For me, the utility of being at home versus being at the office is massive. If I need a 15 minute break, I can start a load of laundry, or run the dishwasher, or do some other chore.
I can wake up later since I don't have a commute. I don't lose two hours a day due to the commute.
I can wear as comfortable clothing as I desire. I can delay my shower until after my daily workout (Which I can do since my workout equipment is at home).
I can control my environment so there are as many or as few distractions as i like. I can put on videos or audio that might not be considered work appropriate. I can use speakers since no one is around me to hear the sound.
The number and magnitude of inconveniences we subject ourselves to by heading to an office every day has been fully revealed. I will do all I can to work from home for the rest of my life.
I've been doing WFH for 5 years and feel like the rest of the world just caught on. In addition to what you mention:
- Control of food. No more bagels or carb dumping ground. No more limited food options. My own kitchen.
- Control of equipment. Need a 4k monitor? Need a trackball? No approvals needed.
- Control of ergonomics. Get exactly the chair you need. Get an electric height adjustable desk without going through facilities.
- Control temperature. Never be too hot or cold.
- So many great options for breaks. Walk down the street. Meditate in the garden. Play Beatsaber. Take a nap, naps are magic.
- Control your lighting. Good color temperature and comfortable brightness make the space more relaxing and can aid sleep and wakefulness.
- The ultimate corner office. Privacy and separate space that you can personalize to your heart's content.
- Location flexibility. Work from a beach rental. Do a city-stay near a WeWork. Find a mountain cabin with high speed internet. Move to a new state without having to change jobs.
- Finances. Live in a low tax state. Have an older car. Spend less on clothes, lunches, parking, gas, tolls. Live in cheaper square footage without worrying about what it does to your commute.
- Stress. More emotional speration between you and your work. Relationships are through Zoom and require less emotional investment. Work forms less a part of your identity and changing it involves fewer changes to your daily routine.
- Caffeine. With more tools to manage your wakefulness, less need to lean on the crutch of caffeine. For me, less caffeine means less alcohol as well.
Other people are free to have their opinions that they don't like WFH or can't wait to get back into the office. For me, I really struggle to understand how you cannot love it. With total control of my environment, I can easily correct for minor downsides such as needing to maintain work-life balance and good social connections. After years of optimization, I have a better quality of life than our CEO. I'd be insane to give it up.
The other thing I don't see mentioned enough is the impact on disabled people. Thanks to spine issues, I can't comfortably drive. That has limited me to either working where a train line goes or at the same place with my wife where I can carpool with her as a passenger. WFH is one of the most freeing things that has ever happened to me. It not only frees me to work anywhere, but it also means I don't need to take as frequent breaks. I used to have to work at places that could accommodate my need to lay down to decompress several times a day, and that meant I couldn't do any actual work during that time. At home, I can much more easily keep working from bed when sitting or standing gets too painful.
I liked how to worded "emotional separation"
The reduction in my stress has been amazing, especially considering we've been in the middle of covid. My moods are way better regulated now. I'm no longer trying to ignore my angry office mate who's muttering under his breath. I didn't realize how much upset people influence my own mood. I thought I was good at ignoring angry people, but the action of ignoring took up a lot more energy than I previously thought. My biggest worry about back-to-office is how I'm going to managed my increased stress levels.
> - Control of equipment. Need a 4k monitor? Need a trackball? No approvals needed.
No approvals, but you have to pay for it.
Prior to COVID, I used vacation time every summer to work at an academic summer camp for three weeks. Most of the other staff members—largely college students—had to go through this dumb supply request system whenever they wanted materials for an activity. I just ordered whatever I wanted off Amazon, which was expensive, but I figured I was technically on a sort of weird vacation, so screw it.
My point being, you can make this trade-off in many workplaces. Working from home just normalizes it—and sometimes removes the choice.
In my home office, I've got pushup stands, a pull-up bar, suspension straps, an ab roller, yoga mat, resistance bands, and some dumbells that I use in those moments while something is compiling. No back pain for years and I'm in great shape.
If I did this in an office, I'd get endless remarks and cocked eyes, eventually being told by a superior that my "coworkers find that a little weird". (i.e. stop doing that)
I loved working from home because it allowed me more time with my dog. His need to be taken outside occasionally was a perfect reminder for me to take a break. Plus, the light snoring coming from under my desk was super comforting.
While I was more productive at home, I think that came at a cost to others that I work with. Every interruption that I avoided while WFH is a slowdown for somebody I work with.
I'm back in the office again but I'm hoping that I can one day arrange to work from home most days and only occasionally come into the office.
> Move to a new state without having to change jobs.
I see this point but it's often not a guarantee, particularly if you work at a small company. In the US if your employer is in State A and you want to move to State B, then your employer must become registered as a business in that state and abide by that state's labor laws. Many small businesses aren't capable of (or interested in) maintaining compliance with every state's laws.
I believe this will change in the future, but right now I wouldn't bet on it.
I actually went through really severe caffeine withdrawal last year, it turns out that the always-ready coffeepot at our coworking space was keeping me way, way more caffeinated that I could reasonably do at home
I also spent the year stressed out by the endless stream of Slack messages, eating poorly, forgetting to take breaks, and slumped on a couch rather that bothering to use my nice ergonomic chair, so, YMMV
> After years of optimization, I have a better quality of life than our CEO. I'd be insane to give it up.
Maybe you did run in to it but haven't mentioned, or maybe 5 years is not enough to see it -- have you noticed that a big part of the "remote culture" that few know how to build, is proper recognition of remote workers in the mixed- or dominantly-office- teams?
Those CEOs are perfectly aware that your life quality is higher than theirs on a much lower income, they know full well you are not going away anytime soon...
Yes, working from home can be very comfortable if you invest in comfort.
But for me, comfort isn't everything. I'd rather be a bit less comfortable if it means being able to feel part of something nice. I really like being among people, experiencing things together. For me, that feeling easily outweighs comfort.
Then again, my work is a 10m walk from my house, and I have quite a bit of influence on how our work environment is shaped - so that may be easy for me to say.
I've been doing WFH for the better part of ten years. So beat you. Lol.
But it is kind of vindicating seeing people everywhere start to have the same philosophy. It makes me hopeful that other good things may catch on in the future eventually.
The next stage is possibly moving somewhere with a lower cost of living. Been spending most time in Mexico for almost three years.
I'm glad this works for you & others and that you are happy. However, every time WFH comes up here, people present their preferences as universally better or best. I hate WFH but that is my preference. I really wish these discussions were more about how happy people are that they now have a choice instead of things being so authoritative.
For clarity, I enjoy having a hard separation between home and work. If I'm at home, I'm more likely to be distracted with chores instead of working. I leave my laptop at work so I don't need to work off hours unless there is an emergency. I enjoy my 30 minute commute. I listen to podcasts or design board games. I understand I could do those at home, but I'm more likely to just watch a show or something instead of dedicating time to just listening to a podcast. I enjoy being around friends that I've worked with off and on for over 20 years. We go to lunch together and talk about life. Sometimes we play board games at lunch. I enjoy collaborating over a white board trying to solve a problem. It is sooo much easier to do that in person. I personally feel more part of a team in person than I do if we just communicate via Slack. But these are just the things that work for me. I don't expect anyone else to feel the way I do but there are lots of others out there like me too. I'm glad more companies have options for those with a preference.
To add to it, WFH has one clear massive weakness: the lack of face to face interaction leads to quite a bit of atrophy when it comes to team cohesion. I've been managing WFH teams for the better part of a decade and I've yet to find a satisfactory solution other than getting people together every couple of months to work on hard problems together and build some trust.
I'm really bullish on the hybrid model right now. I think having an office designed more like a co-working space that can serve as a central meeting place for teams is what the future of software development looks like. No expectation that everyone is in the office every day, but rather reimagine the office more as a place where people come together when they really need (or want) too.
We're experimenting with that now in my organization and the results so far are pretty good. Some people come in every day. Some people come in every now and then. Others come in when their teams needs them. We're continuing to use all of the best practices for remote work and I think people are finding a really good balance right now.
If most people had an enjoyable 30 minute commute like you do, there would be a lot more people who agree with you. It's not that working in person doesn't have tons of meaningful benefits (to most people), it's that 10 hours of miserable commuting every week is such a soul-sucking curse that a lot of people would trade almost anything to get rid of it.
I have worked in IT for two decades and usually I spend some time working on something in the evenings as well. If you make a clear separation, it's hard to spend time on expanding your knowledge, whether the goal is to use it for the next day at work or for own personal programming / tech projects.
WFH lets me mix those two a lot more and become more efficient. There's less interruptions since I am not going to the office, and also I have supreme "quiet time" after work, usually between 9pm and midnight.
As someone who has been working from home for 20 years, I've come to realise you need to be set up for it. I've gone from working in a spare bedroom to building a garden office, so there really is a hard separation between home and work.
Well said. Indeed, the whole "battle" over WFH should be about giving people the ability to choose what works best for them, not forcing either option. And that may even change for a particular person from year to year or job to job.
>>I enjoy my 30 minute commute. I listen to podcasts or design board games. I understand I could do those at home, but I'm more likely to just watch a show or something instead of dedicating time to just listening to a podcast.
You don't have to do them at home. Take a 20-30 minute walk before work and it'll be the same thing, plus you'll also get some exercise!
Obviously, people are different. Some people prefer to work from an office (like me) just because you get to spend time with people (I live alone). Me and my teammates also become more efficient when we work together in the same physical space than remotely (we've tried bunch of things like perpetual video calls, among other things). We all live in the same city, the longest commute in our team is ~30 minutes, but we all feel like it's worth it to go to the same physical space and work together instead.
Unless you live outside big cities, I'm not sure if 2 hours of commute is that common (at least with my South West European perspective, maybe is different in the US/elsewhere?).
Let's look at a 1-hour round trip commute assuming 240 working days per year. This means 240 hours gone in a year to your commute. That's 10 full whole days. A 2-hour round trip commute means 20 full whole days... almost a whole month gone. 3-hour round trip commute = 30 full days.. and so on.
Personally, I'm looking forward to going back to the office. I am an extremely introverted person and during the pandemic, I've gone upwards of 5 months without saying another word to a person face-to-face. I personally prefer that and don't feel lonely or anything; I just don't need social interaction in my day-to-day life. But I know that in the long term, it's going to have negative consequences for me in terms of networking and just friendships in general. These are basic things that you need that I am completely incapable of achieving without it being forced upon me in an office environment.
Yes, I hate driving. But I'll move closer to the office (which we're relocating to a much further location currently) and I'll get it to <20 minutes each way, which is acceptable.
Just because you can't find arguments for it in your life doesn't mean others can't. I need that environment and if my job went remote-only, I'd quit without any hesitation just as employees are quitting after being asked to return to the office. We shouldn't go from one extreme (everyone has to be in an office) to the other (there is no office at all).
We need to accept hybrid solutions where an office exists and maybe you're expected to be there once every week or two or something. We need to accept that some people work better remote and others work better in an office. We're trying to build the most efficient working environment for the team in general, not just one or two people one way or the other.
When interviewing with a company who demands commuting say, "I value my time as I'm sure you do. I will commute if required but I charge a premium for my commuting time. My rate is $x/hr and since I will be commuting 2 hours a day, 5 days a week, an estimated 48 weeks (accounting for holidays, vacation, sick, etc...) a year then I request you increase my salary by $x * 2 * 5 * 48."
I say that partially in jest because, of course, no employer is going to increase your salary by $48K simply because you value your commuting time at $100/hr (a reasonable rate if you're in tech). Still, I think it's a useful way to gain a perspective on just how valuable one's time really is to them.
The commute isn't always dead time though. For me, the 3hr round trip was spent playing computer games on my Nintendo Switch, or reading a book, or just letting my mind wander while listening to music. All of these are activities I don't get time to do at home because of the thousand other commitments I have at home.
You'd think working from home would give people more free time, but that's not always the case, for example if you have small children. Don't get me wrong, I love spending time with my family, but the commute was the only "me time" I had in a given day and I miss that dearly.
covid gave us a lot of data, and things are not as obvious as imagined, many people said they just couldn't operate at home, but it seems the majority was utterly happy
It does depend on the type of commute. If you walk or ride a bicycle to work that is at least somewhat personal time, and I personally enjoy the structure. If you use a train or bus or something similar and don’t have too much rigmarole around transferring etc, that also can be personal or work time or a combination. The only real lost time is driving, and even then some people enjoy podcasts etc.
Agreed, and the resources that a commute consumes (time, wear and tear on a vehicle, fuel, mental reserves either sitting in traffic or dealing with other people on public transportation, etc) are not considered in compensation...
Your most valuable resource, time, which can be neither replenished nor its true quantity known, is being wasted for very little gain.
I go to a coworking space. Having some semblance of separating home from 'work' (even though I do sometimes 'work' from home) helps. I did total 'work from home' - working out of a converted bedroom - for years, and... it's functional, but the process/ritual of leaving and coming back does help me.
I still 'work remote', as a freelancer. I have had engagements where I go to a client's offices, sometimes for somewhat extended periods of time. I will travel if needed.
But the majority of work I do is still done on terms I have some control over, which, ultimately, I think is the key part of the whole discussion. Where I work, what equipment, what hours, when/where I travel, what I wear, etc - things you were mentioning above - having control over those is key, regardless of whether you want to work from home or in an office or somewhere in between.
I think it's interesting how "the ritual" of going to or leaving work. Is such a big part of the discussion around working from home.
I felt it myself at first. I had to do something to break up the day into work and not work. At first I'd pretty much just walk to the bus stop and go home from there. Basically pretend I took the bus. After a month or two I think I stopped. The walk was the new commute.
The ritual part just became moving all cables back to my own computer from the work laptop dock. A quick minute and it's over. Work has ended and all is well.
I need to separate work from home and home from work. My home is filled with distractions and the first couple of months of the pandemic were horrible becuase I couldn't get anything done. I started going back in to work in the summer (2-3 minute commute depending on the single traffic light along the route) and my productivity went back to normal. It was actually better than normal because work was mostly empty, so I had a big office building designed for 600 workers mostly to myself. Now, unfortunately starting today we are all back in the office, so I'm having the same transition issues as all the WFH people, but because my nice empty office building is now filled with people.
That's the key for me. I think every remote company should pay for co-working space for their employees if they choose to. Also, it's important that co-working spaces design it to be more like a quiet office with stations with big screens etc. Not like the old co-working concept where it's like a cafe, cramping multiple people together.
I recall once interviewing at a startup. Their office was in a co-working space. When I arrived in the morning I knew after 5 minutes that I'm not going to work there. The entire team of 4 people, including the CTO who was supposed to be my manager, were sitting together in a tiny room with zero privacy.
Agreed! I had an hour-long one way commute too and it's been great. My work day went from 11 hours to 9 at most. I have more time to cook, I can get up later of earlier, I can do laundry, dishwasher etc...
My company wants to go 2 days home and 3 days office. I've said I'd do it the other way around.
I do miss my colleagues as well, but two days a week should be enough to garner most weekly advantages of being in the same place.
And it's not just convenience, either. 2 days in office would open up immense possibilities for me regarding housing, I can live in a cheaper home outside the big city and still commute less than 10 hours a week.
> My company wants to go 2 days home and 3 days office. I've said I'd do it the other way around.
That's exactly the same as me. Company is talking about everyone coming back in for 3/2 starting in mid-September. My response is I'll see you for 2/3. I have a 20 minute commute which isn't too onerous, and I like having some in-office time as I find it valuable.
What will really be the test for me is how I feel after a month or two of the kids being back in school. Right now being home is still fairly social for me. Previous times I've tried to work remotely it was the loneliness of having only myself in the house for days on end that killed it for me.
I'm also a bit of a realist, though. Being remote (or at least 'more remote' than the rest of the team) is a serious career limit, so if everyone else starts spending most of their time in the office, I will probably follow along.
I suspect the partial in-office/wfh arrangement will be fairly rare. Office space is costly to use only 2 days a week. Companies can do hoteling but it breaks down when you have very technical employees who like very particular desk setups (multiple monitors, chair positions, special keyboards/mice). The more common arrangement will probably be mostly WFH but meet up occsionally in some per-hour rented office for collaboration. Sucks for WeWork to have blown itself up before this :).
Also, depending on the type of commute, I need to factor in the exhaustion that comes with using public transportation like Bart. So for me it was an hour each way plus a substantial time to decompress from standing in a packed sweaty train. In the evening it usually meant that I was just too tired to do anything else after work.
Before the pandemic I did a lot of WFH, looking after my chronically ill partner. I basically got my face-to-face load out the way on a Monday, which was Meeting Day.
I guess it depends on the type of job, but for me (software engineering), WFH works extremely well.
I often -often, not "sometimes"- get more done by 8AM, than I used to get done in over half a day (or even the entire day) at the office.
WFH won't work for everyone. It takes real self-discipline, and not everyone considers home to be a suitable place for work.
Even in these cases, I think we'll be seeing alternatives, like small "work hubs," ala WeWork, that are close to people's homes, and allow them to have a lot more autonomy than the main office.
I’m the same I had been WFH in SF for at least two years and joined a new employer pre covid that required me to go into the office. Once COVID hit my manager was really surprised by how much more productive I was. At this point we’re on a flex schedule going back, will see how that goes.
My hope is two days in the office for meeting days or interviews, rest engineering time at home.
I've worked from home for years, and found the same thing - it's made me look like, maybe not a 10X dev but definitely 2X.
But now everyone else I deal with is WFH too and... It turns out they don't appear to be benefiting in the same way and performance has probably dropped on average.
Give it a couple of years and most people will be back in the office as before, I expect.
I have gained a kind of hyper-focus and desire to do the work I had entirely lost thanks to the 9-5 grind, I've been working from home since before covid too. 9-5 5 day weeks seem almost designed to cause that kind of long-tail unproductivity.
Agree with all of this, but it also requires to schedule pretty much any interaction. Also all the interactions are going through your employers systems, which are all recorded. So any gossip or informal catch up, or sharing real “corporate incorrect” opinion is out of the door (if you work for any large organisation).
It was fine the first 6 months of working from home but I feel increasingly professionally isolated, not knowing what is going on, even though I spend half of my day talking to people on a headset.
> but it also requires to schedule pretty much any interaction.
That's a small price I'm willing to pay.
> So any gossip or informal catch up, or sharing real “corporate incorrect” opinion is out of the door (if you work for any large organisation).
Just speaking personally, any company I've worked at where gossip/whispering/staff looking over their shoulders and feel the need complain/etc. were important factors was not an environment I wanted to be a part of anyway.
> but it also requires to schedule pretty much any interaction.
This is another positive.
> So any gossip or informal catch up, or sharing real “corporate incorrect” opinion is out of the door (if you work for any large organisation).
I'm not sure what "corporate incorrect" means here, but gossip is generally a net negative in the workplace that tends to build cliques and factions that often manifest in a bigger problem.
Assuredly there are other non-company channels to do those things, but the question is ... why?
I know plenty of people, myself included, who consider most of what you described as a blessing.
Not having to have "how are the kids?" conversations and instead being able to play a video game or watch a TV show during some down time is worth every bit of company gossip I'm missing.
not sure how "corporate incorrect" you are intending, but I feel pretty open to discuss things I'm dissatisfied with with my team. I suppose if push came to shove, I would be fine with that being public record.
Another equivalent view point is that your commute was being compensated and that now employers will begin to pay less as the supply of people who are willing to work remote increase.
The biggest perk for me is the ability to hit that bong in a middle of work day, while watching weird ass japanese hentai with my surround sound home cinema.
Depending on your company culture, you could do that in the office as well. In some companies I worked at, weed brakes were an everyday occurrence for engineering, but gamedev in general and Tel Aviv in particular are a bit different from the usual white-collar office culture.
I can just start calling people, no need to find a room with my laptop where I only have the screen of that laptop, just to not disturb the others in the open office.
I have breakfast with the kids, am home for package/groceries deliveries.
I have much better relations with colleagues in other countries because cam on is the default and we are not with a group of locals and 2 people on cam. It's a big equalizer.
I like it like this and would be annoyed as well if this was taken from me.
You are pitching being able to do laundry, dishes, clean, etc. as a perk. I feel like it’s a negative as part of my mental space is occupied by household chores as well. Blending errands and cleaning with meetings and focused work is a pain now. It feels like I’m doing an insane multitasking balancing act most days.
This as much as you want to do it though. I share OP's view point, but will also let those house keeping tasks rote away for a while if I'm not in the mood too.
They'll still need to be done at some point, but now we have more choice on when we want to do it, and not just between 8PM and 8 AM or only on weekends, as it was the case before.
Not an uncommonly long commute, perhaps, but only because—particularly in the US—we’ve made some really unfortunate choices with regard to city planning. It shouldn’t be this way.
Pretty much anyplace where someone commutes into a city from comfortably outside the city is going to have a substantial commute. I'm actually very convenient to a decent commuter rail system to a city with a good mass transit system. And it would take me around 90 minutes door to door to commute in. It would be shorter if I lived closer in but it would be hard to be much under an hour.
It's the kind of commute where you have said you don't want to be a renter for your entire life nor devote your entire paycheck to the mortgage.
That said, I actually like my commute that is 30 minutes of bike followed by 30 minutes on the train. I get exercise in the morning and evening and make steady progress on my backlog of books.
I would hate it if I was driving. That's just wasted time.
> I can wake up later since I don't have a commute. I don't lose two hours a day due to the commute.
Commutes are also dangerous if they're by car. Not only are roadway congested, everyone is in a rush, and people are driving after just waking up and then again after a full day of work.
From a purely economic standpoint, commutes are responsible for a 10% drop in hourly wages[1].
Depending on company culture, meetings with 10+ people can end up with just a few people talking and others not participating at all but still being forced to attend. Tolerating such events is much easier when you simply turn off your camera and lay on the couch, stretch around etc. instead of sitting awkwardly and pretending to care.
Hear, hear. As someone with dietary restrictions, the ability to make lunch at home every day is also huge (to say nothing of not being in an office which "helpfully" offers the temptation of junk food during moments of stress).
I'm not gonna lie, it lowers my stress levels by at least half. The sheer fact that people can't randomly drop by and I can more control the flow of my day by ignoring email and slack until reasonable interval checks. People can still get me if there's an "emergency" but those are few and far between.
My mental model on commute time is that every 1 hour is a year of my life wasted over a 24 year career. More than that if I work for more than 24 years.
I recently committed to a 40m commute for the next three years to take my young child to our chosen school. I rented a desk near the school b/c of course 40m is too far for multiple round-trips each day.
I used to commute an hour pre-pandemic so I thought, how bad can it be?
Let me tell you - after a year of working at home, any commute feels like a giant waste of time and energy, which of course it is. I cherish the time with by child, but being strapped into a car seat in the back of the car is hardly quality time.
Not only that but when you combine it with having the freedom to relocate to a low cost of living destination suit your optimal lifestyle the benefits stack up even more.
For example living 15 minutes to world class hiking trails or surf spots. Not having to take a flight or drive for hours each way to go do those things on weekends you can now do them every day before or after work. Getting to live in a large house out in nature, far away from the city crowds.
> I don't lose two hours a day due to the commute.
Realizing I was basically using an entire work day or even a little more per week just to commute was what made me put in the effort to move to remote work(pre-pandemic by a couple years). And once I started, I noticed the little niceties as you mentioned and it would take something drastic to get me back into an office again.
I 3d print and make useful things for my house on CNC mill machine I received few months back.
At this point if a company wants me back in office, I'll go and work for the one which doesn't really there's no value in being packed in a shop with people who don't want to be with you.
It's other thing to orchestrate something by purchasing bit of inputs from everyone on team.
The pandemic has flipped things on their head. Before it was “how can I know that you’d be productive outside of the office?” and now it’s “how is the office is any way necessary or an improvement on working from home?”
Businesses have to justify offices and cubicles to their workers but from all of the arguments I’ve read, they’re coming up short.
I've been working from home for years, and while all the things you listed are huge. The number one thing I missed the most in the 20 or so times I've been to the office in the last 7 years, is having my own bathroom.
That said, I miss going out to lunch, accidentally meeting people from other teams, reading on the train, meeting friends in the city right after work, and just being around people in general.
I wish I could get an in office part time job that paid benefits, but I don't think those exist.
Agreed with the above. I'll also add that for many years my wife and I have had the goal of living in Europe (we're Americans) but finding suitable work in Europe seemed nearly impossible:
* EU work visas seem very hard to get
* EU software jobs seem to pay ~40% less than comparable American jobs before taxes (and EU taxes are more significant)--this leaves little slack for travel
* My wife's field is communications/marketing and she's pretty specialized to English/American-culture and the demand is quite a lot lower for her industry than mine
Then there's the hassle of long-term remote: figuring out taxes, selling our home, the logistics and costs of moving those possessions we're unwilling to sell to Europe, etc.
Work-from-home enables us to work from Europe for a few months at a time--we'll have to work odd hours (~2pm-9pm iirc) and we'll probably have to pay Europe rent and our American mortgage; however, we'll probably take most of our vacation during our abroad months so the odd hours will only apply for a few weeks and we can afford the additional housing cost (especially if we save for it during the months we're in the US). I think the tax situation should be okay since we'll be in the US for the majority of the year, but I need to find out for sure.
IANAL but technically you working remote from Europe on a tourist visa is a violation of a bunch of immigration laws (and probably some tax treaties).
Will your firm catch you? Likely not if you are only working abroad for a few weeks, if you're doing it for longer, you'll probably get an email asking for clarification on your tax status (at best). At worst, they'll pull your VPN logs and demand that you get back to the states before you trigger some payroll issues.
Not sure about other countries but it's pretty much automatic in Germany for any job over EUR 55k (or something like that). Which is nearly all software jobs worth taking.
>> If I need a 15 minute break, I can start a load of laundry, or run the dishwasher, or do some other chore.
That is not universal. That is a subset of work-from-home. Many people working from home can no more step away for a break than they would if at the office. For instance, customer support/contact people cannot just step away from the phone. Others working at home have employer systems that monitor them live. Any unscheduled breaks get noticed and recorded.
Even amongst highly-paid "knowledge workers" there are issues. I do occasional home days but am not able to take breaks. At any time one of my five bosses might call. We don't have any monitoring software but they expect me at my desk ready to respond, not walking the dog or doing laundry.
Or my talk therapist girlfriend, for whom working from home still means having phone or video appointments starting and ending every hour. Though at least she can take a short break if someone no-shows (most of that time is for doing notes).
I suspect most people working from home have some opportunity to take breaks here and there, though. I'm aware of certain professions with invasive monitoring (I've seen nurses that work for pharmaceutical companies report this), but it doesn't seem to be particularly widespread. I'm not familiar with anyone in my personal life who have an expectation of immediate response to superiors (though on the rare case the CEO contacts you, you should make sure to get on that pretty quickly ... but that's why I get email on my phone/watch).
> I don't lose two hours a day due to the commute.
One of my bitches about Silicon Valley is top managers of tech companies locate their companies a short drive away from their homes and estates in Palo Alto, Los Altos, Woodside and force the schmucks that work for them into long commutes.
It is time humanity takes lesson from all that happened in the last two years and aim to build a more sustainable environment. Not just for us but for our future generations.
Yep. I just changed jobs to have a shorter commute to support my wife and children better, and also expect to only be in the office ~3 days a week.
Working from home has been an absolute boon to me. I've done partial WFH for my entire career and it feels totally natural to me. I do miss being in the office, maybe once a week or so.
Just to add to the plusses you already mentioned, the amount of CO2 released into the atmosphere just by the practice of driving to the office everyday is immense.
I was a long-time skeptic of remote work, but after this last year I am convinced it can work well - and perhaps not just work well but work better than traditional office work. Our experience has been that people are just as productive in a 'visible sense' as when they were forced to commute and come into the office. But I also get the sense that people are happier, because they are able to skip frustrations (commute), retain their family life in a better way (seeing kids more), and free up mental bandwidth (by taking care of little chores/errands at will). They are able to create the work environment they want, eat more healthily, and do things like go for a walk and recharge. For creative work, I think there will be significant long-term benefits to having a work force that isn't just productive, but also happy, healthy, and fulfilled. Companies that are trying desperately to hold onto the old working model with stopgaps like "hybrid work" are simply dating themselves and will lose their best talent.
OK. I WFH as well. I know all the benefits. And as I'm WFH for pandemic only I've been trying to find remote work post-pandemic and there I realized some bitter points:
1. I compete for positions with people all over the world. Who can complete with a fraction of the salary I need.
2. As a remote worker -most often working as a contractor- I'm even easier to be replaced in a heartbeat. No severance or anything alike.
3. Did I mention that I compete with all the planet? That makes competition for good roles really crazy.
4. Work blends into life and it is very hard to keep it from. This gets worse depending on the company/role but in general these things tend to go the employers way not yours.
5. You need to find new ways to socialize (and the motivation to do so is minimal) or you risk mental health issues.
All I'm trying to say is be careful what you wish for because you might get it.
> Work blends into life and it is very hard to keep it from. This gets worse depending on the company/role but in general these things tend to go the employers way not yours.
Am I one of the few that sees this as an enormous benefit? Work becomes a series of tasks I need to achieve throughout the day, like all the other tasks like laundry and doctors appointments.
I get to restructure what I need to do in a way that suits me best. I can push code at 11PM and go for a nap at 4PM if I choose (assuming no meetings).
Then my life isn't segmented into exclusive blocks. It is just one seamless integrated life.
When an emergency comes up, you are right by your desk and it’s hard to not sit down to address it right away, even if it’s 11 PM. When you have a deadline it’s so easy to log back in after dinner and burn your night away working. As the work life divide begins to erode, burn out is a real risk. I see my computer and if I’m stressed about work I get stressed at times I’d have normally left it behind and not thought about it. I feel guilty if I’m not working late on something I think I’m behind on.
Keep in mind I have kids, a social life, etc. I’ve built my time around work/life balance and keeping the two distinct. It’s healthy for me in ways that having the two conflated never was. May not be an issue for everyone.
This is good if you want work to be a part of your life, which almost nobody wants. It's terrible for a good work/life balance, pretty soon you're going to be stressed 24/7 because you "should be working right now".
If you work in a team that requires lots of collaboration, you might not get to restructure work.
Can people call you or message you to clarify what you just now pushed at 11pm? Do you respond immediately? Let's say you do immediately because you restructure your night time as your best work time, does that mean you're automatically exempt from 8am meetings in a few hours?
Come to think of it. Pushing code at 11pm is not that unusual even pre-covid, but the expectation for the associated communication might be totally different.
> Work becomes a series of tasks I need to achieve throughout the day, like all the other tasks like laundry and doctors appointments.
I don't know about you but I'm not smart enough to feel that my job is as easy as doing laundry or going to the doctor. I'd rather finish all my work in one focused block of time and not think about it the rest of the day. Due to the pandemic destroying most childcare options, this is an unattainable dream for many.
Not to mention that the notion that there's a huge global pool of talented devs is largely a myth. It's true that labor is cheaper in India or Russia, but research confirms that the average engineer is far less competent than their American counterparts.[1]
Software wages in the US are high, because it's very hard to replicate the quality of an American workforce. By and large global differences in wages reflect global differences in workforce quality. It's not like this is the first time companies have realized that global labor is cheaper. They've been trying to capitalize on cheap engineers in developing countries since the 1980s. It's always the same issue. Lower price on paper, but delivery and quality issues that scale far beyond the up front cost savings.
The impacts mentioned by OP aren't predicated on companies hiring globally. Simply expanding hiring across the US (or even just your US timezone) will result in a significant drop in salary for your average role.
Employers aren't going to drop salaries in the midst of a pandemic, but if remote work persists, salaries will drop substantially. It's simple supply and demand, and I'm sure there's data out there (for existing remote positions) that corroborates this.
Many of which are completely orthogonal to where the physical office is; if a company hadn’t completely or heavily offshored its workforce for cheaper talent already, it’s not clear why WFH would be the final straw.
Globally may not be a problem but it does make it far easier for hiring managers to reach outside their immediate area and look nationally. That may not change things much in Europe, where distances are short but in the US that's potentially a huge hiring pool. Even if you limit yourself to just your time zone, how many competent developers reside in EST?
> I compete for positions with people all over the world. Who can complete with a fraction of the salary I need.
This is what always jumps to the front of my mind when I read about WFH on software engineering forums.
I'm lucky -- I have deep technical expertise in a very uncommon intersection of economically valuable topics. I never compete for positions, because there is way more work than available skilled labor. Even still, I'll be back in the office. One day the education system will catch up -- or my skill-set will become obsolete -- and at that point having a decade-long in-person relationship is my only bulwark against ruin.
I can't imagine being a SWE working on a standard tech stack without deep personal connections in an application domain and thinking of WFH as anything other than an enormous and terrifying threat.
WFH absolutely screws over younger people joining an industry. There's nothing like face-to-face learning, and I don't envy anyone who's had to start their career recently.
2. As a contractor, yes, As an employee WFH changes nothing here, particularly in countries with worker favorable employment laws.
3. See 1.
4. True, remote workers need to maintain a 9-5ish routine. meaning that remote means you can be flexible about which 8 hours you work, but you should still stick to the 8 hours you are paid for
5. True, but you now have more time to find a social group to join, closer to home and more into things your interested in outside of work.
About 1: Are you saying that the competition for a role offered in Munich is the same as for the same role offered remotely within +-5 hours CET or planet wide?
I really don't think so. And I'm afraid that this is a classic race to the bottom for the most of us.
> I compete for positions with people all over the world. Who can complete with a fraction of the salary I need.
Perhaps. On one hand, the office was clearly one barrier separating onshore and offshore talent. On the other hand, there never really was a lot preventing companies from setting up offshore offices to attract cheaper talent worldwide. The fact that many US jobs remain still quite expensive compared to the developing world implies to me that there are still some barriers there above and beyond the ability to drive to a shared office.
This can't be understated, at least for some of us. I'm in the Midwest and in the last 6 months about 20% of my company's engineering team has left and taken positions at new companies. Virtually none of them had anything bad to say about the company, its just that for a developer in the Midwest, the number of jobs that have opened up to them that were unavailable to them a year ago is unbelievable.
And on the flip side, it hasn't been too rough for my company to replace them because there are now a huge number of devs in places like the West Coast that wouldn't have been interested in working for us prior moving to remote work who now are.
I suspect some of this will all calm down a bit as the new order of things settles in, but for now, remote work is shaking things up in terms of opportunities for workers in a big way.
Might happen for some companies, but the vast majority not. At least in Europe I'm pretty sure I'm not going to be replaced by someone from India because they don't speak our language, they live in vastly different timezones and their culture is different which doesn't make for the most efficient collaboration.
You really aren't, if you are from US most companies that are advertising remote positions really want you to be located in US, I've been looking for remote work and I don't really believe that its possible to get a US job as a foreigner.
1. I kind of expect a general reduction in the "living in the USA' salary premium for a lot of jobs. It sucks for the people getting paid less, but hopefully the deflationary effects on the economy make up for it a bit.
I hope this is the start of a nation wide trend towards better work life balance. Production output has gone up over the past few decades and we’re expected to work the same amount of hours. I think the future probably looks something like 4 6-hour work days each week. Life is way too short and precious to be spending so much of it working for somebody else, even if you mostly do love your job.
>Production output has gone up over the past few decades and we’re expected to work the same amount of hours
My hypothesis is that Americans cashed in on their increased productivity by socializing at work or browsing the internet at work. In Germany, it's extremely frowned upon to talk about non-work stuff at work, so they could cash in on this increased productivity by shortening working hours.
This is an interesting point but I do think the causality goes both ways. Yeah Americans are probably more inclined to want to socialize at work, but American companies also are way too obsessed with butts in seats. If you're being forced to stick around for 8 hours but you only need 6 hours to do your job, of course you are going to fill the time with something.
> My hypothesis is that Americans cashed in on their increased productivity by socializing at work or browsing the internet at work.
Many people, yes. But the beneficiaries of an increase of minimum and hourly wages, which would affect like 60+ million US workers - they show up and they just work all day, they're not socializing, they didn't cash in anything.
What you're saying may be factual to some degree, but it almost universally talked about in bad faith.
In Germany, it's extremely frowned upon to talk about non-work stuff at work
I wish my German co-workers felt this way. It would cut hour long meetings by half, usually. Not to mention the long list of my other non-American colleagues who are quite chatty. In my experience, I don't really see how one can generalize this behavior by nation...
Most people I know work nonstop until the bell, salaried or hourly. The chitchat and internet browsing is not sustainable at the vast majority of workplaces, you will fall behind and there will be questions asked. IT can also pull logs of internet browsing and show your boss your reddit history.
To me that sounds like wishful thinking. In my experience, even talking to friends and coworkers, hours have gone up and the expectation is that you are available on IM all the time. Maybe not 24/7, but definitely more flexible than the old 9-5 expectation.
On top of that, sick days are much less frequent now I daresay.
> On top of that, sick days are much less frequent now I daresay.
But to be honest, that's fine/expected? There's a quite large range where I might not feel up to the commute/office (or not want to cough and sneeze at people - aside, I bet that's going to be more stigmatised in the near future) but up to doing what I can from the comfort of home where it doesn't matter that I'm curled up unshowered or whatever.
I did that a couple of times even when I went in to the office five days a week - gives me something to do other than lying in bed feeling sorry for myself or doing something and feeling guilty that it's not work, and gives my employer a bit of output even if it is less than 100% (which isn't the alternative, 0 is).
Also could be less frequent as you are exposed to less germs from people forced to go into the office when they are feeling a little under the weather.
Sort of like how flu cases went down during the pandemic — with less interaction from abroad less germs are transmitted.
I'm pretty sure my coworkers have been using this to accomplish the reverse, and I have dabbled.
There are times when your most important work is being available. Maybe less than some managers seem to think, but it does happen. I can go make myself a complicated snack or step outside to do some yard maintenance for half an hour here and there and still be back to my desk in 5 minutes if someone actually needs me for something. At lunch time you can usually stretch that to 15 minutes, which opens up a lot of options for errands.
My wife works for a company that was fully remote before the pandemic, and they certainly were self-aware that being remote was a competitive advantage when it came to hiring and retaining talent. Unfortunately for them, that competitive advantage is now gone, given that they now have to compete with companies that are now remote and have deeper pockets.
Our personal theory is that the next equivalent to remote work will be the four day work week. We work way too hard as a society; the 40hr work week is based off the point of diminishing returns for factory workers. There’s not a lot of reason to believe that continuing this pattern for knowledge work is desirable for the company or the employees.
I'm doubtful the US would be comfy becoming less productive, when competition abroad is heating up and challenging the US empire. On the contrary, I think Americans will feel challenged and a renewed sense of purpose, versus the last 30y of having no contender to measure itself with. I'm already seeing a bunch of people annectdata-ly getting into covid-inspired ventures, and all the "buy made in USA" people being vindicated by political pressure to develop advanced manufacturing within the US (and aligned countries).
So I think the decrease in daily overhead from the remote-revolution will actually serve an increase in productivity, and not be budgeted toward work-life balance.
I'm saying this and I've been remote for years, and promoting WLB aplenty. But my coldhearted crystal ball hints me that larger forces at play will not primarily favor WLB.
My concern with this is that we'll get result inflation. I'm not sure which is better - enforced butt in seat for 40+ hours or forcing productivity that whole time. Working in consulting I know that it's kind of a unspoken truth that even though you're billing and "working" on something, you're not always 100% working at it.
I really don't see that happening except in the very upper echelons of work.
When there's more competition, the guy willing to work longer will always win, especially if the work is such that he can work longer without a decrease in quality.
We're automating more things, there's more of us around, and we're connecting job markets better every day. There's more competition.
People have been saying this for more than 100 years - see the old popular mechanics articles predicting a 10 hour work week due to automation's production gains, quotes from Buckminster Fuller, references to Kurt Vonnegut's "Player Piano", etc., but instead of coordinating these gains with one another we have left them up for grabs for whoever scrambles harder, and the baseline creeps upward. Just like the economics analogy where some people in a seated audience stand for a better view, requiring everyone to stand for more or less the same view as before but with more effort, only with some American Horatio Alger pull-yourself-up-by your-bootstraps mythology mixed in.
This is not inevitable, it is policy we choose, as opposed to some European countries where workweeks have actually shrunk and retail hours are much more restricted. We have decided much of the gains from automation and better average human health and lifespan should go elsewhere.
Corporations naturally compete in race to the bottom on labor rights, because labor rights are in direct conflict with productivity. The only way we're getting a 6 hour 4 day workweek is through legislation setting that race to the bottom at a higher threshold. That's what the minimum wage does (and also why it should be raised).
I took a (quasi) sabbatical recently. I worked 1.5 days a week for one year. I dialed down my expenses so it was enough to pay the bills. It gave me the opportunity to work on some hobby projects, spend more time with my family and just enjoy life. It was fantastic. Now I am planning to repeat this every 5 years at least. I only wish my overworked friends did the same so I could spend more time with them as well.
Will be interesting to see the impact this has on children growing up in the next 10-15 years and I'd guess it's largely positive. Parents with jobs that required business travel have found they can do their job and be present for their children. And yes while it's not all positive e.g. domestic abuse stats have gone up, I would suspect the overall impact has been generally positive for families.
I would hope it's a net positive. My basic theory is that abuse stats have gone up because exposure to the parent has gone up. I would hope that abusers make up a small percentage of parents. If so, I would hope that means exposure to all the 'good' parents will yield positive results.
Maybe it will also change the nature of spousal relationships, as well. We can no longer collectively escape to work to avoid our problems; we must confront them and hopefully grow in the process.
"The latter breeds envy, poorly sorted priorities, and, ultimately, misery."
But is not exclusive to materialism. It can be a part of capitalism.
I am miserable. I have to work for food, shelter, medical care, etc. I do get some othe material items, but usually they are very cheap things for hobbies. I just never have enough time to do the things I want to do because working for my necessities takes up too much of my time.
Good for them, and good for everyone else here who's happy about the switch to remote working. That said: I think I'd almost rather quit than "work from home" indefinitely.
For me I'm not "working from home", I'm "living at the office". I deeply resent that my work has taken over a part of my home. For the record: I love my job. I also really miss working from the same physical space as my colleagues. Meetings which I used to enjoy are now awkward and draining. Lastly: I even miss my commute home in the evening (not so much my morning commute, to be fair). It used to give my 30 minutes in which to decompress and switch my brain out of work mode.
Fully agreed. I didn't endure over a decade of an abusive household and even a few months of homelessness just so my employer could close down its offices and forcibly relocate them into my living room.
I was absolutely fucking livid. Can't a man just be left alone in his own home any more?
I hope we can find a solution where people can choose to work at an office or from home. I expect that the compromises necessary will be difficult. For some, like yourself, meetings were a source of pleasure and are now draining. For others, meetings were a place for dominating (usually male) colleagues to enact competence dramas, often at the expense of more competent but quieter ones. I know some people who already head to the office, but prefer that the meetings are still virtual. For many people getting to the office really is just about having a physical space to work outside the home. So there are a lot of factors. In the end, the market will decide.
WFH is great for > 30 yo, and those with money/space and worse for people just starting out or who live in a studio.
I'm young (26), but successful by financial standards and before the pandemic my apartment was just the place I slept so I had a studio and I liked it that way.
Working, sleeping, eating and socializing from my 800 sqft studio is frankly maddening. I feel like I'm always on call and connected where before my apartment was the place I decompressed and escaped.
Apparently it's an unpopular opinion, but I am completely in this boat. I suffer from ADHD and my productivity and emotional wellbeing cratered when WFH started. I eat worse than I did at work, I put on weight, etc.
I lived next to the office before I ended my lease and moved in with family so I wouldn't be completely alone, so the office was never a hassle. I was a 20 minute walk away and the weather is usually nice.
I had a clear delineation between work life and personal life. My home was for relaxing and play, the office was for work. It helped me keep my priorities in order. Going into the office helped me mute out the personal distractions of life - personal projects, entertainment, etc.
I have a dramatically different experience at home. I can hardly focus because it's next to impossible to fully separate myself from my toys, as it were.
It's driven my stress levels through the roof because I know I'm less productive. No one has said anything to me about it, nor brought up anything, yet my self guilt is consuming me. It keeps me up at night and I'm dreading performance reviews...
> My home was for relaxing and play, the office was for work
Yup I feel this exactly. I had the exact same separation and the exact same issue when it stopped existing. I'm still struggling with it and we've been living this way for over a year now.
This is off-topic, but to me as a European, it's fascinating to read that you consider an 800sqft studio to be somewhat limiting. I'm pretty sure most couples in European cities live in apartments smaller than that. Back when I was in university, I lived in a ~200sqft studio. Granted, I'm really happy that I didn't have to lock down or WFH from there.
It's limiting if you're indoors during the first half of a pandemic all the time, and work from there for another 8 months. A year and 2 months to be exact. Maybe in a normal time (like when you physically went to a university). Now - prison.
I am not sure where you live, but I would expect that WHF allows those under 30 a similar financial relief to those above. For you to be forced to live in an 800 sqft place working in tech, I would assume you live in one of the larger metropolitan areas. WFH should allow you to move further away and capture more space for your dollar, even if you don't end up owning the property like those over 30 might.
At the start of the pandemic I lived in a house full of people working at tech startups in Oakland. So I understand having no space as I worked/lived from my tiny room. But, I was able to leave the bay area, as were my roommates and now we all have our own places (some rent some own) because the same rent in Oakland was able to afford private spaces in other parts of CA.
So I empathize with your position. I recommend trying to move out of the locale that only allows you to afford an 800 sqft studio. Even the shittiest tech jobs in the Bay would allow for you to have your own 2 bedroom apt in other parts of CA. This is how you take advantage of the WFH opportunity as a younger person.
You may have misunderstood me, I could definitely afford a bigger space. I didn't/don't want one. I purposely chose my 800 sqft studio because I hadn't signed up to be entombed in it.
I was never home by choice in the before times and I don't want to change that. I want to go back to getting home at 10pm sleeping after work, socializing, going to meetups or whatever and then leaving at 8:30am the next day. The extra space would be wasted in that case. Plus saving 35%+ of my paycheck was/is great.
I only spent time in my apartment later at night and sometimes on the weekends.
Moving away from the city won't help me there. I imagine it'd actually be worse.
Right now I'm working in my backyard on a nice day, listening to the birds chirp instead of keyboard clacking. One of the MASSIVE downsides of working in an office that I rarely hear mentioned is that you have to be inside during prime sunlight hours for basically all of the summer except weekends and when you're on vacation. We're all cooped up in a shed like factory farmed animals.
Sounds like the office has become a substitute for social interaction everywhere else in life. That may not be a bad thing for you, but it is a negative in the sense that it forces everyone to make it a part of their social lives. If you are looking for making new friends, a sense of belonging, sports and games, drinking buddies, meeting potential dates, and group lunches, you can in theory find outlets for all of those things outside of work.
But everyone working in an office means that if you aren't interested in those things, (you already have friends, a family, hobby groups, etc), you are forced to spend time away from them to participate in the in-office culture. It seems extremely backwards to me.
Its like if people who make church their social group, which is very common, required people who aren't interested in church to attend to enable their social lives.
I don't know how or why a large number of us have made work a substitute for our social lives, but it has been a major problem for the rest of us who haven't.
I feel like this mindset is actually responsible for a lot of modern-day unhappiness. Why are 1st world countries
somehow more lonely?
Something I've noticed while talking to my older relatives outside of the US is that their social life often are the people that they meet in their (first) job in the location they ended up staying in. It feels straightforward that
the people that you spend 8+ hours a day with are going
to be the people that you feel like you know and can trust.
It seems like some odd modern/corporate idea that work is just for work. Imagine if we had the same mindset for school, and tried to make things "productive" by eliminating all breaks and the assumption that students should get to know each other during class/free time.
I think we need to accept the idea that work is really going to be much of your social life when you move, work friends are not your best buds, and only later on can you have a social life that doesn't deeply involve people at work.
This feels like a heavy-handed response to me. Socializing in the office doesn't need to be a substitute, but can be one many missing pieces in a well-rounded social life. Many of the ways people found a social life outside of work are either still not available or not the same. I used to love working from the coffee shop down my block. There were often around 50 people working in there at any given time of day, but the chairs and tables are still stacked against the wall, and people come inside only to get their coffee and go back home. Even finding conversation in a crowded bar can seem more difficult as people are still keep physical distance from people they do not know.
Wow. You get a lot more out of the office than I do. I hate small talk and at work it feels like a distraction. I am friendly with coworkers but I'm not actually friends with many/any. I have tried to decouple my sense of belonging from work as much as possible since that is very unhealthy because its not a situation I control (if I get laid off is my belonging gone?)
Company sports are great but those can be replaced by sports with friends. Dating at work is... Well I'll leave that alone. And food I cook is better than any office food I've ever had. That being said I havnt worked in a FANG office that has a chef.
A lot of us don't miss any of that. I can do all that on my own time and have been for several years now. I'm not going back in until I've exhausted every possibility.
Just bear in mind when you say "a lot of us", it's a small minority of the general workforce. For the majority of the workforce, working from home is a.) not even an option, b.) torn 50/50, with your sales and client success type folk, typically customer facing and person interacting jobs overwhelmingly favoring a return to the office, and us mangly, dirty coding bots overwhelmingly favoring continuing to WFH.
I am squarely in the WFH is great if it's possible camp, but perspective is necessary here. Pushing / demanding that the entire work arrangement norms for the majority of the workforce change for a vocal minority is exactly what gives people with cushy desk jobs their (deserved in this case) bad names.
You can do all of those things outside of work. There are meetup groups, local sports leagues, etc. There is no reason it has to happen at the office.
Also this is just my opinion, but I find it odd when people's social groups are... just people from their job. There is so much more to life than just people who work in the same company or industry as oneself.
I agree. It only improves work-life balance if you've made work and your life one and the same. For the rest of us, the "balance" tips heavily towards work and away from life when in-office is required.
I'd agree – there are real advantages in maintaining a friends group outside of work: you spend far less time griping about your day to day, and the connections you make are far more stable.
Get a beer once a month with coworkers, sure, but relying on work to be a primary social outlet always seems risky.
I associate with my friends and a few groups I frequent. I've never felt the compunction to do this at work or with work people for the most part.
- Making friends with old employees who I didn't know, and connecting with new employees.
Too true; there is this. I've a small handful of people whom I met at work and would call friends. But I usually try to maintain work as work - having friends tied up at a workplace can make for some really bad times when you leave or something happens. I think it's like a work-conditional friend.
- Work Life separation (balance).
If you can master working on work stuff during the day, once you log out of $workchat and vpn, you're off. Set a schedule when you do everyday and work on being predictable.
- Sense of belonging.. team outing, weekday after hours beer.
To me, "hanging out with the team" is definitely work. It has to be work-appropriate talk, on and on. That's enforced team-building activities. My sense of belonging is the paycheck I receive. I will seek elsewhere, not tied down by a job, to get a sense of belonging.
- Intra company sports and games, and then teaming up with office colleagues to play inter company tournaments.
Again, for me, this seems to unhealthily attach a jobs' modus operandi to your own. In reality, unless you're the owner, you are as expendable as any other machine or cog. And I try not to intertwine work relationships with friends. Only rarely do those actually cross.
- (Not me but others) Meeting potential dates
Yipes.
- Office facilities for breakfast, lunch.
My counter is that I have health issues that restrict my diet. At home, I can control exactly what I eat. At work, is what is provided. Its usually good, but sometimes I don't have anything. I would much rather have control of what I eat, by being in my kitchen cooking with my own foodstuffs.
Can (s)he work in office and get all the perks, while you with remotely and receive none of those perks, at the same company?
Sure. This "hybrid" model has been working for a lot of companies, small and large, pre-covid.
On place I worked with 100-120 people in the office saw 5 marriages. A big part of that was they employed a lot of single 20-somethings, but that's a lot of couples who met at work.
I agree with you and that's why I'll join a co-working space when I feel I'm missing these things. (I've worked remotely before the pandemic) You can get the same thing from a lot of co-working spaces.
I still prefer working form home, because I can pack my bag and go back home anytime I want.
Soon, I'll likely go back to a co-working space because right now, I miss those things as well.
I had the same thought as you re: co-working spaces, but I am frequently on audio and video calls throughout the day and need an office. Co-working space dedicated offices are expensive as hell if your employer isn't paying for them. I haven't really seen a reduction in prices due to the pandemic, either. Has anyone found a good solution?
I just miss being able to meet, pair, collaborate and mentor lag free with the full presence of in person communication. I find zoom really exhausting.
Yeah, all of that stuff is WAY worse over screensharing/calls.
Being able to turn your head over to a coworker and say "hey take a look at this" and they take a few steps over to see your monitor is much less of a hassle than ringing their computer for a video call and screensharing which may be better or worse depending on either of your internet connections.
Not to mention depending on your monitor sizes it might not even work properly. i.e. if you're using a larger monitor where everything is rendered smaller so more can fit on screen, it will probably be too small for them to see on their laptop. And in the case of ultrawide monitors, just give up the idea of screensharing on that entirely. At least if you use Teams where you can't share a portion of your screen. -- only the entire thing, or a single window which has problems of its own. Oh and Teams doesn't even let you draw on the other person's screen so they can't point to things!
I find myself feeling vaguely offended by this response.
These are needs that all previous generations fulfilled through their community, or by meeting strangers. But I have the feeling that (some subset of) current generations find that proposition unacceptably risky. And I guess the offense comes from the idea that we should all be inconvenienced for their sake, and also from how the idea "I can only make friends in a safe space" is presented here and just expected to be believed.
I mean we're in the middle of a pandemic right now, but with my WFH life currently I leave my house once a week to pick up groceries. (Where I pop the trunk and they put them in)
I feel like it's really easy for people to not get out of a comfort zone and meet people just /randomly/ on the road or at the Grocery store. Especially to the point of being friends.
Sadly our community has died, church attendance is massively down in most of the world. Which killed that social circle, clubs seem to not really exist anymore. Basically we're down to meetup.com, work, and bars.
Why are you appealing to the past when the fully remote but post industrial 9-5 day schedules is the new thing? My parents and grandparents have either work friends or old college friends.
As someone who's now been in the workforce for decades: presence in an office is mostly a waste of time and money. In my experience, those who demand "facetime" do so because
- it's part of a political power/control game
- "this is the way we've always done it"
- they buy into the myth that "magic" happens in hallways conversations and nowhere else
There are plenty of large companies (and god knows how many startups and SMBs) who have recognized what a colossal waste it is to maintain permanent offices and mandatory facetime. It's time for the rest to stop pretending it's 1980.
Readit News
I can wake up later since I don't have a commute. I don't lose two hours a day due to the commute.
I can wear as comfortable clothing as I desire. I can delay my shower until after my daily workout (Which I can do since my workout equipment is at home).
I can control my environment so there are as many or as few distractions as i like. I can put on videos or audio that might not be considered work appropriate. I can use speakers since no one is around me to hear the sound.
The number and magnitude of inconveniences we subject ourselves to by heading to an office every day has been fully revealed. I will do all I can to work from home for the rest of my life.
- Control of food. No more bagels or carb dumping ground. No more limited food options. My own kitchen.
- Control of equipment. Need a 4k monitor? Need a trackball? No approvals needed.
- Control of ergonomics. Get exactly the chair you need. Get an electric height adjustable desk without going through facilities.
- Control temperature. Never be too hot or cold.
- So many great options for breaks. Walk down the street. Meditate in the garden. Play Beatsaber. Take a nap, naps are magic.
- Control your lighting. Good color temperature and comfortable brightness make the space more relaxing and can aid sleep and wakefulness.
- The ultimate corner office. Privacy and separate space that you can personalize to your heart's content.
- Location flexibility. Work from a beach rental. Do a city-stay near a WeWork. Find a mountain cabin with high speed internet. Move to a new state without having to change jobs.
- Finances. Live in a low tax state. Have an older car. Spend less on clothes, lunches, parking, gas, tolls. Live in cheaper square footage without worrying about what it does to your commute.
- Stress. More emotional speration between you and your work. Relationships are through Zoom and require less emotional investment. Work forms less a part of your identity and changing it involves fewer changes to your daily routine.
- Caffeine. With more tools to manage your wakefulness, less need to lean on the crutch of caffeine. For me, less caffeine means less alcohol as well.
Other people are free to have their opinions that they don't like WFH or can't wait to get back into the office. For me, I really struggle to understand how you cannot love it. With total control of my environment, I can easily correct for minor downsides such as needing to maintain work-life balance and good social connections. After years of optimization, I have a better quality of life than our CEO. I'd be insane to give it up.
I have some points on the not good column
- If you have kids, it is hard to focus sometimes, specially small ones.
- Sometimes your SO forgets you are not "Home" and this also can be bad, as it can create stress between you 2.
- I miss software design sessions with my team, we would go thru issues 2x faster being together.
- Onboarding new team members is a lot harder and they feel less part of the "team"
Last one is building culture remotely is a skill a handful of people have, until now at least. So this also becomes a mess...
For me the perfect balance is to be at the office once a week.
No approvals, but you have to pay for it.
Prior to COVID, I used vacation time every summer to work at an academic summer camp for three weeks. Most of the other staff members—largely college students—had to go through this dumb supply request system whenever they wanted materials for an activity. I just ordered whatever I wanted off Amazon, which was expensive, but I figured I was technically on a sort of weird vacation, so screw it.
My point being, you can make this trade-off in many workplaces. Working from home just normalizes it—and sometimes removes the choice.
In my home office, I've got pushup stands, a pull-up bar, suspension straps, an ab roller, yoga mat, resistance bands, and some dumbells that I use in those moments while something is compiling. No back pain for years and I'm in great shape.
If I did this in an office, I'd get endless remarks and cocked eyes, eventually being told by a superior that my "coworkers find that a little weird". (i.e. stop doing that)
While I was more productive at home, I think that came at a cost to others that I work with. Every interruption that I avoided while WFH is a slowdown for somebody I work with.
I'm back in the office again but I'm hoping that I can one day arrange to work from home most days and only occasionally come into the office.
I see this point but it's often not a guarantee, particularly if you work at a small company. In the US if your employer is in State A and you want to move to State B, then your employer must become registered as a business in that state and abide by that state's labor laws. Many small businesses aren't capable of (or interested in) maintaining compliance with every state's laws.
I believe this will change in the future, but right now I wouldn't bet on it.
Also I realized how conscientious I am compared to other people and the message trail means I have peace of mind about stuff that's not my fault.
And I love that some people are forced to hold in their verbal diarrhea and have to think before writing messages.
I also spent the year stressed out by the endless stream of Slack messages, eating poorly, forgetting to take breaks, and slumped on a couch rather that bothering to use my nice ergonomic chair, so, YMMV
Maybe you did run in to it but haven't mentioned, or maybe 5 years is not enough to see it -- have you noticed that a big part of the "remote culture" that few know how to build, is proper recognition of remote workers in the mixed- or dominantly-office- teams?
Those CEOs are perfectly aware that your life quality is higher than theirs on a much lower income, they know full well you are not going away anytime soon...
But for me, comfort isn't everything. I'd rather be a bit less comfortable if it means being able to feel part of something nice. I really like being among people, experiencing things together. For me, that feeling easily outweighs comfort.
Then again, my work is a 10m walk from my house, and I have quite a bit of influence on how our work environment is shaped - so that may be easy for me to say.
But it is kind of vindicating seeing people everywhere start to have the same philosophy. It makes me hopeful that other good things may catch on in the future eventually.
The next stage is possibly moving somewhere with a lower cost of living. Been spending most time in Mexico for almost three years.
Or are you renting them access to your equipment :-)
For clarity, I enjoy having a hard separation between home and work. If I'm at home, I'm more likely to be distracted with chores instead of working. I leave my laptop at work so I don't need to work off hours unless there is an emergency. I enjoy my 30 minute commute. I listen to podcasts or design board games. I understand I could do those at home, but I'm more likely to just watch a show or something instead of dedicating time to just listening to a podcast. I enjoy being around friends that I've worked with off and on for over 20 years. We go to lunch together and talk about life. Sometimes we play board games at lunch. I enjoy collaborating over a white board trying to solve a problem. It is sooo much easier to do that in person. I personally feel more part of a team in person than I do if we just communicate via Slack. But these are just the things that work for me. I don't expect anyone else to feel the way I do but there are lots of others out there like me too. I'm glad more companies have options for those with a preference.
To add to it, WFH has one clear massive weakness: the lack of face to face interaction leads to quite a bit of atrophy when it comes to team cohesion. I've been managing WFH teams for the better part of a decade and I've yet to find a satisfactory solution other than getting people together every couple of months to work on hard problems together and build some trust.
I'm really bullish on the hybrid model right now. I think having an office designed more like a co-working space that can serve as a central meeting place for teams is what the future of software development looks like. No expectation that everyone is in the office every day, but rather reimagine the office more as a place where people come together when they really need (or want) too.
We're experimenting with that now in my organization and the results so far are pretty good. Some people come in every day. Some people come in every now and then. Others come in when their teams needs them. We're continuing to use all of the best practices for remote work and I think people are finding a really good balance right now.
WFH lets me mix those two a lot more and become more efficient. There's less interruptions since I am not going to the office, and also I have supreme "quiet time" after work, usually between 9pm and midnight.
You don't have to do them at home. Take a 20-30 minute walk before work and it'll be the same thing, plus you'll also get some exercise!
With that standard 8h work 8h personal time 8h sleep. Commute eats up 1/4 of your personal time.
Don't forget that could also be more time with your loved ones, like your partner, your children or even your pets.
That's a big deal for lots of people and very understandable.
edit: It's also more time for _everything else_.
Personally, I really enjoy cooking lunch and sitting on my balcony for half an hour, something I can't do when working from the office.
Unless you live outside big cities, I'm not sure if 2 hours of commute is that common (at least with my South West European perspective, maybe is different in the US/elsewhere?).
Let's look at a 1-hour round trip commute assuming 240 working days per year. This means 240 hours gone in a year to your commute. That's 10 full whole days. A 2-hour round trip commute means 20 full whole days... almost a whole month gone. 3-hour round trip commute = 30 full days.. and so on.
Yes, I hate driving. But I'll move closer to the office (which we're relocating to a much further location currently) and I'll get it to <20 minutes each way, which is acceptable.
Just because you can't find arguments for it in your life doesn't mean others can't. I need that environment and if my job went remote-only, I'd quit without any hesitation just as employees are quitting after being asked to return to the office. We shouldn't go from one extreme (everyone has to be in an office) to the other (there is no office at all).
We need to accept hybrid solutions where an office exists and maybe you're expected to be there once every week or two or something. We need to accept that some people work better remote and others work better in an office. We're trying to build the most efficient working environment for the team in general, not just one or two people one way or the other.
I say that partially in jest because, of course, no employer is going to increase your salary by $48K simply because you value your commuting time at $100/hr (a reasonable rate if you're in tech). Still, I think it's a useful way to gain a perspective on just how valuable one's time really is to them.
You'd think working from home would give people more free time, but that's not always the case, for example if you have small children. Don't get me wrong, I love spending time with my family, but the commute was the only "me time" I had in a given day and I miss that dearly.
Your most valuable resource, time, which can be neither replenished nor its true quantity known, is being wasted for very little gain.
For people who chose to not prioritise living remotely near their workplace.
I still 'work remote', as a freelancer. I have had engagements where I go to a client's offices, sometimes for somewhat extended periods of time. I will travel if needed.
But the majority of work I do is still done on terms I have some control over, which, ultimately, I think is the key part of the whole discussion. Where I work, what equipment, what hours, when/where I travel, what I wear, etc - things you were mentioning above - having control over those is key, regardless of whether you want to work from home or in an office or somewhere in between.
I felt it myself at first. I had to do something to break up the day into work and not work. At first I'd pretty much just walk to the bus stop and go home from there. Basically pretend I took the bus. After a month or two I think I stopped. The walk was the new commute. The ritual part just became moving all cables back to my own computer from the work laptop dock. A quick minute and it's over. Work has ended and all is well.
I recall once interviewing at a startup. Their office was in a co-working space. When I arrived in the morning I knew after 5 minutes that I'm not going to work there. The entire team of 4 people, including the CTO who was supposed to be my manager, were sitting together in a tiny room with zero privacy.
My company wants to go 2 days home and 3 days office. I've said I'd do it the other way around.
I do miss my colleagues as well, but two days a week should be enough to garner most weekly advantages of being in the same place.
And it's not just convenience, either. 2 days in office would open up immense possibilities for me regarding housing, I can live in a cheaper home outside the big city and still commute less than 10 hours a week.
That's exactly the same as me. Company is talking about everyone coming back in for 3/2 starting in mid-September. My response is I'll see you for 2/3. I have a 20 minute commute which isn't too onerous, and I like having some in-office time as I find it valuable.
What will really be the test for me is how I feel after a month or two of the kids being back in school. Right now being home is still fairly social for me. Previous times I've tried to work remotely it was the loneliness of having only myself in the house for days on end that killed it for me.
I'm also a bit of a realist, though. Being remote (or at least 'more remote' than the rest of the team) is a serious career limit, so if everyone else starts spending most of their time in the office, I will probably follow along.
Mine is pushing some similar nonsense. I don't think anyone thought about it too hard:
1. I still have to live within a reasonable driving distance of the main office.
2. I still have to maintain a home office, sacrificing valuable square footage without being reimbursed for its use.
3. I still have to furnish this home office, without being reimbursed for anything except computer accessories.
I often -often, not "sometimes"- get more done by 8AM, than I used to get done in over half a day (or even the entire day) at the office.
WFH won't work for everyone. It takes real self-discipline, and not everyone considers home to be a suitable place for work.
Even in these cases, I think we'll be seeing alternatives, like small "work hubs," ala WeWork, that are close to people's homes, and allow them to have a lot more autonomy than the main office.
My hope is two days in the office for meeting days or interviews, rest engineering time at home.
But now everyone else I deal with is WFH too and... It turns out they don't appear to be benefiting in the same way and performance has probably dropped on average.
Give it a couple of years and most people will be back in the office as before, I expect.
It was fine the first 6 months of working from home but I feel increasingly professionally isolated, not knowing what is going on, even though I spend half of my day talking to people on a headset.
That's a small price I'm willing to pay.
> So any gossip or informal catch up, or sharing real “corporate incorrect” opinion is out of the door (if you work for any large organisation).
Just speaking personally, any company I've worked at where gossip/whispering/staff looking over their shoulders and feel the need complain/etc. were important factors was not an environment I wanted to be a part of anyway.
This is another positive.
> So any gossip or informal catch up, or sharing real “corporate incorrect” opinion is out of the door (if you work for any large organisation).
I'm not sure what "corporate incorrect" means here, but gossip is generally a net negative in the workplace that tends to build cliques and factions that often manifest in a bigger problem.
Assuredly there are other non-company channels to do those things, but the question is ... why?
Not having to have "how are the kids?" conversations and instead being able to play a video game or watch a TV show during some down time is worth every bit of company gossip I'm missing.
I doubt all of our Google Meets are recorded. And even if they were, who'd bother listening through all of them for wrongthink?
Also, a lot of people at my work are on Discord. I wouldn't be surprised if that were the common channel for semi-private employee chats.
not sure how "corporate incorrect" you are intending, but I feel pretty open to discuss things I'm dissatisfied with with my team. I suppose if push came to shove, I would be fine with that being public record.
In a normal job that's 25% of your time that's flatly uncompensated, who would opt for that.
I'm not sure if you are being sarcastic, but how could you possibly be productive after that?
I can just start calling people, no need to find a room with my laptop where I only have the screen of that laptop, just to not disturb the others in the open office.
I have breakfast with the kids, am home for package/groceries deliveries.
I have much better relations with colleagues in other countries because cam on is the default and we are not with a group of locals and 2 people on cam. It's a big equalizer.
I like it like this and would be annoyed as well if this was taken from me.
They'll still need to be done at some point, but now we have more choice on when we want to do it, and not just between 8PM and 8 AM or only on weekends, as it was the case before.
Not an uncommonly long commute, perhaps, but only because—particularly in the US—we’ve made some really unfortunate choices with regard to city planning. It shouldn’t be this way.
That said, I actually like my commute that is 30 minutes of bike followed by 30 minutes on the train. I get exercise in the morning and evening and make steady progress on my backlog of books.
I would hate it if I was driving. That's just wasted time.
Commutes are also dangerous if they're by car. Not only are roadway congested, everyone is in a rush, and people are driving after just waking up and then again after a full day of work.
From a purely economic standpoint, commutes are responsible for a 10% drop in hourly wages[1].
[1] https://go.frontier.com/business/commute-calculator
Depending on company culture, meetings with 10+ people can end up with just a few people talking and others not participating at all but still being forced to attend. Tolerating such events is much easier when you simply turn off your camera and lay on the couch, stretch around etc. instead of sitting awkwardly and pretending to care.
I used to commute an hour pre-pandemic so I thought, how bad can it be?
Let me tell you - after a year of working at home, any commute feels like a giant waste of time and energy, which of course it is. I cherish the time with by child, but being strapped into a car seat in the back of the car is hardly quality time.
For example living 15 minutes to world class hiking trails or surf spots. Not having to take a flight or drive for hours each way to go do those things on weekends you can now do them every day before or after work. Getting to live in a large house out in nature, far away from the city crowds.
It's a game changer
Realizing I was basically using an entire work day or even a little more per week just to commute was what made me put in the effort to move to remote work(pre-pandemic by a couple years). And once I started, I noticed the little niceties as you mentioned and it would take something drastic to get me back into an office again.
At this point if a company wants me back in office, I'll go and work for the one which doesn't really there's no value in being packed in a shop with people who don't want to be with you.
It's other thing to orchestrate something by purchasing bit of inputs from everyone on team.
Businesses have to justify offices and cubicles to their workers but from all of the arguments I’ve read, they’re coming up short.
Why would I ever go back to the office?
How do Zoom calls work? Do you just throw on an Afghan monk-style or use a Snap filter?
That said, I miss going out to lunch, accidentally meeting people from other teams, reading on the train, meeting friends in the city right after work, and just being around people in general.
I wish I could get an in office part time job that paid benefits, but I don't think those exist.
* EU work visas seem very hard to get
* EU software jobs seem to pay ~40% less than comparable American jobs before taxes (and EU taxes are more significant)--this leaves little slack for travel
* My wife's field is communications/marketing and she's pretty specialized to English/American-culture and the demand is quite a lot lower for her industry than mine
Then there's the hassle of long-term remote: figuring out taxes, selling our home, the logistics and costs of moving those possessions we're unwilling to sell to Europe, etc.
Work-from-home enables us to work from Europe for a few months at a time--we'll have to work odd hours (~2pm-9pm iirc) and we'll probably have to pay Europe rent and our American mortgage; however, we'll probably take most of our vacation during our abroad months so the odd hours will only apply for a few weeks and we can afford the additional housing cost (especially if we save for it during the months we're in the US). I think the tax situation should be okay since we'll be in the US for the majority of the year, but I need to find out for sure.
Will your firm catch you? Likely not if you are only working abroad for a few weeks, if you're doing it for longer, you'll probably get an email asking for clarification on your tax status (at best). At worst, they'll pull your VPN logs and demand that you get back to the states before you trigger some payroll issues.
Not sure about other countries but it's pretty much automatic in Germany for any job over EUR 55k (or something like that). Which is nearly all software jobs worth taking.
That is not universal. That is a subset of work-from-home. Many people working from home can no more step away for a break than they would if at the office. For instance, customer support/contact people cannot just step away from the phone. Others working at home have employer systems that monitor them live. Any unscheduled breaks get noticed and recorded.
Even amongst highly-paid "knowledge workers" there are issues. I do occasional home days but am not able to take breaks. At any time one of my five bosses might call. We don't have any monitoring software but they expect me at my desk ready to respond, not walking the dog or doing laundry.
I suspect most people working from home have some opportunity to take breaks here and there, though. I'm aware of certain professions with invasive monitoring (I've seen nurses that work for pharmaceutical companies report this), but it doesn't seem to be particularly widespread. I'm not familiar with anyone in my personal life who have an expectation of immediate response to superiors (though on the rare case the CEO contacts you, you should make sure to get on that pretty quickly ... but that's why I get email on my phone/watch).
One of my bitches about Silicon Valley is top managers of tech companies locate their companies a short drive away from their homes and estates in Palo Alto, Los Altos, Woodside and force the schmucks that work for them into long commutes.
- Walk kids to school in the mornings, pick them up in afternoons
- Buy groceries when it suits you in the middle of the day.
- Do sports in the middle of the day
- Start slow cooking during the day
- Avoid being called into pointless meetings (no-one can see that you are actually not in another meeting or phone call)
- Take breaks with your wife
Working from home has been an absolute boon to me. I've done partial WFH for my entire career and it feels totally natural to me. I do miss being in the office, maybe once a week or so.
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-57149747
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Is this hyperbole? Why do you all have 2 hour commutes? That sounds like hell
- time saved
- gas saved
- car wear saved ..
1. I compete for positions with people all over the world. Who can complete with a fraction of the salary I need.
2. As a remote worker -most often working as a contractor- I'm even easier to be replaced in a heartbeat. No severance or anything alike.
3. Did I mention that I compete with all the planet? That makes competition for good roles really crazy.
4. Work blends into life and it is very hard to keep it from. This gets worse depending on the company/role but in general these things tend to go the employers way not yours.
5. You need to find new ways to socialize (and the motivation to do so is minimal) or you risk mental health issues.
All I'm trying to say is be careful what you wish for because you might get it.
Am I one of the few that sees this as an enormous benefit? Work becomes a series of tasks I need to achieve throughout the day, like all the other tasks like laundry and doctors appointments.
I get to restructure what I need to do in a way that suits me best. I can push code at 11PM and go for a nap at 4PM if I choose (assuming no meetings).
Then my life isn't segmented into exclusive blocks. It is just one seamless integrated life.
Keep in mind I have kids, a social life, etc. I’ve built my time around work/life balance and keeping the two distinct. It’s healthy for me in ways that having the two conflated never was. May not be an issue for everyone.
Can people call you or message you to clarify what you just now pushed at 11pm? Do you respond immediately? Let's say you do immediately because you restructure your night time as your best work time, does that mean you're automatically exempt from 8am meetings in a few hours?
Come to think of it. Pushing code at 11pm is not that unusual even pre-covid, but the expectation for the associated communication might be totally different.
I don't know about you but I'm not smart enough to feel that my job is as easy as doing laundry or going to the doctor. I'd rather finish all my work in one focused block of time and not think about it the rest of the day. Due to the pandemic destroying most childcare options, this is an unattainable dream for many.
Software wages in the US are high, because it's very hard to replicate the quality of an American workforce. By and large global differences in wages reflect global differences in workforce quality. It's not like this is the first time companies have realized that global labor is cheaper. They've been trying to capitalize on cheap engineers in developing countries since the 1980s. It's always the same issue. Lower price on paper, but delivery and quality issues that scale far beyond the up front cost savings.
[1]https://www.pnas.org/content/116/14/6732
Employers aren't going to drop salaries in the midst of a pandemic, but if remote work persists, salaries will drop substantially. It's simple supply and demand, and I'm sure there's data out there (for existing remote positions) that corroborates this.
This is what always jumps to the front of my mind when I read about WFH on software engineering forums.
I'm lucky -- I have deep technical expertise in a very uncommon intersection of economically valuable topics. I never compete for positions, because there is way more work than available skilled labor. Even still, I'll be back in the office. One day the education system will catch up -- or my skill-set will become obsolete -- and at that point having a decade-long in-person relationship is my only bulwark against ruin.
I can't imagine being a SWE working on a standard tech stack without deep personal connections in an application domain and thinking of WFH as anything other than an enormous and terrifying threat.
Now I'm curious. What is your secret power?
2. As a contractor, yes, As an employee WFH changes nothing here, particularly in countries with worker favorable employment laws.
3. See 1.
4. True, remote workers need to maintain a 9-5ish routine. meaning that remote means you can be flexible about which 8 hours you work, but you should still stick to the 8 hours you are paid for
5. True, but you now have more time to find a social group to join, closer to home and more into things your interested in outside of work.
I really don't think so. And I'm afraid that this is a classic race to the bottom for the most of us.
Perhaps. On one hand, the office was clearly one barrier separating onshore and offshore talent. On the other hand, there never really was a lot preventing companies from setting up offshore offices to attract cheaper talent worldwide. The fact that many US jobs remain still quite expensive compared to the developing world implies to me that there are still some barriers there above and beyond the ability to drive to a shared office.
And on the flip side, it hasn't been too rough for my company to replace them because there are now a huge number of devs in places like the West Coast that wouldn't have been interested in working for us prior moving to remote work who now are.
I suspect some of this will all calm down a bit as the new order of things settles in, but for now, remote work is shaking things up in terms of opportunities for workers in a big way.
Could you expand on this?
Have you paid attention to the housing market, car market, or really... any market in the last year?
Aside from the commute itself I don't mind working at the office and seeing people.
It ain't good to be holed up like a hermit not socializing.
I'd like a good balance of some office days and WFH days.
That would seem to indicate that you can make and maintain relationships over text and video chat.
I mean, personally, I’d count as my best friends of nearly two decades two people that I’ve only ever seen in person… 3 times?
Building and maintaining those relationships is different from in person. It’s certainly not impossible.
My hypothesis is that Americans cashed in on their increased productivity by socializing at work or browsing the internet at work. In Germany, it's extremely frowned upon to talk about non-work stuff at work, so they could cash in on this increased productivity by shortening working hours.
Many people, yes. But the beneficiaries of an increase of minimum and hourly wages, which would affect like 60+ million US workers - they show up and they just work all day, they're not socializing, they didn't cash in anything.
What you're saying may be factual to some degree, but it almost universally talked about in bad faith.
I wish my German co-workers felt this way. It would cut hour long meetings by half, usually. Not to mention the long list of my other non-American colleagues who are quite chatty. In my experience, I don't really see how one can generalize this behavior by nation...
On top of that, sick days are much less frequent now I daresay.
But to be honest, that's fine/expected? There's a quite large range where I might not feel up to the commute/office (or not want to cough and sneeze at people - aside, I bet that's going to be more stigmatised in the near future) but up to doing what I can from the comfort of home where it doesn't matter that I'm curled up unshowered or whatever.
I did that a couple of times even when I went in to the office five days a week - gives me something to do other than lying in bed feeling sorry for myself or doing something and feeling guilty that it's not work, and gives my employer a bit of output even if it is less than 100% (which isn't the alternative, 0 is).
Sort of like how flu cases went down during the pandemic — with less interaction from abroad less germs are transmitted.
So talk to them about those expectations. Let them know that you won't respond outside of X hours, etc.
There are times when your most important work is being available. Maybe less than some managers seem to think, but it does happen. I can go make myself a complicated snack or step outside to do some yard maintenance for half an hour here and there and still be back to my desk in 5 minutes if someone actually needs me for something. At lunch time you can usually stretch that to 15 minutes, which opens up a lot of options for errands.
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Our personal theory is that the next equivalent to remote work will be the four day work week. We work way too hard as a society; the 40hr work week is based off the point of diminishing returns for factory workers. There’s not a lot of reason to believe that continuing this pattern for knowledge work is desirable for the company or the employees.
I actually just launched 4dayweek.io - Software jobs with a better work / life balance
So I think the decrease in daily overhead from the remote-revolution will actually serve an increase in productivity, and not be budgeted toward work-life balance.
I'm saying this and I've been remote for years, and promoting WLB aplenty. But my coldhearted crystal ball hints me that larger forces at play will not primarily favor WLB.
When there's more competition, the guy willing to work longer will always win, especially if the work is such that he can work longer without a decrease in quality.
We're automating more things, there's more of us around, and we're connecting job markets better every day. There's more competition.
So, nowhere in reality.
This is not inevitable, it is policy we choose, as opposed to some European countries where workweeks have actually shrunk and retail hours are much more restricted. We have decided much of the gains from automation and better average human health and lifespan should go elsewhere.
- Part of management will be against WFH, as they want to have their workers under direct control, politics is much easier this way.
- Finances will like the idea of having to rent less office space.
I am getting popcorn for this fight.
and for the same pay!
https://cepr.net/this-is-what-minimum-wage-would-be-if-it-ke...
Key to this is understanding the difference between capitalism and materialism.
The former drives innovation and improvememt.
The latter breeds envy, poorly sorted priorities, and, ultimately, misery.
But is not exclusive to materialism. It can be a part of capitalism.
I am miserable. I have to work for food, shelter, medical care, etc. I do get some othe material items, but usually they are very cheap things for hobbies. I just never have enough time to do the things I want to do because working for my necessities takes up too much of my time.
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For me I'm not "working from home", I'm "living at the office". I deeply resent that my work has taken over a part of my home. For the record: I love my job. I also really miss working from the same physical space as my colleagues. Meetings which I used to enjoy are now awkward and draining. Lastly: I even miss my commute home in the evening (not so much my morning commute, to be fair). It used to give my 30 minutes in which to decompress and switch my brain out of work mode.
I was absolutely fucking livid. Can't a man just be left alone in his own home any more?
It seems that I am in the minority here.
I'm young (26), but successful by financial standards and before the pandemic my apartment was just the place I slept so I had a studio and I liked it that way.
Working, sleeping, eating and socializing from my 800 sqft studio is frankly maddening. I feel like I'm always on call and connected where before my apartment was the place I decompressed and escaped.
It's lost its sanctity and I want it back.
I lived next to the office before I ended my lease and moved in with family so I wouldn't be completely alone, so the office was never a hassle. I was a 20 minute walk away and the weather is usually nice.
I had a clear delineation between work life and personal life. My home was for relaxing and play, the office was for work. It helped me keep my priorities in order. Going into the office helped me mute out the personal distractions of life - personal projects, entertainment, etc.
I have a dramatically different experience at home. I can hardly focus because it's next to impossible to fully separate myself from my toys, as it were.
It's driven my stress levels through the roof because I know I'm less productive. No one has said anything to me about it, nor brought up anything, yet my self guilt is consuming me. It keeps me up at night and I'm dreading performance reviews...
Yup I feel this exactly. I had the exact same separation and the exact same issue when it stopped existing. I'm still struggling with it and we've been living this way for over a year now.
At the start of the pandemic I lived in a house full of people working at tech startups in Oakland. So I understand having no space as I worked/lived from my tiny room. But, I was able to leave the bay area, as were my roommates and now we all have our own places (some rent some own) because the same rent in Oakland was able to afford private spaces in other parts of CA.
So I empathize with your position. I recommend trying to move out of the locale that only allows you to afford an 800 sqft studio. Even the shittiest tech jobs in the Bay would allow for you to have your own 2 bedroom apt in other parts of CA. This is how you take advantage of the WFH opportunity as a younger person.
I was never home by choice in the before times and I don't want to change that. I want to go back to getting home at 10pm sleeping after work, socializing, going to meetups or whatever and then leaving at 8:30am the next day. The extra space would be wasted in that case. Plus saving 35%+ of my paycheck was/is great.
I only spent time in my apartment later at night and sometimes on the weekends.
Moving away from the city won't help me there. I imagine it'd actually be worse.
1. Bathroom break. Better not take too many or it'll be noticed.
2. Coffee/smoke break outside. Not much scrutiny of this, but I do neither.
3. Exercise break where people walk around the campus for a bit. Not too fun to do in the middle of either a hot or ice-cold midwestern day.
Anything else was viewed with a jaundiced eye.
- Social chatter.
- Making friends with old employees who I didn't know, and connecting with new employees.
- Work Life separation (balance).
- Sense of belonging.. team outing, weekday after hours beer.
- Intra company sports and games, and then teaming up with office colleagues to play inter company tournaments.
- (Not me but others) Meeting potential dates
- Office facilities for breakfast, lunch.
But everyone working in an office means that if you aren't interested in those things, (you already have friends, a family, hobby groups, etc), you are forced to spend time away from them to participate in the in-office culture. It seems extremely backwards to me.
Its like if people who make church their social group, which is very common, required people who aren't interested in church to attend to enable their social lives.
I don't know how or why a large number of us have made work a substitute for our social lives, but it has been a major problem for the rest of us who haven't.
Something I've noticed while talking to my older relatives outside of the US is that their social life often are the people that they meet in their (first) job in the location they ended up staying in. It feels straightforward that the people that you spend 8+ hours a day with are going to be the people that you feel like you know and can trust.
It seems like some odd modern/corporate idea that work is just for work. Imagine if we had the same mindset for school, and tried to make things "productive" by eliminating all breaks and the assumption that students should get to know each other during class/free time.
I think we need to accept the idea that work is really going to be much of your social life when you move, work friends are not your best buds, and only later on can you have a social life that doesn't deeply involve people at work.
Company sports are great but those can be replaced by sports with friends. Dating at work is... Well I'll leave that alone. And food I cook is better than any office food I've ever had. That being said I havnt worked in a FANG office that has a chef.
I am squarely in the WFH is great if it's possible camp, but perspective is necessary here. Pushing / demanding that the entire work arrangement norms for the majority of the workforce change for a vocal minority is exactly what gives people with cushy desk jobs their (deserved in this case) bad names.
Also this is just my opinion, but I find it odd when people's social groups are... just people from their job. There is so much more to life than just people who work in the same company or industry as oneself.
Get a beer once a month with coworkers, sure, but relying on work to be a primary social outlet always seems risky.
What I need for that is high quality audio and video for meetings.
Do you think that is possible?
On place I worked with 100-120 people in the office saw 5 marriages. A big part of that was they employed a lot of single 20-somethings, but that's a lot of couples who met at work.
I still prefer working form home, because I can pack my bag and go back home anytime I want.
Soon, I'll likely go back to a co-working space because right now, I miss those things as well.
Being able to turn your head over to a coworker and say "hey take a look at this" and they take a few steps over to see your monitor is much less of a hassle than ringing their computer for a video call and screensharing which may be better or worse depending on either of your internet connections.
Not to mention depending on your monitor sizes it might not even work properly. i.e. if you're using a larger monitor where everything is rendered smaller so more can fit on screen, it will probably be too small for them to see on their laptop. And in the case of ultrawide monitors, just give up the idea of screensharing on that entirely. At least if you use Teams where you can't share a portion of your screen. -- only the entire thing, or a single window which has problems of its own. Oh and Teams doesn't even let you draw on the other person's screen so they can't point to things!
Alright this is turning into a Teams rant now.
These are needs that all previous generations fulfilled through their community, or by meeting strangers. But I have the feeling that (some subset of) current generations find that proposition unacceptably risky. And I guess the offense comes from the idea that we should all be inconvenienced for their sake, and also from how the idea "I can only make friends in a safe space" is presented here and just expected to be believed.
I feel like it's really easy for people to not get out of a comfort zone and meet people just /randomly/ on the road or at the Grocery store. Especially to the point of being friends.
Sadly our community has died, church attendance is massively down in most of the world. Which killed that social circle, clubs seem to not really exist anymore. Basically we're down to meetup.com, work, and bars.
- it's part of a political power/control game
- "this is the way we've always done it"
- they buy into the myth that "magic" happens in hallways conversations and nowhere else
There are plenty of large companies (and god knows how many startups and SMBs) who have recognized what a colossal waste it is to maintain permanent offices and mandatory facetime. It's time for the rest to stop pretending it's 1980.