@bckr submitting this as an Ask HN[1], but I think we would all get better insight if this were a poll
Polls are not supported[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30239283
Readit NewsReadit News[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30239283
Now, I know that I badly need some amount of in-person time with my coworkers on a weekly basis, or I go crazy.
It's a motivational thing for me. I thrive on solving problems for and with other people, and there's an "out of sight, out of mind" effect for me over zoom. It's just harder for me to get my brain going.
I wish I were better at WFH - maybe with the right type of work I would be. I love everything else about it! My home office setup is awesome, I always hated commuting, I love the flexibility of doing chores during the day or getting some work done at 11pm because I don't feel like sleeping.
But man, I miss people.
I got into software engineering because I like solving problems, but also because I love solving problems with really smart people. Turns out that it feels really good to do that in person!
Coffee breaks, lunch outings, being able to stop by someone's desk and shoot the shit or see what they're working on -- I've realized that these things are not only enjoyable for me, but critical for both the actual quality of my work and my motivation to do it. Not to mention any kind of whiteboarding / collaborative discussion, which I think is pretty obviously nicer in person.
So far, nothing I have tried remotely gives me the same kind of satisfaction that just physically being with my work partners does. I do think there's something very deeply ingrained in me that's responsible for that, and I know it's definitely not something everyone wants or needs.
I would like to talk about it but I'm kind of sick of seeing the discussion framed in term of people who only socialize at the office.
The fact is, in the office we have many in-person interactions spread throughout the day. Socialization isn't fungible, we can't simply replace interactions in one context with interactions in another context and assume people will be happy with it.
Like another commenter said, I find it easier to care about the concerns of people around me, so if that's a bunch of people at my company then I'll care more about them and what they need. It makes a difference for me if physical presence and work presence are aligned.
Probably for a similar reason, I've found that I can't reach 100% productivity consistently (over weeks) unless I'm in an environment where people around me are working. So that means finding a coworking space wherever I go.
Also, in-person conversation is so much higher bandwidth than anything else. Those couple hundred ms of latency do matter. Being able to party on the same physical whiteboard is really nice.
I have this sentiment, yet I hang out with one or two friends once or twice a week, occasionally some family every couple weeks or so, and constantly on a daily basis get to socialize with the parents of my dog's friends while on walks.
None of that makes up for working alongside people. And I don't just mean work specifically but forming connections with my coworkers. I'm a huge proponent of making real social connections with coworkers so that it's easier to be collaborative with them. There will be times when your work is not siloed and you either need context about something that your coworker has contributed to before but you haven't, vice versa, etc. and it helps if you both have some kind of connection and stake in the work relationship. If there's no stake in it, then other than the bare minimum (such as not wanting someone to totally screw up something owned by the team), nothing will be contributed. It can make gathering context brutal, work more competitive (resource starvation where one coworker can let their coworker have more trouble which results in them getting a better pick of things to work on, etc.).
Personally just being lifted from a 1h + 1h car commute has dramatically increased the quality of my day to day life, so much that friends and relatives noticed an uplift in my mood.
On the flip side, being able to drop everything and go to the DMV without feeling the social pressure to skip lunch or work late is nice. I feel like I only have a finite number of super productive hours a day, and it's not eight, and they're not always squished together back to back.
But I don't know, I only learned recently that my own team members had been working around a broken feature that I maintain for over a year without telling me. I kind of feel like I've been abandoned.
I keep getting this happen. Someone wants an improvement/fix to something and just doesn't communicate that, probably because it has to be very intentional now, whereas it used to be something you'd mention over coffee when you saw the right person.
If I could offer some unsolicited advice - tell them that you feel that way! I am quite confident that no one wants you to feel abandoned, and they would be unhappy to know they're making you feel that way. They might not be able to fix the situation all at once, but I hope you're able to get a better situation soon, one way or the other.
That's the problem with people that doesn't want WFH: they also want their coworkers to work at the office so they don't "go crazy".
What I do know is that I did work from home for four months and I was miserable. Any job where the norm is at least three weeks at the office would be a huge plus for me, and if choosing between jobs that are mostly remote and jobs that are mostly in the office, I would take a paycut for the job that is mostly in the office. I realize it may be the other way around for other people and am really curious what the norm will be in the end.
Although, it's doubly tough when things aren't good at home. Because during those times, the office provided some solace. But overall it's been positive.
Have you gotten at least some kind of positive tradeoff in terms of more friends+family time, exercise, etc?
Any companies not offering remote now that instead want me to commute to an office and lose all of that personal time, are an immediate rejection.
On the other hand, young professionals who have moved into a city and our just developing their career, they want to be among peers, socializing , learning and building a network.
But at some point I realized that I really missed work people! I got into software engineering because I love talking about engineering with other really smart engineers. Took me a while to realize that was what was missing.
On the other hand, the pandemic really took the fun from meeting people all day, so I don't think I'd be happy in an office either, at least under the current circumstances.
My employers are getting half the efficiency they used to get. Anything I used to find enjoyable about the work is now gone.
I'm probably going to go on a looong sabbatical soon.
I've always loved working from home (and was doing it for almost a year before the pandemic started), I'm quite self-driven, but I do recognize that it can be difficult to get back into the groove once you've been out of it for a while - meeting colleagues in person would help with that aspect.
Ideally, if my colleagues weren't some 3000 km away, I wouldn't mind going to the office once a week or something.
I agree I think the best of both worlds would be some sort of schedule, maybe ~1-ish day a week on average. Personally I'd love something like Monday-Tuesday in the office every other week. But everybody is different, which in turn makes it really hard to coordinate and make everyone happy.
I miss the office for..
- Free and convenient food.
- Social chatter & engagement.
- Making friends with employees who I don't know and connecting with new employees.
- Work life separation (balance).
- Proper workstation, climate controlled environment.
- Sense of belonging - team outing, after hours beers..
- Intra and inter company sports and games.
- Meeting potential dates.
I don't miss the office-loud-laugher, or the drive-by-tell-you-a-dumb-joke guy when "I'm just trying to get my work done please". My manager wisely scheduled a daily team meeting so I get to see my team every day via Teams.
Now I almost long to get off work and do some choirs outside instead.
I’m the opposite. Part is that I irrationally hate lifestyle change. Part is that I work with so many teams.
I hated switching. I liked my busy workspace and being able to jump in and help people around me, get info, etc. I had the benefit of also having a private office I could retreat to when I needed long focus time.
I also love routine. I like predictability of my schedule.
But so much of the teams I primarily work with had been spread across the country. 3 cities at the time. They missed out on the hallway chatter and always felt behind.
After a couple months, I got into my groove. I was collaborating with the folks outside my city (and building) much better. But I was overwhelmed by notifications, and was working too many hours.
I disabled all chat notifications on my phone. I started enforcing a beginning of the day and my kids pop in to remind me it’s over (I lose track of time when I’m focused).
Those teams are now in 6 cities. I’ve learned to schedule collab time, offer myself up to teach new folks when I have time and jump in on things I don’t know the same way.
I also schedule 1 hour meetings with close coworkers for 10 minutes of decision just so the conversation can wander. We have an open biweekly call to just joke and wander into something brilliant.
Folks got super aggressive with meetings. So I block off focus time on my calendar and reject meetings that should be emails. I reject emails for things that should be public. I ignore “good morning” chat messages from people I don’t know. When I’m focusing, I disable notifications and turn my speakers off.
I’m more productive and collaborative now. I have more control with people not able to just walk up to my desk. I’m not distracted by others’ more appealing problems except when I plan to be. Folks in other cities have equal access as local.
I also switched to waking up early for my quiet time at home, before the kids wake up, and not staying up late. I stopped eating lunch out, but always take an hour away. Sometimes I just eat a snack and take a power nap. I quit drinking soda. I stopped caffeine after noon. COVID got me doing outdoor activities that I love regularly out of necessity.
I’m 60lbs lighter than when COVID hit, and just feel a lot healthier. It wasn’t an arching intentional goal, just a change here and there to feel better.
Also, I’m naturally an introvert. At work people don’t see that because I am jovial, kinda loud, and opinionated. But when I clock out, I’m done. I just want to chill with my family.
I’ve dabbled in hobbies. Outdoors stuff like fishing and hiking. Picked up sewing bags and masks. Small home improvements. Goofing around with guitars and drums. Making my own guitar pedals. I just don’t force myself to finish anything, it’s just entertainment.
We’re starting back “hybrid” soon, with “team days.” For some that’ll mean 2-3 days per week in office.
But my teams aren’t local, so I really only see that happening when we can get folks traveling again for planning events. I’m not going to the office to Zoom, when I can do it at home without shoes. Maybe the occasional whiteboarding session. I haven’t found an adequate digital replacement for that.
This is the sort of honesty I’d love to hear when interviewing candidates.
I've been working from home for over six years. I never want to return to the office. I will change careers before I return to a software development office.
This is extremely situational. When I was in a larger house and had no kids, WFH was an easy way to avoid interruptions.
Moving to a smaller house (more expensive city) and having kids flipped the situation around. Avoiding interruptions at home was extremely difficult because I was always only a door away from someone asking a “quick favor”.
It’s not just me: As a remote manger I can almost always tell when summer break starts for everyone’s area because there’s a stepwise decline in productive when people’s kids aren’t in school.
Likewise, the office environment makes all the difference. I’ve worked in open-office spaces where everybody respected each other and concentration was the default. I’ve also worked in private-office spaces where I could expect knocks on my door every 15 minutes or less because the culture was so bad that interrupting the engineers was the default practice.
Lately, I’ve felt that fully remote has been the worst of all worlds. Once Slack becomes the default I’m pinged from every angle all day long. It’s hard to push back against people who want answers now now now and know they can get your attention by typing the right few characters into Slack. Comes down to culture, but Slack makes it easy for people to quietly interrupt people directly whereas it was much easier to police the interruptions (as a manager) when I could literally see the offenders bothering the engineers.
I lived in an 800 square foot home with one bathroom for five of the last six years, with my wife and two children. My desk was beside the front entryway, with no door.
> Avoiding interruptions at home was extremely difficult because I was always only a door away from someone asking a “quick favor”.
That's a problem of setting boundaries. It never gets easier, but at least the spouse works and the kids go to school and day care.
> I’ve felt that fully remote has been the worst of all worlds. Once Slack becomes the default I’m pinged from every angle all day long. It’s hard to push back against people who want answers now now now and know they can get your attention by typing the right few characters into Slack.
More setting of boundaries. Be firm and say no. Better, don't respond outside of your core hours unless you're explicitly on pager duty.
(above paragraph edited for clarity)
It's been awesome. Very respectful environment. People @ you but you are not expected to stop what you're doing.
By the same token, I can @ others without fear that I'm causing them an undue interuption, because asynchronous messaging is the norm.
IMO full remote can eliminate the need to live in a small house in an expensive city.
I get way more work done in a lot less time, save time and stress due to the commute, see my family more, and have significantly better mental health due to all those previous points.
I did miss the office a bit earlier in my WFH career when video conferencing wasn’t as common, but these days it’s not an issue at all and you still get face time with your colleagues etc.
Everyone is different, but my ideal work environment is library quiet. No music and certainly no overheard conversations or people constantly walking past. I’ve never worked in an office that was willing to provide such an environment, but I have it at home.
The only people I've met who seem to like them are people who do sales for a living or the exact kind of coworkers who I would really not like to be in an open office with.
I have a really nice office in Seattle. Since I am the second most tenured person on the team, I even have a water view and am right next to the snacks. I haven't seen the inside of this office since May 2020, and probably never will again.
All of my colleagues and I have agreed that we don't see the need to go back and our employer is likely going to sell our admin building (we have several other buildings for actual patient services) and distribute some of the money to those of us who worked in that building as a bonus or as an allowance to buy equipment for home.
I've visited the open offices at friends who work for Microsoft and Google and they're just awful hives of noise. I would rather have my own door and own bathroom.
I think of the benefit of the office being the opportunity for continuous partial attention. It affords the ability to be aware of what's going on about you, to learn & see a lot more. But one has to be attentive-ish, have some receptivity, to benefit from this. I feel like I can work without interruption in an office. But it's a risk or a sacrifice to do so: giving up my option of awareness, giving up the chance to share, the chance to learn or teach, the chance to discuss, to focus on my own things.
Rather than argue against open office as a bad construct, my main grievance is that most engagement points are synchronous & exclusive. Those not in the room at the time are not included, in most organization. Most learning, most deciding happens in the moment, in confidence. The open-office works because people are unable to find good forums for important conversations, and so ad-hocracy is an acceptable all-connected fallback.
Remote tends to be way more deliberate. Ad-hoc interaction is replaced by smaller networks of who-wants-to-talk-to-who. Most actions are private & hidden. It's even less communicative.
I'd far prefer an organization that can find more enduring, participatory, accessible ways of communicating. True for organizations which are remote, and those that are in person.
I absolutely cannot get anything done with open office floor plans. And commuting is life wasted.
I wouldn't be surprised if there is a strong correlation between the number of people (partner,family,kids) and how much people enjoy working from home.
I live alone in my apartment and going the first year or two of the pandemic seeing people I know once every few weeks drove me mad.
I always sought to establish a clear distinction between my work life and home life and the enforced work from home due to COVID has made the two blur to a point now where I feel like I've lost all rhythm. Now living through a pandemic itself has a way of disrupting the rhythm of life but I feel that the collapsing of space into a singular living and work area doesn't help matters.
Another unexpected thing I've found that I missed while working from home is a commute. Now I imagine a person's opinion of their commute is highly conditioned on the mode of transportation but in my case it's a mostly relaxing public transit ride where I had 20-30 minutes of unstructured time to read, listen to a podcast, or just zone out. It similarly helped create additional space to separate the work life from the home life.
This second point on a commute would probably completely change if I had a 90 minute drive in bumper to bumper traffic. If that was my life, there's a good chance I'd find work from home preferable.
Hard agree on a clear distinction between work life and home life. I require an office in the home with a door that closes. When I am in the office, I am working. When I leave the office, I am not working. The closed door separates my work life from my home life.
My kids are trained not to come into the office, and my wife respects the boundary and messages me instead. I don't work from the living room or dining room. (I've tried, and I can't do it anyway, I become nearly useless to both the family members trying to talk to me, as well as my employer.)
A good way to enforce this separation is by hardware. (This has many other benefits as well.)
I have a work laptop which is for work only (provided by employer). I switch it on at 9am and I turn it off when the day is done. My own machines are mine, no work or work-related communication happens on them, ever.
While these machines are only a few feet away from each other, once the work laptop is off, it's off.
Or am I going to have to start a new SaaS?
home maintenance and electricity is also conveniently ignored by my employer (internet bills are flat so I don't mind). someone else does and pays these back in the office. staying at home longer means it gets disorganized faster, especially with work stuff thrown into it.
i had also always hated remote (micro-)management, even before the pandemic. now that's not just the norm, that's the only option. there are a lot of things that are not communicated verbally/textually. a lot of details get overlooked as we are only using documents as a guide instead of the actual stuff that is being built/developed. things look nice on paper, but the reality is full of duct tape solutions. there are also a lot of decisions that can be made better if you are at the workplace seeing the actual work.
it's also kind of insulting to do "extracurricular" work that would have been tolerable in the office. i had spent hours making "educational" presentations that had nothing to do with product we are developing, only because it had been a tradition in the workplace. when i'm doing stuff at home it's hard not to question whether it is ultimately meaningless.
The President of the United States has worked from home for centuries, but the Oval Office and West Wing are well separated from the residence. “Oh, but I don’t have room in my West Coast studio apartment to do that.” If you’re working remote, why are you in a West Coast studio apartment?
First job of my career, they told me I would have an office of my own. First day I came back in for full time (I had interned there with my own office as well), they tell me they're switching buildings to go open office in about a month's time. I got a precious few weeks with a personal office, and then it was all gone. I hated this change of scenery immediately, but I guess I got used to it after a few years.
Working from home took me back to that zen. I didn't even know how much I had missed it - how much I needed my own space to feel productive.
I've since changed jobs, and I kinda dread having to go to the open office nightmare once this is all over. The facilities are way nicer than my last job, but it's still an open office.
Open. Office. As. Implemented. In. Our. Industry. Is. Stupid.
I know my own opinion of WFH improved once I got a desk (once there was finally stock…) and a chair.
It might be that the grass is always greener, but I feel like having the ability to close the door & have a private room (at home or in the real office…) can be a huge plus if you need some quiet time. Similar to the desk/chair, it's just a better working space.
Open office floorplans were effective paycuts, IMO; nothing more than less space == cheaper, and no thoughts were given to the long-term effects because nobody in our industry thinks long-term about anything. Who would when whole companies turn over every two years?
I'd love a home office… but real-estate prices are ridiculous.
For a lot of people with long commutes or terrible work offices, "minimizing suffering" is working from home/a co-working space regardless of what those look like.
For a lot of people with terrible home office setups or lack of boundaries with family and short commutes, "minimizing suffering" is going to an employer's office.
Personally, I think work from "home" (anywhere) is the better path for most of the HN-types. At its core, it's us taking back _control_ over our workspace and we have the resources to make it better if we choose to. I can move somewhere with a spare room to use as an office. I can't make my employer give me a private office.
Which is all to say yes, I'd love to see a more in-depth poll/study on _why_ people are making the decisions they're making. My suspicion is that it largely comes down to which problems are easier to fix for that individual.
In my experience, remote work typically has no direct productivity downsides, but team cohesion absolutely can take a hit. I find being in the same room with someone doesn’t help us work any better, but having been in the same room with them at some point (ideally not all that long ago) absolutely does, likely even more so having had a beer with them.
I'm sure this varies based on the type of work you're doing, but I found the hit to team cohesion led to long term productivity losses. At first we were getting more done than ever. As time went on our raw work output day-to-day did not decrease but a lot of unneeded work that previously would have been headed off at planning and discussion stages would get through.
This was on a team that is specifically doing speculative high risk/reward work so that might be applicable to a lot fewer people than I imagine.
For me? Never again.
At home, I get a "guilty" feeling if I don't work 100% effectively for the whole day. At the office, I never felt pressured to "code" the full eight hours, as I could see nobody was doing so (in Slack it seems everyone else is always green/present.)
At the office, I'd fill the day with conversations, lunch and coffee breaks, and other meaningful interactions with other programmers, managers, designers and various other stakeholders.
At home, when I need to take a mental break I just get bored and start procrastinating with the computer. If I go see my family to the other room we talk family business.
I look forward to returning to the office. Immense amounts of information just never get communicated over Slack & Zoom. I feel like working in a dark tunnel for the past 2 years and going.
If I wanted to sharply focus on a specific task for the whole eight hours I could do unlimited remote already pre-Covid. I used this option rarely, as these days could get quite exhausting.
I like the office and am currently working in the office but I just... get up and leave whenever I want. Come back whenever I want. No need to pretend to work 9-5.
I can only imagine the amount of institutional knowledge that is being lost right now. Workers that are low to the ground and sociable who form informal bonds between departments are hurt by being limited to only online interactions, and as a result, the organization suffers too.
Why?
Writing software, especially in a large organization, is often an inherently social job, just like many others. You often need heads down time to actually get into flow and produce code, but that doesn't mean interaction with others isn't a significant part of it as well.
Throughout the pandemic we surveyed employees and they largely preferred to WFH. A lesser but significant cohort preferred a hybrid setup. Almost nobody at all was in favor of full-onsite. I was in the hybrid camp. I thought I could have the comraderie of the workplace and the dynamism of a bustling city, plus enjoy the comforts and efficiencies of WFH. On paper it sounds great. In practice it doesn't work at all.
As an employee: I found that the office felt empty and dead which made me question commuting in. Nobody was really around to go to happy hours or have events. A significant portion of the people I wanted to be around were opting to stay home more.
As an employer/manager: We found capacity planning to be hard. You can't save by scaling office space down if everyone is hybrid and still coming in on the same days (tues, weds, thurs, obviously). You also can't have a lively environment with A/B days and half-staff, and it creates headaches around who needs to be in together and when people want to be there. Communicating is easier if everyone just joins the meeting from their own laptop _wherever_ and doesn't need to arrive to a conference room and fight with some silly speakerphone-camera-tv thing.
So I'm ALL IN on remote work. Does it have downsides? Of course. I miss bonding with coworkers, going out to coffee/lunch, and impromptou hack-sessions. What I have gained is different and so much more valuable: Hours of extra time per day to devote to family, friends, health and hobbies. Work is work, and life is life. It's a revelation to realize that you don't _need_ to be IRL buddies with coworkers, just do great work together, and then go do your own thing.
Commuting is literally wasted money and life-- Full-stop. Corporate workspaces are redundant if the work can be done from home rather than letting that space go unused. This is just trimming wasted time and money and putting it somewhere more useful. I also find office attire to be insane. Countless individuals stressing about what shirt/pants/shoes combo to wear... ironing and paying for dry cleaning. Just go on your zoom call wearing something and use your brain to get shit done. Thats the whole point of work.
Commuting is not the same as setting time on fire. The distraction endemic negates the advantage and makes it worse. The forced time in the car with limited options lets me use it somewhat productively, notably makes me do one thing. I spend that time thinking about work, taking phone calls, sometimes listening to podcasts and audiobooks. I have read zero books, but finished 2 audiobooks in the car this year. I find myself setting time on fire during weekends on social media. If instead of commuting the hours are spent on Netflix/Social media etc has gone up then the point is moot.
Generally we're talking 20-30 mins though. A much longer ~hour commute or something would definitely start to wear on me I think.
Having a fixed office day really helps. Also, what I really liked about the hybrid approach is that the commute can actually be better; i.e. I don't mind driving 1h to work if I do so once per week.
> It's a revelation to realize that you don't _need_ to be IRL buddies with coworkers, just do great work together, and then go do your own thing.
You also don't need to love your job, you just need to pay your bills. I don't think this is a revelation; at least for me, being friends with my coworkers is a significant part of what makes working fun. And even with WFH you still spend a lot of time working. This is of course just preference; if you're not much into socializing, cutting out that part of your life and instead spend the time somewhere else can make sense.
When we were in the office, there were many random events that I miss.
As a naturally introverted person, I love WFH.As an introspective person, I think WFH has done hidden damage by enabling my introversion to an extreme degree. However, I think that's more of a strike against my personality than against WFH.
I thought WFH would be great but it happened too early in my career. I had no savings and too many roommates, and I was not learning nearly as much on the job as I was while we were all in person. I still had to learn how to do my tasks but stopped having conversations with random coworkers about projects they were working on, stopped gossiping about our personal lives, all of our activity became measured and quantified (I freaking hate the MS-Teams online status) and my motivation suffered hard for all of it. It's hard for me to tell if it's my workplace that became dysfunctional or myself, but I wish I had spent long enough time in the office to get sick of it before being wfh.
I think I'd have already gone completely insane if I were still a bachelor when this pandemic WFH experiment has been thrust upon me. I go stir crazy when I'm home alone, but I'm not really a social butterfly either. Work was a good compromise.
For one thing, I don't have the luxury of an entirely separate space to dedicate just to work -- my home office is also my bedroom and personal computer/gaming space.
And as others have noted, its just... way too easy to fall into a pattern where you literally turn into a technological anchorite. I have refused to let myself use food or grocery delivery primarily because I realized there was a point in the depths of 2020 when I hadn't left my apartment in almost two weeks, and it really frightened me how easily the time passed, in a beige blur of life.
This is the issue with all of these anti-WFH posts and threads. It was in the midst of the pandemic, where you were not strongly discouraged from leaving your home and socialising. I imagine if there was no lockdown yet everybody similarly worked-from-home, the answers would be markedly different.