I was out more days than I was in owing to health problems, yet I still managed to knock out 11 AP classes because I got really serious about reading the textbook and actually studying on my own time. This was even before I discovered spaced repetition systems.
By the time I actually got to college I realized these techniques were not only more effective and enjoyable for me than sitting down in lectures, but that the vast majority of students never actually had to build these muscles to begin with. They really struggle when the courses get too big to cram into a class session, but it's not because they're dumb or anything - it's literally just an endurance sport they've never played.
I feel those same muscles are the ones I've been using in remote work, which I've had the good fortune to do my entire career in at least a 60% capacity and more often a 100% capacity. Remote work likely feels deeply unnatural at first, to people who aren't used to putting in focused sweat at a desk in their own room far beyond what traditional education typically requires.
I hope my own children develop this ability too, although I'm not really sure how to get them there.
>By the time I actually got to college I realized these techniques were not only more effective and enjoyable for me than sitting down in lectures, but that the vast majority of students never actually had to build these muscles to begin with.
This reminds me of a CS class I had in college with a bad professor. I knew the guy by reputation. We had like 4 tests that class, and the only time I stepped foot in the class room was to take his tests. I didn't bother with his lectures. I simply read the book and read the supplemental materials. The looks of outrage I got when it was revealed I got the highest grade in the class were priceless.
Another factor beyond individual suitability to remote work (which certainly varies person to person and even within a person’s lifetime due to lifestyle changes), is the work situation itself.
One thing I don’t see mentioned in these discussions much is that someone might be perfectly content WFH when given clear goals and autonomy to execute in a neutral political environment, but do a few unexplained mass layoffs, give muddy direction or tighten the leash with stricter policies or new monitoring software and watch paranoia and depression take root (this is true in-office as well but I think gets amplified over Slack due to a stronger prisoner’s dilemma effect).
Unfortunately due to the power differential, any disruption to output caused by these situations will still be blamed on the individual contributor.
Slack and Zoom are a massive parts of the problem. Because "my boss can read it" sure does curtail a lot of conversations.
You are left in a situation where you miss out on all sorts of hints that people just aren't putting out. A string of tepid yes's on the way to get coffee is a much different signal than a string of yes's with no context in Slack. Things may be different again on zoom because of equipment quality and connectivity and peoples willingness to be a certain way on camera (and when looking at themselves).
I have seen at least half a dozen work place kerfuffles in the last 5 years that would have been avoided entirely if people were regularly co-located.
Unless you're small enough to get away with a very open and free culture (both business and personal) then there is a lot being left on the table that requires work to be re-gained. Many organizations are still bad at this.
Work that can be re-gained by the number of hours (multiplied by each employee) not lost to commutes every week. Something to consider when tabulating this!
Agreed, the loss of some opportunities for signal like is definitely one of the downsides.
One thing that helps a lot is occasionally mixing in (non-recorded) video or phone calls, and having a lightweight way to initiate one.
Text chat: "quick call this afternoon?" "3pm ET?" ":thumb-up:" <call added to calendars>
For that matter, making 1-on-1 text chats mostly private reduces the chilling effect of perceived boss panopticon. The company might retain logs for various reasons, but the only access is through Legal, and only for exceptional events.
(Though, there may soon be an additional chilling effect on communication within a company: people will realize it's an individual problem if the company's third-party team communication SaaS is profiling them individually in company chats "for AI training", and using/selling that various ways. There's already a lot of SOP performative and gaming behavior in our field, especially when it comes to obtaining jobs and getting good performance evaluations and promotions, so we can extrapolate what will happen.)
I love my remote company for being mostly cameras off. We’re not even a small company at all. It’s so much less stressful than constantly being on Zoom on camera.
I load the dishwasher and do other small chores while I have 1:1s and other non-hands on keyboard meetings. It’s amazing for my home life. Thank goodness for modern noise canceling headphones.
I don’t feel like these small social cues or in-person signals are actually that valuable when it comes to completing tasks to make the company money. It’s really easy to avoid kerfuffles: hire the right people who exude the right values and don’t care for drama. Don’t hire people who are vindictive assholes.
I was brought on to a team as WFH - there was an office, but most of the team I worked with were in different states. But a lot of folks had left 6-12 months previous. I was stepping in to a void, and just had some jira tickets.
Manager above me wasn't technical, didn't know my project, just said "get done what you can". I worked and filled out timesheet. I was pinging the ticket owner, no response. Tickets were for an external client. Asked manager to arrange meeting. Took 2 weeks. Got a meeting with the external client using the system who had put these tickets in. "That was Jeremy, he doesn't work here any more... I think he was talking to Glen". Well.. Glen left our team 6 months earlier.
Emily at the client I was talking to had no idea what this was for, cause she only started 2 months earlier. Another week later she said "I don't think we need any of this - whoever asked for it is gone, and I have no info".
I had recorded... probably 130 hours on a few of these tickets mostly just trying to get stuff to build. Emily couldn't update tickets because it was tied to Jeremy who had left.
2 weeks later I had some department head at our company about 4 levels above me call me on my personal phone and start yelling at me telling me I'd put the project way over budget, I was 6 months behind schedule, and was jeopardizing the entire client relationship, and she was threatening to fire me. Apparently the whole budget for the project was 60 hours - I'd more than doubled that plus whatever people before me had done, etc. But... the client contacts I had had no idea what it was for, or really even who wanted it in the first place. I remember this woman saying "the budget was only 60 hours - you blew it up!" I said "I never gave those estimates in the first place, and there's no one here who even knows what this code is to even ask". "None of that matters, we may lose this client because of your incompetence...."
That was pure insanity. I left shortly after - already had something else lined up, but was on the fence about leaving (devil you know vs devil you don't). At that point, I knew I'd had enough of this devil. I left for another remote/WFH position.
This was also ... towards the end of 2020 - depths of covid, lockdowns, etc. Crazy times indeed.
re: department head at our company about 4 levels above me... -- what could be going through this person's mind when they continue yelling at someone after the situation has been explained? A friend got screamed at by some upper level person for being three months behind on a project. They contined screaming even after my friend explained it was his first day at the company.
"They contined screaming even after my friend explained it was his first day at the company."
Yep - that was similar to this. Not a moment of "oh... hang on... let me dig deeper". It was just an explosion. And FWIW, I've exploded on to other people a couple of times in my career - it's not fun. But I also can recognize it's a symptom of something deeper than just the issue being yelled about, and usually very unrelated to the topic at hand.
Next time go to your manager and say "I'm seriously considering axing this project and I want your approval to do so. x, y, and z are no longer applicable and the landscape of the client relationship has changed in the interim as well."
From what I have seen, layoffs tend to go hand in hand with pushing for more work from the office (which companies hope will help them get rid of some employees without severance), so if being in the office helps combat layoff paranoia and depression, there's that.
I personally don't have less paranoia now I am in the office 3 days a week (and probably won't have less when I will soon be forced to come in 5 days a week either), but I only talk to "my" team via Teams no matter if I'm at home or in the office, because they're spread over several locations (and no, it doesn't make sense to do RTO in these conditions, but that just reinforces my certainty that all the talk about "increasing efficiency" is just BS and they simply hope to get rid of people, no matter how competent they are). In the meantime, I don't really care one way or the other, but if they want to get rid of me, they should at least offer me some money for it, I won't do them the favor of just leaving voluntarily (especially not in this economy).
You say your team is remote "anyway", but RTO precisely is about connecting with other people OUTSIDE your team, working on internal politics, and you act as an interconnection point between the remote team and the local network.
I think the two of you are thinking/talking about two different things.
In most workplaces before ~2020 individual teams had designated desks/islands - all team members were sitting next to each other, actually every individual had their own permanent desk.
And you could have a quick chat, pair program, and even adhoc whole team meeting by just removing your noise-cancelling headphones and talking to each other.
Though of course bigger/longer meetings would still be better in a meeting room because of big screen, not being nuisance to other people ...etc.
Most workplaces now do some variant of flexi-desks. At best a group of teams is allocated some specific area/desks, at worst it's completely random which desk you get.
And to have a chat/meeting you often need to still do it via conference call, or get into a meeting room.
Between that, and usually having some people from the team still WFH on that day (many workplaces don't even have enough work desks or cafeteria - for everyone to come into office on the same day) - you now need more meeting rooms than before.
And for some reason they didn't add more meeting rooms, even when redesigning office buildings.
Actually, you both misunderstood what I wrote: the team is spread across multiple locations: they all work from their respective offices, but for meetings we still have to use Teams. My company is one of those typical multinationals that grew through mergers and acquisitions and now has offices all over the world (but I bet it's not one of those that come to your mind, somehow it managed to fail to build any sort of brand recognition, mostly because it's a B2B company). That's especially galling: it's more than ready to embrace remote working tools when it's to the company's advantage, reassigning people as needed, but it now completely denies the advantages of remote working to its employees.
There is no mention of how many of the surveyed workers are even able to work remotely. A large healthcare organization is likely to employ many people who must be on-site in a hospital or clinic to even do their jobs, from doctors and nurses to orderlies, food service, and cleaning staff.
It is easy to imagine that the ER staff might report lower well-being than someone on the admin staff who works from home on their laptop all day.
I've always thought that the same discipline needed to work remotely, is the same to start your own company. When you start a company, you have the same isolation, lack of coworkers for socialization, and no boundaries between work and home.
It also requires you to be a self-starter.
I've been working remotely since 2007. Thew few times I've had client visits reminds me all over again why I hated working in an office.
By the end of the COVID lockdowns, I was ready to RTO, at least as least hybrid. Just to get out of the house and see people other than my wife and dog during the work week.
But, half of my team (plus my direct boss) is remote and couldn't come in even if they wanted. So, all meetings are still on Zoom. But, at least for the half who are here, I can get some water-cooler gossip and face-to-face 1-on-1s.
Loved remote working from 2019 to early 2026. No doubt it was the best type of job for my health as there was little stress and I was never lonely. I made sure I found new friends (like in 2024 I found a happy hour group via Bumble for Friends of 6 other dudes in which we gather every Tuesday. Also, one of them is my European travel buddy as his kid now lives in Europe) and strengthened other friendships.
I am now one of the millions out of work techies yet Im starting a new job and career at Johns Hopkins in healthcare as a nurse. Definitely am going to miss remote work but i need to pay my bills and IT especially web design and development is a dying field.
Could agree with this more. I've worked 100% remote for the last 6 years and had quite a few years of hybrid remote work before that.
Not everyone is as well suited to it because you have to implement your own boundaries and discipline. I used to get a majority of my social interaction at work, now I have to make sure I get out with friends, or even just to the store, to make sure I'm not just in my house all day toggling between work and personal life.
But any downside I have to manage like that is more than offset by being at home, with the temperature how I like it (I always froze in offices), with my dogs, able to go pick up my kids from school, and with an ideal desk setup (43" monitor, quiet uninterrupted space, able to use voice mode on Codex without disrupting others) that I couldn't have in an office.
> here are a lot of people who think they’re going to love remote who ultimately flame out
I'm the opposite. I avoided remote work, figuring I'd hate it. Then COVID forced it upon me. And now I won't even consider a job unless it's remote-first. I'd allow for remote-friendly definitions of hybrid though.
Don’t coworking spaces solve some of the issues? I am one of these people that hates working from home and loves going to the office - the chat with colleagues, the exercise of bicycling to the office and back, the context switching between work and not work - otherwise I loose myself in the work. All of that is awesome for me.
When I was playing around with remote work, (before the pandemic and before it was cool) - I figured most of this can be offset by just going to a coworking place - and even better - friendships you form from there seem stronger, because people are less anchored to the company and more to the “place” - more open to friendships. Plus you can pick and switch your “office” as desired for your mode of travel and preferences (or even switch cities, travel around)
I worked remote my entire life, I have never worked in the office (I did occasionally go for socialization purposes at one company), that's 20 years working remote. Would that be sufficient of a proof?
I am not looking for a job, just trying to figure out what would be sufficient to convince you of good remote work skills. I am happy where I am at (a full remote company, yes)
Remote employees are also in demand enough to negotiate / find a role with remote work. They probably then are experienced, senior, and better compensated than their peers.
It could be that the underlying cause is being more in-demand in a position to negotiate remote work, not remote work by itself.
Since full remote I can spend 8 hours a day on work instead of 10 (an hour commute each way). Putting aside other benefits like easy and cheap lunches, way better desk ergonomics and equipment, and all the sundry other benefits, working remote allows me to have a life that I never could when I worked in an office because of those 2 hours a day.
It's nice to be face-to-face with people, but I don't need that every day (and frankly don't want it neither), but all the benefits in quality of life overwhelming favor remote work for me to the point I will put up with way more shenanigans just to keep this benefit.
If there were no previous study available, there would be no argument to enforce a policy to enable this. So I am thankful that someone made a study, now there is more ”data” to back the claim up.
I have been remote working for the past ~5 years or so. I had to RTO briefly for 3-4 weeks, which was about as long as it took me to find a position with a new org. I love the benefits at this stage in my life (young children, etc.) but I'm not sure the networking relationships I developed early on in my career "in the trenches" would be nearly as strong or beneficial as they have been had I started remote. I'm curious to see how that plays out over the long-term for folks that may start remote and attempt to stay that way throughout their entire careers.
So I was part of a very small company (<15 people) that was bought by a mid-sized company that otherwise had no presence in our country.
Leadership left and there was a few years where no one else in the office was in the same teams or reporting chains. The majority of people were in a single office in another company. I found it very difficult to participate and was left out of most decisions. Then covid hit and everything changed. With everyone working from home remote networking opportunities were built, I was an equal part of every discussion. Now I am in a large fortune 500 organization with a mix of working arrangements and I don't have any issues networking. I like to think we do a pretty good job with junior participation as well. The main thing I'm missing is the rumour mill and the pulse on what unrelated roles like sales/finance are saying on the ground.
That's great to hear. I guess what was in the forefront of my mind were how those relationships carry over after your time with that organization is through. There are a group of us that "started together" ~15 years ago that have had each others backs throughout the years in regard to opportunities and plenty of other life events outside of our starting organization. I was also in the military as well and it seems like those early relationships where we were peons (basic training, A-school, first deployment) are the ones that really stick. Maybe there's no correlation and that's just how it worked out for me. I have only worked for 2 organizations completely remotely. The first myself and my group worked very well together and got along great. After leaving, however, the only time I hear from them is when I reach out to see how everyone is doing.
Some people have been working remote for much longer than the past few years. They are doing fine.
Maybe it depends on the nature of your work, but I think remote working revealed to everyone how much office "networking" was always kinda delusional.
For sure, networking is important, but I have never found opportunities talking to the same people in my fishbowl. It was almost impossible to talk to the right people within the organization in person, and cornering them is not a great first impression. Reaching out to them on Teams is a whole different ball game, and one that I think more people are good at. Getting the right attention from the right people is also easier in large group chats.
Apart from that, working remote is not strictly at home. There's a whole wide world out there to meet people and find opportunity.
> how much office "networking" was always kinda delusional.
I think different people benefit from it differently. Most people regardless of remote or in-office, put on their headphones and barely talk to anyone else all day, and being in the office has zero if not negative networking benefit for them.
Then there are a few "social butterflies" who know everyone in every department, and they benefit in various ways internally and externally. Internally maybe they can move a difficult cross-department project because they have friends there, which then comes back as praise and rewards. Externally maybe one of their friends get a better position somewhere else and poach them, etc. etc.
I can't speak beyond my own experiences, but the "social butterfly" phenomena is also a bit of a lie.
It's rare to see someone just walk into a business as a total outsider and charm their way in. See how well they handle unfamiliar people. Most of them will stay in their bubble. When you and your unfamiliar people are all nerds, you're actually in the best position to figure them out. They try to take the easy way out with flattery. Something like: "Oh, you all are so smart I couldn't possibly comment." before running back to their people. Does that really seem like a "social butterfly" to you?
Networking is one thing, but nepotism is another. I don't like working with people who can drag everyone else down.
My F500 employer has on-site requirements. Colleagues and I sad-laugh because we all commute into the office, and spend most of the day on Zoom meetings with colleagues from other locations - you know, exactly the same thing we would do from home.
The sample is not high quality, but the conclusion is pretty obvious. No thinking person can doubt that improving work/life balance, flexible hours, sleeping more, commuting less and comfy pants is going to lead to any other outcome.
Its not just sleeping more but having more people wake up in their optimal times. People's natural wake up times are in a distribution so when you remove the commute time you including more people in the optimum wake up times.
They didn’t control for occupation, pay, managerial status etc.. An on-site physical job like nurse, facilities, or technician was compared to predominantly remote administrative jobs.
Thanks. The complete gap to measure at-home living conditions kicks this into a flawed study. It does not control for physical living conditions anywhere. For instance, if your home is just some hot and filthy room in a neighborhood with lots crime, you're RTO just to escape the horrible environment.
Besides, the premise seems stupid to me. Employers don't like wfh because of perceived lower performance. 'For years, many employers have worried that work-from-home arrangements leave employees isolated, disconnected from coworkers and more likely to leave their jobs.' this is just stupid PR, no different than netflix saying they're cutting down on shared accounts to give subscribers greater "personalization" and "covenience". employers care about employee health only in so far as it bears on performance. this stupid study is investigating the stupid pretext employers give for demanding rto.
interestingly moving between jobs is more likely to increase workers salaries. Would be interested if one of the reasons stopping wfh is to prevent salaries from increasing. There is a physical barrier to finding new employers that are further away from where you live and less jobs available overall in the area you live compared to the entire country/world. People who wfh can work almost anywhere, do not have a moving barrier and can job hop their way to higher salaries
This is partly self-selecting, though. For example, it could really be saying that introverts - more likely to select remote work - are also more likely to be happy on their own. Extraverts are more likely to be happy around other people, but also more likely to be unhappy because of the behaviour of other people.
Just the amount of time and life you waste for commute can be staggering. And of course all the other overhead that comes with going to and back from the office.
Clearly easier for you, me, or anyone else to delude ourselves into thinking our tech or jobs are harmless. God knows I prefer and feel happier at a WFH job, but how is this different or better for us than filter bubbles, aside from the obvious perks that are nice? How comfortable should work be?
A big issue with non-remote is access to opportunities. A lot of organizations don't have offices everywhere, and I having to relocate every time there's a job change is absurd.
For what it’s worth having to relocate for work if the new work isn’t local has been the norm for like 10000+ years. I’m not sure it’s absurd, but it is a trade off.
I'm also curious. I work remote about 95% of the time and my time spent in the office is by far my least productive. Way more ad hoc chats and longer lunches (both work related and not). I do enjoy the social aspect a lot, but man I get so much less actual work done. On occasion though, those chats lead to a really great idea for the product, so there's also that.
From what I saw most people who "like" going to office are those suffering from domestic violence, having young children and wanting "time off" from parenting and in case of managers, the feeling of power over other human beings is not the same over Teams. Then you have narcissists and peeps/pervs who enjoy being in the middle of "action" and finally people who don't have any friends who hope they find them at a workplace. If you feel the need to go to office, book appointment with a therapist. Maybe you have an unresolved issue.
Couldn't one argue that if you think "most" of the people who say they like going to the office are lying, abuse victims, burned out parents, power tripping managers, narcissists, perverts and lonely losers, that it might be *you* that has an unresolved issue? Maybe people really do enjoy being in the office because they enjoy spending time with like minded people engaging in a common activity. If there really was no benefit to gathering in a common space in person with like minded people to engage in a shared activity, conventions wouldn't be nearly as big of a thing as they are, and they certainly wouldn't be big among famously introverted nerd and geek interests and hobbies. And yet when I talk about a "convention" I bet your mind goes first to a nerd event, something like comic-con or a star trek convention, or even CES.
Of course. When I went remote, I could work from Miami during the winter, and escape the NYC cold months. Going for a swim to your buildings roof pool after done with the day, was the best feeling ever.
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[ 0.19 ms ] story [ 7.7 ms ] threadIn my opinion that's the crux of this debate: social needs vs social remedies.
If you have high social needs but don't have a strong personal social network, then an office is a great remedy. It solves the problem for you by default.
Remote only seems to work for the inverse. Lower social needs, or a strong social network outside of work, or some mix of the two.
I'm fairly extroverted (as far as engineers go) and I'm grateful to have a social network I've cultivated personally. So remote has fit well for me. I can get my work done to a high standard without the obligation, then turn around and spend purposeful time with friends and family.
It's perfect for me, but not for everybody, and you can see that in the comments here.
What remote really did was expose how many people were relying on office culture to meet their social needs. That's not a bad thing. It just surfaced something that went under-noticed for a long time.
Just did a quick check and the Shoreline Costco to Pike Place at 9 on a Tuesday morning is 35m-65m according to Google Maps.
Isn't there kind of an inherit bias here where on-site healthcare workers would have vastly different job requirements than remote workers?
60+ minute commute times are very common where I live. If you are anywhere outside of the downtown area you either pay for parking (expensive) and have a shorter commute, or you use public transit (cheap) and have a long commute.
When I used to commute to an office it was easily an hour to an hour and a half each way every day. I hated it
In the poor rural area my hometown is located, 1-3h+ commutes aren't unusual, partially out of necessity (there aren't enough jobs nearby to sustain the population).
One answer to the parent's question is that I owned/own a house which was a pretty manageable 25 minute suburban commute which I wasn't going to sell just because I got a new job. (Which didn't last that long anyway.)
A lot of the people I know who went remote after COVID took remote jobs at new companies (remember “the great resignation”?) or moved to a new house because they thought they were done with commuting. Then their companies said they wanted everyone back.
BLS doesn't publish data at the right granularity, but it seems like jobs at tech companies are even more geographically concentrated in this way.
https://data.bls.gov/oesprofile/?major_group=150000&occupati...
You're on a board full of technologists. Many are in SF or Seattle or NYC. A 10minute commute means you live in a 5-20 Million dollar home in SF. Not sure how realistic that is.
I work in NYC. The salary doesnt support having a home in the city. Yes, it can support a 1br apt, perhaps a 2br with roommates. Definitely not accomodations for a family.
Laptop professionals who make enough money to own and buy a nice house in the suburbs but not FU money to buy in the city. I count myself in this category.
If you don't make enough to consider buying, you might as well rent close. If you are super rich, you can buy in the city or don't have to worry about building home equity.
You get to skip the commute and reap the benefits all day long. Even your diet improves. You can cook fresh or have delivered whatever you want. Your hygiene improves since nothing is preventing you from taking another shower or committing to more involved skincare. You clean your home more often. You're more likely to exercise throughout the day for natural stress relief. If you have any minor medical issues that need upkeep, you're already in the privacy of your own home.
This is not just a list of annoyances or frivolous luxuries for highly sensitive people. These are the basic building blocks for a better quality of life. These used to be the forever-deferred items at the bottom of my todo list stressing me out. Now they are integrated with my life and effortless. I'm no longer trapped in a cube and put on display. I can live like a human being and do whatever whenever wherever I want. My life is no longer oriented around running errands or physical presence.
I enjoy working in the office at my current place of employment... nice office space, small company, everyone who works there is great and the office is only 15 minutes away if there is no traffic.
But I live in Southern California, so when there is traffic that 15 minute commute balloons to 45-60 minutes.
So I work from home most of the time. I still go in a couple of times a week (voluntarily, not required) but there are no expectations of a set schedule so it is very easy for me to avoid heavy traffic commute times.
I'd have to get paid a lot more to sacrifice an additional 10 hours a week commuting. You can't just tack an additional ten hours worth of pay on, and even if the pay was excellent, I can't imagine this is something I can do long term. Losing three hours a day for a commute eats into so much social and sleep time.
Last sometimes commute (I traveled a lot) to a suburban office was much more manageable but the office shutdown at some point during COVID because of low use.
Zoom out. Being full remote means I don't even need a car. I can live in a walkable city with passenger rail in a low cost of living location. I can reduce my living expense to just food and utilities with a paid off house and no automobiles.
> Researchers analyzed survey data from 7,704 employees at a large healthcare organization.
I’ve been remote and worked for remote companies for a long time. In my observation, the well-being is bimodal. The people who adapt well to remote thrive. There are a lot of people who think they’re going to love remote who ultimately flame out from the loneliness, isolation, lack of visual boundaries between work and home life, and lack of externally enforced routine.
It’s really sad when the latter happens because it’s almost always someone who was hired for their great work and abilities. Then over time they get drained and you can see that the remote work wasn’t what they expected.
It’s basically impossible to predict who will fall into each category at the interview stage, or at least I can’t do it. Prior remote work success (not just experience) is the best indicator but it’s hard to evaluate, too. Some of the most difficult remote hires I’ve worked with had past remote work experience, but it’s only after being hired that you learn they struggled at those companies too.
Some people just don’t want to work next to their gaming PC, completely unsupervised. Others live alone and don’t live near their friends and family. Both these groups (can) suffer from a fully remote environment.
I built my first little company as remote-first before we knew what to call it. I had to be very careful who I would hire, since only a relatively small percentage of folks (around a third, by my estimate) were ready and able to be self-motivated and disciplined enough to work remotely.
And my company was built with remote work in mind from the ground up. Asynchronous comms, everything written down, very well established information systems and work process, etc.
I then worked for a company that became remote by accident. They were obviously an in-person company that never once sat down to figure out a remote-first work culture. It was the most exhausting and unproductive work of my life. Constant meetings, almost no concept of async comms, etc. That company would have worked 1,000% better as an in-person traditional company and the lack of mature process or strict guidelines could have been papered over.
My rule of thumb now is that any company that expects you to be on more than a very small handful of Zoom calls a week is not worth working for. If you need meetings to sync up work like that, you likely have horrible remote work infrastructure, tools, processes, and culture.
It seems a number of companies somehow combine the absolutely worst aspects of in-person work with the worst aspects of remote work and expect to see good results.
Now - my absolute favorite way to work - was when my little company got acquired by a larger company and I effectively ran a small division where we worked remotely, but came into the office if/when we felt like it. That worked because everyone else had to be in the office though, so it wasn't exactly fair. But man, being able to take a 15 minute train ride downtown to spend a day or two in the office each week if I felt like it after I woke up each morning was by far the best of both worlds for me. I could do different types of work in each location to sort of break up my week, and get the benefits of the in-person socialization and relationship building with the lack of scheduling stress and deep focus time remote working gives you.
Still though. I cannot stress enough how shitty Zoom calls are. Anything to do with video calls will be completely banned from any org I run should I ever get the startup itch again. At least on the engineering side of things. Either in person meetings if you must, or phone calls so people don't need to be uselessly staring at a screen for hours each day.
I've found that following an Open Source model of collaboration works well for remote companies. And it gave me a hiring pool of talent with demonstrable abilities to get shit done without needing to be in an office. No open source project is running daily standup video calls.
The people who were burning out at home would become revived and re-energized when they came into the office for something and would stay that way for a week or two.
Then they would slide back into burnout and social problems (assuming benign interactions were hostile in Slack or that people were backstabbing the. was common) the longer they were away from the office.
Some people had the self-awareness to start bringing themselves back to the office for a few days each week and would directly admit they struggled to work from home.
It’s really not uncommon and readily acknowledged in every offline remote work environment I’ve been in. It’s only on social media where you run into claims that remote works well for everyone.
For instance, I've observed dynamics like what you describe at various orgs, and what they had in common was a lack of psychological safety. If people are responding defensively to benign messages then it tends to mean they have a reason to expect hostile messages. Hostile messages are not a given.
One common way this arises: a company ostensibly offers flexible remote work, but in practice strongly prefers in-office work, and enforces this via social pressure. Remote work has a small social cost that accumulates each full day that one works remotely. These remote-oriented workers then have to periodically show up at the office primarily to ingratiate themselves to management and their peers. This is incredibly common, and might even be the default configuration for an org that permits flexible WFH.
I don't think this is intentionally malicious, BTW. It's simply what happens when you make a policy shift without considering your team culture as well so that both working styles are supported as first-class citizens.
I will never go back.
This used to be me but pair programming / in-call collaborative working solved 100% of all of those problems.
Even the work/life boundary was solved because as soon as I dropped off the call at the end of the day my brain immediately switched off work mode.
These days the first thing I do in a new team is try to suss out who else is a bit like this and try to work out a collaborative working pattern that works for all of us.
It's not just more fun it's almost unreasonably effective compared to solo working patterns.
Those collaborative conversations are so often fruitful in ways I don't expect.
One of my coworkers set up a "slack" watercooler channel he would always pair in with an explicit invitation that anybody who wanted to drop in could at any time, even if it was just for a chat. That was cool.
(This is something I've repeatedly noticed in discussions about getting people in-office, and about open office plans vs individual offices: the same managers who push these changes through in the name of "collaboration" create a bunch of other management processes that strongly disincentivize collaborative work.)
But in environments where I've been able to do this effectively, it's always been great, far better than going of totally on my own!
this is enormously self destructive as well. when employees are stack ranked, pitted against each other, discouraged from collaborating the quality of work drops off a cliff and profits suffer.
executives are perfectly rational about this though. the profits don't matter to them anywhere near as much as having more power over the workforce does.
Accommodated employees perform better. Non-accommodated employees perform worse.
For some people, an office is an accommodation - they need that not-home space with other people in it. For others, a home office is an accommodation - a very convenient/local space with very few distractions.
It should come as absolutely no surprise that putting someone somewhere they do not feel accommodated is going to reduce performance.
I also really reject this boomer-esque idea that in-office helps underperformers underperform less. Instead I find it helps under-performers _appear_ to underperform less because they can chat up the boss and more visibly do performative stuff like showing up early or leaving late.
remote work was a blessing for me. but turned out the ceo didn't want us remote working.
i tried repeatedly to communicate what i needed to do my best with my boss and the ceo. but the ceo fought me on all of it.
The problem I was talking about was with people who asked to work from home but struggled with it.
Some of them did start coming in to the office more when they realized what was happening. Many did not, believing that work from home was best for them.
And with RTO, it seems that wasn't even rock bottom, now that employers are straight-facedly suggesting things like "hot desking".
> It should come as absolutely no surprise that putting someone somewhere they do not feel accommodated is going to reduce performance.
I agree, but this required corporations to admit they're the problem in not properly accommodating employees. That is the problem: corporations would far rather blame performance on the employee than any sort of self-reflection.
(¹as accommodated by the employer. Even when I worked in an office, I did have a custom keyboard, but it's something I paid for.)
Yeah, you might. I assume you're a principled person.
In my experience, the less principled simply leave their shit all over the place for us to deal with.
I interpret the study findings not as remote workers being happier, but on-site workers being less happy in remote-oriented companies than on-site workers in on-site-oriented companies.
Now maybe my employer has reason to dislike that I’m probably like 80% of the worker I would have been if we were in office, but the 80% has been enough to exceed expectations on my performance reviews so there doesn’t seem to be a problem.
Then I moved and now its a 30 min drive. Not a nice commute.
Latterly I had about a 30 minute driving commute again but I was doing so much travel that I wasn't consistently in the office that much.
And I found that going for a walk or something like that to replace the commute didn't have the same effect, for a number of reasons. There was the mental hurdle of forcing myself to try taking the walk instead of going straight from A to B since I was already there. There was the fact that while I could try to flush home concerns from my mind on the walk, coming back to my home where all those home concerns are right there for me to notice when I walk through the door meant that all that mental flushing was for naught.
Now I admit that I am fortunate enough to have a commute where I'm rarely in bumper to bumper traffic, and it's less than a 30 minute drive. But at least for me, a commute is a vital part of my work routine.
I was childless and petless then though. The thought of squeezing everything in between school drop-offs, pick-ups, after-school scheduled activities, and dog walks is when things get really annoying.
That never comes up though as the dogma must survive.
Working remote during COVID sucked and felt unmoored.
Once I had a robust IRL social life and could go see some live music again, it was great.
It also depends if you live in tiny apartment or if you have a house with a dedicated space.
The same person can take to it depending on the circumstances.
(Not to mention that, in both contexts, it's very hard to pull apart being remote vs in-office from other aspects of the work and culture.)
Half of group therapy is just being in a group. Groups that require you to be rested and fit and provide a local social network orthogonal to everything else in your life include intramural sports, hiking clubs, radio repeating, crafts and markets... and they're all comfortable with nervous individuals showing up.
This was the major one for me, in addition to the other stuff you mentioned. The "always at work" feeling was reinforced by the management style of remote work being like, we expect you to be generally available to respond at any time in a 12 hour window, sometimes more (because everyone works their own schedules across multiple timezones). In an office this separation is clean, and if I'm responding to messages or working at home, it's generally accepted this is outside the norm and I'm perfectly free to just shut the laptop off until the next morning 99% of the time unless I am on-call. It's nice.
The first thing I did when I went back fully in-office was tear down my home office and turn it into a game room. I generally do not even use a computer in my home. Sometimes we have enforced WFH days due to various things or events, but I established the understanding with management that generally I will not be expected to work full days from home outside of emergencies and I take those days off.
I understand some people love it, and I have a good office environment which helps, but the downsides (general office annoyances, commuting, lunch expenses, clothing expenses, etc) way outweigh the downsides of working remote for me. I got severely depressed and burnt out very quickly.
That's not a management style, it's a 12 hour on call which needs to be compensated without appropriately higher pay and comply with work time regulations.
I often tell people that I'm unusually well suited to remote work because I've had a lot of practice. Starting in high school I was out more days than I was in owing to health problems, yet I still managed to knock out 11 AP classes because I got really serious about reading the textbook and actually studying on my own time. This was even before I discovered spaced repetition systems.
By the time I actually got to college I realized these techniques were not only more effective and enjoyable for me than sitting down in lectures, but that the vast majority of students never actually had to build these muscles to begin with. They really struggle when the courses get too big to cram into a class session, but it's not because they're dumb or anything - it's literally just an endurance sport they've never played.
I feel those same muscles are the ones I've been using in remote work, which I've had the good fortune to do my entire career in at least a 60% capacity and more often a 100% capacity. Remote work likely feels deeply unnatural at first, to people who aren't used to putting in focused sweat at a desk in their own room far beyond what traditional education typically requires.
I hope my own children develop this ability too, although I'm not really sure how to get them there.
This reminds me of a CS class I had in college with a bad professor. I knew the guy by reputation. We had like 4 tests that class, and the only time I stepped foot in the class room was to take his tests. I didn't bother with his lectures. I simply read the book and read the supplemental materials. The looks of outrage I got when it was revealed I got the highest grade in the class were priceless.
One thing I don’t see mentioned in these discussions much is that someone might be perfectly content WFH when given clear goals and autonomy to execute in a neutral political environment, but do a few unexplained mass layoffs, give muddy direction or tighten the leash with stricter policies or new monitoring software and watch paranoia and depression take root (this is true in-office as well but I think gets amplified over Slack due to a stronger prisoner’s dilemma effect).
Unfortunately due to the power differential, any disruption to output caused by these situations will still be blamed on the individual contributor.
Slack and Zoom are a massive parts of the problem. Because "my boss can read it" sure does curtail a lot of conversations.
You are left in a situation where you miss out on all sorts of hints that people just aren't putting out. A string of tepid yes's on the way to get coffee is a much different signal than a string of yes's with no context in Slack. Things may be different again on zoom because of equipment quality and connectivity and peoples willingness to be a certain way on camera (and when looking at themselves).
I have seen at least half a dozen work place kerfuffles in the last 5 years that would have been avoided entirely if people were regularly co-located.
Unless you're small enough to get away with a very open and free culture (both business and personal) then there is a lot being left on the table that requires work to be re-gained. Many organizations are still bad at this.
One thing that helps a lot is occasionally mixing in (non-recorded) video or phone calls, and having a lightweight way to initiate one.
Text chat: "quick call this afternoon?" "3pm ET?" ":thumb-up:" <call added to calendars>
For that matter, making 1-on-1 text chats mostly private reduces the chilling effect of perceived boss panopticon. The company might retain logs for various reasons, but the only access is through Legal, and only for exceptional events.
(Though, there may soon be an additional chilling effect on communication within a company: people will realize it's an individual problem if the company's third-party team communication SaaS is profiling them individually in company chats "for AI training", and using/selling that various ways. There's already a lot of SOP performative and gaming behavior in our field, especially when it comes to obtaining jobs and getting good performance evaluations and promotions, so we can extrapolate what will happen.)
I load the dishwasher and do other small chores while I have 1:1s and other non-hands on keyboard meetings. It’s amazing for my home life. Thank goodness for modern noise canceling headphones.
I don’t feel like these small social cues or in-person signals are actually that valuable when it comes to completing tasks to make the company money. It’s really easy to avoid kerfuffles: hire the right people who exude the right values and don’t care for drama. Don’t hire people who are vindictive assholes.
I was brought on to a team as WFH - there was an office, but most of the team I worked with were in different states. But a lot of folks had left 6-12 months previous. I was stepping in to a void, and just had some jira tickets.
Manager above me wasn't technical, didn't know my project, just said "get done what you can". I worked and filled out timesheet. I was pinging the ticket owner, no response. Tickets were for an external client. Asked manager to arrange meeting. Took 2 weeks. Got a meeting with the external client using the system who had put these tickets in. "That was Jeremy, he doesn't work here any more... I think he was talking to Glen". Well.. Glen left our team 6 months earlier.
Emily at the client I was talking to had no idea what this was for, cause she only started 2 months earlier. Another week later she said "I don't think we need any of this - whoever asked for it is gone, and I have no info".
I had recorded... probably 130 hours on a few of these tickets mostly just trying to get stuff to build. Emily couldn't update tickets because it was tied to Jeremy who had left.
2 weeks later I had some department head at our company about 4 levels above me call me on my personal phone and start yelling at me telling me I'd put the project way over budget, I was 6 months behind schedule, and was jeopardizing the entire client relationship, and she was threatening to fire me. Apparently the whole budget for the project was 60 hours - I'd more than doubled that plus whatever people before me had done, etc. But... the client contacts I had had no idea what it was for, or really even who wanted it in the first place. I remember this woman saying "the budget was only 60 hours - you blew it up!" I said "I never gave those estimates in the first place, and there's no one here who even knows what this code is to even ask". "None of that matters, we may lose this client because of your incompetence...."
That was pure insanity. I left shortly after - already had something else lined up, but was on the fence about leaving (devil you know vs devil you don't). At that point, I knew I'd had enough of this devil. I left for another remote/WFH position.
This was also ... towards the end of 2020 - depths of covid, lockdowns, etc. Crazy times indeed.
Yep - that was similar to this. Not a moment of "oh... hang on... let me dig deeper". It was just an explosion. And FWIW, I've exploded on to other people a couple of times in my career - it's not fun. But I also can recognize it's a symptom of something deeper than just the issue being yelled about, and usually very unrelated to the topic at hand.
I personally don't have less paranoia now I am in the office 3 days a week (and probably won't have less when I will soon be forced to come in 5 days a week either), but I only talk to "my" team via Teams no matter if I'm at home or in the office, because they're spread over several locations (and no, it doesn't make sense to do RTO in these conditions, but that just reinforces my certainty that all the talk about "increasing efficiency" is just BS and they simply hope to get rid of people, no matter how competent they are). In the meantime, I don't really care one way or the other, but if they want to get rid of me, they should at least offer me some money for it, I won't do them the favor of just leaving voluntarily (especially not in this economy).
In most workplaces before ~2020 individual teams had designated desks/islands - all team members were sitting next to each other, actually every individual had their own permanent desk.
And you could have a quick chat, pair program, and even adhoc whole team meeting by just removing your noise-cancelling headphones and talking to each other.
Though of course bigger/longer meetings would still be better in a meeting room because of big screen, not being nuisance to other people ...etc.
Most workplaces now do some variant of flexi-desks. At best a group of teams is allocated some specific area/desks, at worst it's completely random which desk you get.
And to have a chat/meeting you often need to still do it via conference call, or get into a meeting room.
Between that, and usually having some people from the team still WFH on that day (many workplaces don't even have enough work desks or cafeteria - for everyone to come into office on the same day) - you now need more meeting rooms than before.
And for some reason they didn't add more meeting rooms, even when redesigning office buildings.
It is easy to imagine that the ER staff might report lower well-being than someone on the admin staff who works from home on their laptop all day.
It also requires you to be a self-starter.
I've been working remotely since 2007. Thew few times I've had client visits reminds me all over again why I hated working in an office.
Remote work was a godsend. I started working remote in 2015 and never looked back.
By the end of the COVID lockdowns, I was ready to RTO, at least as least hybrid. Just to get out of the house and see people other than my wife and dog during the work week.
But, half of my team (plus my direct boss) is remote and couldn't come in even if they wanted. So, all meetings are still on Zoom. But, at least for the half who are here, I can get some water-cooler gossip and face-to-face 1-on-1s.
I am now one of the millions out of work techies yet Im starting a new job and career at Johns Hopkins in healthcare as a nurse. Definitely am going to miss remote work but i need to pay my bills and IT especially web design and development is a dying field.
Not everyone is as well suited to it because you have to implement your own boundaries and discipline. I used to get a majority of my social interaction at work, now I have to make sure I get out with friends, or even just to the store, to make sure I'm not just in my house all day toggling between work and personal life.
But any downside I have to manage like that is more than offset by being at home, with the temperature how I like it (I always froze in offices), with my dogs, able to go pick up my kids from school, and with an ideal desk setup (43" monitor, quiet uninterrupted space, able to use voice mode on Codex without disrupting others) that I couldn't have in an office.
I'm the opposite. I avoided remote work, figuring I'd hate it. Then COVID forced it upon me. And now I won't even consider a job unless it's remote-first. I'd allow for remote-friendly definitions of hybrid though.
I work remote when and how I want, it's great.
But there's days and even weeks where "I just want to go in" and that's helpful with meetings, work, socialization.
I know a number of folks that work remote, and they are on Zoom, all day.
That would drive me nuts! [actually, it's not really a drive; more of a short putt -Ed.]
I use Zoom frequently, but always find it to be exhausting. I guess that's just me, though.
But I'm also retired, and really leaning into not ever going back into the office again.
When I was playing around with remote work, (before the pandemic and before it was cool) - I figured most of this can be offset by just going to a coworking place - and even better - friendships you form from there seem stronger, because people are less anchored to the company and more to the “place” - more open to friendships. Plus you can pick and switch your “office” as desired for your mode of travel and preferences (or even switch cities, travel around)
I am not looking for a job, just trying to figure out what would be sufficient to convince you of good remote work skills. I am happy where I am at (a full remote company, yes)
The best is remote with an option to come into the office.
This way you are maximizing flexibility and allowing workers to self select into their preferred way of working.
Anything else is suboptimal.
Remote employees are also in demand enough to negotiate / find a role with remote work. They probably then are experienced, senior, and better compensated than their peers.
It could be that the underlying cause is being more in-demand in a position to negotiate remote work, not remote work by itself.
Where am I wrong?
Remote work benefits are much bigger than a paycheck
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49346149
It's nice to be face-to-face with people, but I don't need that every day (and frankly don't want it neither), but all the benefits in quality of life overwhelming favor remote work for me to the point I will put up with way more shenanigans just to keep this benefit.
I can't believe people need studies to see that. All you need is some common sense.
so. works for many people, but not for others
Leadership left and there was a few years where no one else in the office was in the same teams or reporting chains. The majority of people were in a single office in another company. I found it very difficult to participate and was left out of most decisions. Then covid hit and everything changed. With everyone working from home remote networking opportunities were built, I was an equal part of every discussion. Now I am in a large fortune 500 organization with a mix of working arrangements and I don't have any issues networking. I like to think we do a pretty good job with junior participation as well. The main thing I'm missing is the rumour mill and the pulse on what unrelated roles like sales/finance are saying on the ground.
Maybe it depends on the nature of your work, but I think remote working revealed to everyone how much office "networking" was always kinda delusional.
For sure, networking is important, but I have never found opportunities talking to the same people in my fishbowl. It was almost impossible to talk to the right people within the organization in person, and cornering them is not a great first impression. Reaching out to them on Teams is a whole different ball game, and one that I think more people are good at. Getting the right attention from the right people is also easier in large group chats.
Apart from that, working remote is not strictly at home. There's a whole wide world out there to meet people and find opportunity.
I think different people benefit from it differently. Most people regardless of remote or in-office, put on their headphones and barely talk to anyone else all day, and being in the office has zero if not negative networking benefit for them.
Then there are a few "social butterflies" who know everyone in every department, and they benefit in various ways internally and externally. Internally maybe they can move a difficult cross-department project because they have friends there, which then comes back as praise and rewards. Externally maybe one of their friends get a better position somewhere else and poach them, etc. etc.
It's rare to see someone just walk into a business as a total outsider and charm their way in. See how well they handle unfamiliar people. Most of them will stay in their bubble. When you and your unfamiliar people are all nerds, you're actually in the best position to figure them out. They try to take the easy way out with flattery. Something like: "Oh, you all are so smart I couldn't possibly comment." before running back to their people. Does that really seem like a "social butterfly" to you?
Networking is one thing, but nepotism is another. I don't like working with people who can drag everyone else down.
They didn’t control for occupation, pay, managerial status etc.. An on-site physical job like nurse, facilities, or technician was compared to predominantly remote administrative jobs.
https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10....
Also worth noting: Frontiers in Psychology is a low-impact journal.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/HFZpJ9mWwAEfdhv?format=jpg&name=...
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/HIjqR2aWMAErm9E?format=jpg&name=...
Of course I am going to score higher in the well being department. :)