5 of us wrote Microsoft Works for the Macintosh while working at home from 1984 to 1992. Without the internet, we got together as needed to merge code, usually once a month, but sometimes once a week. We talked on the phone. We went to Microsoft once in awhile. It was ideal and worked very well.
Maybe it was just our personalities that made it work, but I am astonished that any programmer would rather go into the office. With high speed internet and video conferencing, I assume that some people are just very lonely and need face to face. I see nothing wrong with that. I understand it, but after 1992 I took a job that forced me into an office and I hated it.
I can safely say I never wrote any good code while working in an office. There are too many distractions.
> I assume that some people are just very lonely and need face to face
Anecdata from Hacker News suggests this is true. A lot of lonely young men here freely admit their coworkers are the only people they regularly interact with in-person, and remote work takes that away from them.
I'd spin this around and cast it as a challenge -- regular, forced interactions with coworkers is minimally sufficient and retards some people from pursuing social activities outside the home.
There are already a number of options in even the smallest town. I expect that will increase as more people move to WFH and seek social outlets.
And at the end of the day "interacting with coworkers in the break room" is a pretty low quality bar for an alternative to surmount. Maybe your work conversations are more fascinating than mine, but I get more value elsewhere.
This doesn't make sense. There are countless opportunities for social interaction. Join a church, a club, a sports league, a gaming discord. I get that there's a lot of friction involved in joining anything, and many 'lonely young men' don't want to put forth that effort. But it's definitely less total effort than forcing people to come to an office for the purpose of social stimulation. Just measured in terms of time and fuel spent commuting by each person, it isn't even close.
I think there are a lot of reasons that people prefer offices. Most of it is probably tradition and "that's the way we've always done things". If the reason is truly lonely people needing social interaction, then there are a lot of way better solutions.
It's more than that. I'm mid-life, with kids, meaning that my best opportunity for getting out of the house on a regular basis is while they're at school. Without that, days can go by without a significant change of scenery, especially in winter when spending evenings at the park isn't a great option.
I'm not lonely, per se, but, all the same, the pandemic has been very, very difficult for me. I went from being a longtime remote worker who went to a coworking space most days, to what has sometimes felt like two years of house arrest.
I agree that going in to an office - especially an open plan one where they pack desks end-to-end in giant noisy rooms - is a less-than-stellar option, too. But I also suspect that many people's newfound love of WFH is fueled in part by the novelty of the experience, and that the shine will wear off after a couple more years.
I think a lot of it is the exact circumstances of you office as well. All else equal I think I would actually prefer working in an office assuming that:
1. It felt like a "real" space (i.e. not a beige cubical farm)
2. Was not excessively loud
3. I had a comfortable chair/workspace
4. I could walk there from my house in under 20 minutes
5. There was no dress code
6. There was nobody there who I found deeply annoying and also insisted on interacting with me regularly
And I think a lot of people (especially young people who live in cities close to where they work) actually do have something approximating that situation.
> their coworkers are the only people they regularly interact with in-person
This sort of self-alienation seems to be a pretty widespread problem larger than the in-person/remote debate. That said, it's probably better for those experiencing it to have some in-person socialization in the office than none.
I meet people outside of work “regularly” - more weekends than not - but a coffee or a hike or a live performance here and there is very different from casually sharing a building on a random Tuesday.
The comparison isn’t a social life, it’s a family or roommates.
The interesting thing is that folks on HN who want to work from the office just say “I can see why you’re remote. Just not for me. I prefer to work in a team that’s all in-office” but folks on HN who want to work remote always go “It’s because you’re lonely that you can’t work remote. I have a loving wife and children. You are miserable and using coworkers as a substitute for social company.”
Like, dude, we get it. This is important to you. So go work where you find that. A bit tiresome to constantly come into these threads and listen to this endless repetitious nonsense.
WFHomers need a modern equivalent of the Knitting Bee. Distinct from a co-working space since it is organized by its members who make an effort to get to know each other and it shouldn't be dependent on membership with some organization, just a grassroots locally organized thing.
It isn't my responsibility to help "lonely young men" meet people. Just go to a bar/meetup/church and start talking. That's an individual's responsibility to socialize.
Interesting how you automatically assigned a gender. My wife has worked from home for 4 years and can't wait to get back into an office. I like to think that some people just have different preferences.
We are social creatures, there is something quite unnatural only interacting with your wife/kid or worse - with no one else at all, for weeks and months.
If not the office, workers are better off using some social working space, but unfortunately WFH is so tempting and easy most will resort to that.
Psychologically it's not ideal.
Yes the office can be a pain, commute and what not, but loneliness could be worse.
Nothing anyone says in these comments should invalidate your own personal experiences and successes with your working arrangements.
But I have to admit I'm surprised to hear you say that you are "astonished" that any programmer would prefer to work differently.
2 things that I've learned from reading NH over the years: tech/programmer people are often very opinionated, and also have widely different opinions on just about everything :)
Admittedly what you say is true. People tend to believe other people think like them. I go on my own lived experience. Never once in 8 years did any of my coworkers suggest we get an office. We felt lucky to be able to work at home for all the reasons that people give.
I had a couple of other reasons for hating the office that I don't often see mentioned. I'm sensitive to 60 Hz fluorescent lights and also to bad air. Most offices are flooded with this kind of light and don't recirculate the plastic and office supply fumes often enough.
In this case, tech/programmer people have differing opinions about returning to the office. But the managers or at least the management have only have a single blanket policy for all. A compromise like 2-3 days in the office is one such policy.
I won't accept any non-remote job where I need long commutes and I have to sit my ass there for the whole week.
Just yesterday we had a summer day, so just after lunch I went to a remote beach, used my phone as AP and worked for about 5 hours until nightfall.
No interruptions, no annoying noises, not battling with AC.
I mean, having tasted this, Im pretty sure what would I do if my company asks me to go back to office. I still have a low paying job, but my life has improved dramatically.
And my office is literally 5m walk from my home, so Im already ahead of many people in that, but it's a noisy bunker with no window, lots of people and all kinds of other BS.
People is definitely lonely. I can understand that, but I won't pay for other peoples loneliness.
If you want friends, ask me for a beer, or come to my house, I like to cook for people.
Going to the office means getting to know the people you work with to a meaningful level (there are other opportunities to do that besides meetings, such as having lunch together or going out for a coffee/walk) in a way that is simply not possible when chatting via google meets.
But there’s also the increased exposure to serendipity. Unexpected things occur in the office. Maybe you overhear a conversation that makes you think about your career, or during drinks after work you end up discussing a new cool startup idea with colleagues. None of this really happens when you stay at home.
Sure, there are pros to staying at home. You will have more free time and fewer distractions, among other things. But there are also massive perks to putting a bit of effort and going to the office sometimes. Those perks, admittedly, may be hard to understand for the average introverted, socially anxious software dev.
> Going to the office means getting to know the people you work with to a meaningful level
In 15 years in this industry, I have only developed a handful of deep relationships with former and current colleagues. The vast majority of my own work relationships have been superficial. I'm a card carrying member of the over sharer's club, and yet so many of my colleagues throughout the years don't know that I'm originally from Ohio by way of Pennsylvania... That I'm a military veteran... That I'm a strength and endurance athlete, etc. Maybe that says something about me, but I don't think I'm an outlier.
Some of the people I've worked with were utterly contemptible and, while I maintained a professional relationship with them at work, myself and many others were inwardly happy to see them go when the time came. I think we all know plenty of cantankerous assholes who we've had to call team mate, colleague, or worse, manager / boss.
We work here together for a (usually brief, in the grand scheme of things) period of time and that's often the only glue that holds the majority of us together.
One of the deepest and most impactful relationships I have forged through a shared working environment is a person who lives in Argentina and who I have never met in person. No office required, just the Internet.
This is the one thing I've never found a suitable replacement for in the remote world. Chance encounters are difficult to replicate. Maybe I'm discussing an issue with a colleague, and someone in earshot happens to know the answer. I've seen groups try to have policies like no DMs and only using public channels, but that sucks.
I much prefer remote life, but it's true that there are some aspects of in person work that are better.
A few years ago I had my team's desks moved to be next to our sales team. I wanted to overhear their conversations and phone calls to get a deeper understanding of client feedback and how clients used our product. It worked out well, and we got into a much better place in terms of feedback and requests.
During covid I've also had a very strong indicator of how clients view our product - the entire sales team quit over time.
>Going to the office means getting to know the people you work with to a meaningful level (there are other opportunities to do that besides meetings, such as having lunch together or going out for a coffee/walk) in a way that is simply not possible when chatting via google meets.
Who cares? I care about my family and friends. If I match with someone at the office, then it will happen anyway with remote work and I don't need to be force to interact in the hopes of having a better relationship. I work for work, not to socialize. I socialize with people by choice, not by force. And those people are those who I like.
>Unexpected things occur in the office. Maybe you overhear a conversation that makes you think about your career, or during drinks after work you end up discussing a new cool startup idea with colleagues. None of this really happens when you stay at home.
I don't need the unexpected to make me think, thanks. I like to take command of my own life instead of waiting for unexpected wind blows to drive me somewhere or make me think of where I want to go in life. I'm sorry to hear some people need that. Maybe therapy would be good for them. Or, you know, talking with friends.
> Those perks, admittedly, may be hard to understand for the average introverted, socially anxious software dev.
I feel sorry for the people who feel the need to put others down in order to try to prove a point (for which arguments are lacking, and therefore they resort to ad-hominems).
I disagree on one point. I've spent much of my career working with remote offices over the phone and with desktop sharing. I have to say, group video conferences really don't cut it. However, one on one calls and video calls work really well and you can get to know your coworkers. Its so much better to have one on ones with others and not have each other worry about posturing in front of their peers. Group video calls are at least just as useless as group meetings.
Agree with all of that. For me, the issue with working at home is that home is my relaxing and family place office is my work place.
My mind focuses at work much better when i am in my work environment.
Creating real connections with co workers from my experience is not possible via zoom / google meets. There is nothing that can replace real human interaction as far as creating relationships.
My own anecdotal and I'm sure many others have experienced this before, but getting the culture right for remote work has been a great experience. I get to know people at a meaningful level. I remember being younger in high school and making meaningful relationships on the internet through chat rooms and video games that last to today.
Most software is no longer this self contained. It doesn’t need to be that way but often is.
Around 9/11, I was responsible for a major system component that turned out (shocker) to be a lot more work than anyone had estimated, so I spent the week before and the month after 9/11 working fully remote so that I could dedicate every waking hour to the component. Putting aside the lack of balance, it was the most productive I have been in my life despite the high distraction of the news in the outside world.
But the last two years have been nothing like that. Some of that is my current role, and some of that is that building complex systems requires more coordination, but it also seems to me that there is some issue both around engineer depth on average (previous example, everyone was fluent in reading code and it spoke for itself) and that software these days in large companies has just so much internet-group overhead.
And video conferencing is a punishment in most large companies, worse than a phone call because it seems, to me, to result in people paying less attention. I may be alone in that though.
Some people also don’t have living conditions at home that are conducive to being productive. Not everyone can afford the space to have a proper home office, for example.
Absolutely correct. Any everyone's situation is different, but let's be real - the vast majority of software engineers can afford a great home office space.
> Not everyone can afford the space to have a proper home office, for example.
Because they have to live in expensive urban areas near their workplace. Their money would stretch much further if they could remote-work from rural areas.
I think if a company is going to be fully remote, they should provide an office budget to every employee, so you can either rent an extra bedroom / buy a bigger house / or rent space in a co-working facility.
Working from your bedroom with a desk crammed in the corner is a serious downgrade IMO from having an office with good vibes.
With a kid at home I'm very inclined to work in office whenever it allows. I'm also much more productive in office when everything from coffee to food are taken care of.
Nowadays I believe WFH is kinda the norm in IT as long as company policy allows. I love the hybrid mode: two days in office to relax, three days at home to help wifie with kid.
> some people are just very lonely and need face to face
Sure but some of us are just more extroverted and have better energy in the office. Also having a clean separation of work vs home context can be helpful, training the brain "this is work time"[1]
I think it's totally fair to point out if people are opting for the office just due to a lack of need fulfillment elsewhere in life, but don't think its wise to assume it's only that by a wide margin.
>"I assume that some people are just very lonely and need face to face"
This. We have managed to completely fuck up life style of the segment of the population to the point that they have no life outside of the office. This is sick.
That said, it made a huge difference that forced WFH coincided with closing all possible social outlets at the same time. If you discovered that you wanted to expand your social circle to diversify away from workmates, you were out of luck.
A good book about this is Bowling Alone. As much as I liked programming, I would also take the day off to go surfing if the waves were good. Another WFH benefit.
Didn't Microsoft give everyone their own dedicated office in those days? I thought I read/heard somewhere that is what spawned development of Outlook/Exchange.
I agree about the distractions, it's extremely bad with the open office model and hard to get anything done for me. I would much prefer cubicles or dedicated offices.
It was by far the least favorite work environment I've ever had. It was lonely and unproductive for me, with a 15 minute - 2 hour commute depending on traffic. I came home from work angry every day. I have no idea how I lasted almost two years in that environment.
I really enjoy open offices. My next job was all pair programming all the time. No assigned desks. You just showed up and sat down with a different person every day. For me that's the most productive way to get work done.
For the last 3 years I've been working from home and don't see myself going back to an office ever again. I enjoy my time at home too much.
Everyone is different and not every company has to work the same way.
This was true in the late 80's early 90's when we used to go up to Redmond from California to pow wow, but I heard that's not true anymore. Also, if any Microsofties are reading this, how would I got about getting the source code of Works for the Mac? It was about 200,000 lines of 68000 asm code that I'm thinking of trying to get to run in the browser. I may make a formal request to Microsoft if I get more motivated about it. I lost my copy along the way.
I remember hearing that too. Having an office with a door or at least a shared office would make it tolerable, but still the commute always put me in a sour mood to start and end the day. Now a days, the fad is open office, which is a dumpster fire for development. I can't believe Apple fell for that with their new mothership.
This is fascinating to me! How did you manage to merge code in the 80s? What tools were available? Did you have three-way merge tools or did you do it more manually?
Or rather did you talk frequently and ensure that you weren't stepping in each other's files? How did you make changes to shared APIs?
Some "old-timers" at my software company occasionally tell stories about how "checking the source code" meant physically grabbing a the one binder filled with pages of fortran and inserting your changes. Physically holding the binder gave you exclusive checkin access :)
Macintosh Programmers Workshop had some tools but we mostly did it by hand so we tended to work on different parts of the program. If that was a problem our manager who owned the company would do a road trip to collect the new code that another person needed (we all lived in the Bay Area.) He had a big financial incentive to do so. Or we would get together, but that was not optimal.
There were always tools to diff two codebases and make a intermediate file that had all the changes. We did it back in the BBS days. You could always take the diff file and type the changes in manually. That's how "mods" worked. It would be something like this
SomeFile.pas
14: - If Variable = 1
14: + If Variable = 2
Some people prefer working in an office because it helps them stay disciplined and keep a better work/life balance. Perhaps I’m just speaking for myself here, but I tend to get lazy and feel like my life has much less structure as a fully-remote worker.
> I can safely say I never wrote any good code while working in an office. There are too many distractions.
1) Not every office is Silicon Valley Open Office Garbage
I personally think this is the biggest issue.
We never threw in with the "open office" bullshit. Offices have doors. We don't have that many cubicles, and they're generally for contractors/consultants/etc. Every time we started having cubicles, it was time to move to a bigger office.
People hate commute traffic--that's sadly unavoidable in the US. But they didn't seem to hate our office (I could, of course, simply be blind like so many stupid managers).
2) Not every job is solely writing code.
I need a lab. My juniors need a lab. They don't need to be there every day, but they do need it regularly. Expecting them to set this up in their apartment is unreasonable.
3) Junior engineers need mentoring
Maybe the fact that software does this quite so terribly is hiding this need.
There is a lot of friction between simply mentioning something to a staff engineer after lunch and setting up a specific zoom call. There is also something about the staff engineer overhearing something "minor" that junior engineers are struggling with, correlating that multiple of them are having similar issues and setting up something to fix a process or educate people.
4) Lack of face to face time increases conflicts
This is anecdata. However, people who don't actually meet face to face regularly don't cut each other the same slack that those who meet regularly do. I don't know why. Although, we could probably paper over this by having regular lunches.
I like working from home. But I also liked working at the office. They are two different modes that serve two different purposes.
I will, however, agree that 9 to 5, 5 days a week in the office is dumb. At the very least, significantly condensing the number of "common hours" and letting people commute on off times needs to increase. This was happening, but very slowly. Covid accelerated this.
There are multiple reasons to want to work in an office.
Makes it easier to separate home from work.
Not having the space at home to work comfortably.
Not having the quiet need from a busy and noisy house
Being and to interact with others, even if it is just in a social capacity.
Of course personally I'd prefer to work from home
If you don't mind my asking, have you spent much of your time since then working from home or in an office?
I likewise very much prefer working from home and find I get more done, but wanting to get an idea of what it's like from someone who's seen and done both over the long term.
Works was my first job out of the Navy in 84, so I had no prior office experience. I spent 94' to 2000 working in 4 separate offices for 3 different companies. I remember my first office experience I brought in a cot. People looked at me like I was insane. Well, I guess power naps are out of the question. Then I was exposed to office politics for the first time. Some people walk around hating each other all day. What a downer that was. Some women (and some men) would interrupt me to flirt with me. I didn't mind that so much. Then I would be in deep focus fixing some problem and they'd flash the lights because it was someone's birthday and we all had to go to the conference room because it was someone's birthday and there was cake and ice cream. Again, I didn't mind that so much. I felt for all these reasons and many more I was less productive in an office than I was at home. The office to me is a place a lot of people like because they can f around with their office friends.
Edit: I never worked in an office again after I resumed programming after the dotcom bubble burst. Another anecdote: I got called into HR because someone complained I was yawning too loudly.
High speed internet and video conferencing might bring many of those distractions into your home office in a way that you didn't have to deal with during the old days.
The coding used by this survey is a joke. If 40% of an occupation says they work outdoors that's below 50% so it's bucketed into the work from home category on that criterion. I think if even 20% of a job is saying they work outdoors that's pretty strong evidence you're missing some information about what the other 80% are doing in their job that prevents it from being a work from home job. The net result of their setup is obviously a vast overestimate so take the 37% number with a grain of salt.
Couldn’t the job still be performed at home with the occasional on site? I’m thinking of a construction PM. The job could mainly be done at home other then when needed to meet GC on site. Seems like there is still WFH no?
Depends what you're using the WFH number for. If you want to extend it to an argument about being able to live substantially further from a job then needing to meet a GC on site some of the time is a dealbreaker. I think it's fair to say to call the job as a whole a WFH job it needs to be 100% remote. That's not to say non-WFH jobs can't have some remote time.
The construction we've seen recently had a PM, and they were on the site about 20-25% of the time. Parts of their job can be and should be done in an office (or from home), but I can't imagine that they wouldn't visit the site regularly while keeping the quality and the schedule goals...
I know some companies are trying to get their employees to go back to a hybrid schedule, but for me, I think the bell can't be unrung. My company is a f500 company that I would not have thought would remain remote, but we have, and it really helps us hire and retain talent. It honestly helps us recruit people that would otherwise have sought out trendier employers.
Same. Seems not too long before people started really hating offices, offices started being designed to make you hate them. Open offices, no walls, 'island concept' which sounds all fun and tropical until you learn it just means you no longer even have your own desk.
If companies want people back in offices, make them enticing. Have perks! Imagine everyone getting their own room, with a nice desk and maybe small couch and mini fridge. Having a shared personal assistant to take care of some things, work related or not. Heck, even something as small as a free daycare would be a huge motivator.
If you want people back, start treating them like people and not cattle.
1. Kill the panopticon (open offices)
2. Employers should bear the cost of ALL commuting
The panopticon is truly dystopian, and whenever I’m in one, the hair on the back of my neck never lays flat. I feel watched (because I am) and it isn’t pleasant.
Forcing employers to bear the costs of commuting would really up-end things. We’d all be working from home really damned quickly, and I suspect there’d be massive gains for the environment, climate change, etc.
I agree with everything you said but how is "free daycare" something small? Daycare costs thousands of dollars and the regulations and licensure are (rightfully) a very high bar. I would see free daycare as a huge perk and I don't even have kids.
This surprises...nobody? Except maybe bean counters/management types that need to show off perhaps.
With that said, I do have concerns. These issues center around a shift in benefits offered as a result of this new paradigm ( hate using that word but ) around the nature of work. I.e. the gig everything economy coming to your job...soon
Many folks in the US work a 9to5 not just for the pay, rather for healthcare and stability. However, it's only a matter of time that employees will become even more API'ified / made into independent contracts / etc. I know that many will welcome the flexibility - some though will not understand what this means.
I do wonder how the US will be able to handle this continued move away from 'trad' employment, given our rather odd situation of one's medical being tied at the hip to one's employer? Those that work in other jurisdictions need not fear the loss of a job as much as a US citizen. Literally, you could die ( just look at how many of those that were made unemployed during the pandemic lost access to medical. )
First, "gig workers" can't work across the board. Companies working on products often need people to have deep understanding of the product. We all know how costly it can be to lose say a software engineer who has a few years tenure.
Second, if the gig-economy were to become very widespread, it may finally be a push to have a true, sensible market for health insurance in the US. If employers no longer pay insurance carriers/brokers to cover their employees, these carriers will need to come up with products people can afford.
If there is a large shift toward gig economy work, then the healthcare industry will shift as well. There's nothing preventing them from offering affordable healthcare to gig employees other than the status quo and their current profit models.
Something the size of the insurance industry is going to shift about 5-10 years after the general market. So if you're worried about short term gigification of your job, you might want to look into private insurance/benefit options now. Over the long term I think it will take care of itself.
I think it's dangerous when we look at gigification as a "who cares it will work out somehow".
Imagine how up-in-arms if they gigified programming. It has already happened in places, but what if they wholesale a price per line of code?
This will get a lot of replies but honestly, a codebase that is spaghetti from gigification may be cheaper than non-spaghetti codebase at 100k - 200k/year * number of developers and work just as well for the domain it is in.
If you can put the "it won't work" aside - imagine they figure out that it does. That rage right now - how is that not applicable to the people getting gigified right now?
I would guess that the gig economy simply can't come for any jobs that require significant domain expertise or more than a few hour's worth of attention to any single project.
Comparable to how you don't see day laborers doing pipefitting.
Companies have been doing this for decades already.
The current situation is not going to shift even more jobs to India. Reasons being, good engineers from India are already moving to the US in sheer numbers, and good talent is unlikely to remain at Indian IT consultancy companies.
Anecdotally, I have worked along with very clever engineers who happened to be Indian nationals living in the US, but I have yet to find an above average engineer working at an Indian IT shop and based in India.
not if those jobs entail good written or even oral communication skills. Native English speakers have a huge leg up on Indians and Eastern Europeans in this regard.
For example, I imagine Coca-Cola is willing to pay more to have the person writing their ad copy be someone who has been immersed in American culture from birth.
It's already been happening and will increase for sure, but so far hasn't really affected salaries as far as I can see, U.S devs haven't felt a thing yet. If anything, salaries in East Europe went way up.
What I do fear is interest rate starting to rise and the implications of that on our industry but that's another thread.
Imagine the environmental impact of cutting out emissions from 37% of commuters for "free". We could do it today. Its been proven to work the last 2 years. It's such low hanging fruit it's mind boggling!
Once again, I am begging HN: this is a misleading title format for links to single papers or studies. What is being phrased as factual in the headline is merely an assertion in a paper, and should be reflected as such. “New paper claims (x)” is reasonable. “Study suggests (x)” is also reasonable. “(x)” borders on straight up falsehood when it portrays an assertion as a new finding about our world.
I think the assumption on HN should be that the title is merely what the article author is claiming. So from my perspective reading a title like "37% of jobs in the United States can be performed entirely at home" is automatically converted to "AuthorClaimsThat(37% of jobs in the United States can be performed entirely at home)".
Readit News
Maybe it was just our personalities that made it work, but I am astonished that any programmer would rather go into the office. With high speed internet and video conferencing, I assume that some people are just very lonely and need face to face. I see nothing wrong with that. I understand it, but after 1992 I took a job that forced me into an office and I hated it.
I can safely say I never wrote any good code while working in an office. There are too many distractions.
Anecdata from Hacker News suggests this is true. A lot of lonely young men here freely admit their coworkers are the only people they regularly interact with in-person, and remote work takes that away from them.
There are already a number of options in even the smallest town. I expect that will increase as more people move to WFH and seek social outlets.
And at the end of the day "interacting with coworkers in the break room" is a pretty low quality bar for an alternative to surmount. Maybe your work conversations are more fascinating than mine, but I get more value elsewhere.
I don't really miss at all the office, let alone my co-workers. Working remote is just what I need, and I am way more productive.
I think there are a lot of reasons that people prefer offices. Most of it is probably tradition and "that's the way we've always done things". If the reason is truly lonely people needing social interaction, then there are a lot of way better solutions.
I'm not lonely, per se, but, all the same, the pandemic has been very, very difficult for me. I went from being a longtime remote worker who went to a coworking space most days, to what has sometimes felt like two years of house arrest.
I agree that going in to an office - especially an open plan one where they pack desks end-to-end in giant noisy rooms - is a less-than-stellar option, too. But I also suspect that many people's newfound love of WFH is fueled in part by the novelty of the experience, and that the shine will wear off after a couple more years.
1. It felt like a "real" space (i.e. not a beige cubical farm)
2. Was not excessively loud
3. I had a comfortable chair/workspace
4. I could walk there from my house in under 20 minutes
5. There was no dress code
6. There was nobody there who I found deeply annoying and also insisted on interacting with me regularly
And I think a lot of people (especially young people who live in cities close to where they work) actually do have something approximating that situation.
This sort of self-alienation seems to be a pretty widespread problem larger than the in-person/remote debate. That said, it's probably better for those experiencing it to have some in-person socialization in the office than none.
The comparison isn’t a social life, it’s a family or roommates.
Like, dude, we get it. This is important to you. So go work where you find that. A bit tiresome to constantly come into these threads and listen to this endless repetitious nonsense.
Christ on a stick. Do you never tire of it?
Well, with the 8 hours they're getting back from not commuting, they'll have more time to go out and socialize in non-work settings
But I have to admit I'm surprised to hear you say that you are "astonished" that any programmer would prefer to work differently.
2 things that I've learned from reading NH over the years: tech/programmer people are often very opinionated, and also have widely different opinions on just about everything :)
I had a couple of other reasons for hating the office that I don't often see mentioned. I'm sensitive to 60 Hz fluorescent lights and also to bad air. Most offices are flooded with this kind of light and don't recirculate the plastic and office supply fumes often enough.
Just yesterday we had a summer day, so just after lunch I went to a remote beach, used my phone as AP and worked for about 5 hours until nightfall.
No interruptions, no annoying noises, not battling with AC.
I mean, having tasted this, Im pretty sure what would I do if my company asks me to go back to office. I still have a low paying job, but my life has improved dramatically.
And my office is literally 5m walk from my home, so Im already ahead of many people in that, but it's a noisy bunker with no window, lots of people and all kinds of other BS.
People is definitely lonely. I can understand that, but I won't pay for other peoples loneliness.
If you want friends, ask me for a beer, or come to my house, I like to cook for people.
But Id bet that this is more of a managers thing.
But there’s also the increased exposure to serendipity. Unexpected things occur in the office. Maybe you overhear a conversation that makes you think about your career, or during drinks after work you end up discussing a new cool startup idea with colleagues. None of this really happens when you stay at home.
Sure, there are pros to staying at home. You will have more free time and fewer distractions, among other things. But there are also massive perks to putting a bit of effort and going to the office sometimes. Those perks, admittedly, may be hard to understand for the average introverted, socially anxious software dev.
In 15 years in this industry, I have only developed a handful of deep relationships with former and current colleagues. The vast majority of my own work relationships have been superficial. I'm a card carrying member of the over sharer's club, and yet so many of my colleagues throughout the years don't know that I'm originally from Ohio by way of Pennsylvania... That I'm a military veteran... That I'm a strength and endurance athlete, etc. Maybe that says something about me, but I don't think I'm an outlier.
Some of the people I've worked with were utterly contemptible and, while I maintained a professional relationship with them at work, myself and many others were inwardly happy to see them go when the time came. I think we all know plenty of cantankerous assholes who we've had to call team mate, colleague, or worse, manager / boss.
We work here together for a (usually brief, in the grand scheme of things) period of time and that's often the only glue that holds the majority of us together.
One of the deepest and most impactful relationships I have forged through a shared working environment is a person who lives in Argentina and who I have never met in person. No office required, just the Internet.
This is the one thing I've never found a suitable replacement for in the remote world. Chance encounters are difficult to replicate. Maybe I'm discussing an issue with a colleague, and someone in earshot happens to know the answer. I've seen groups try to have policies like no DMs and only using public channels, but that sucks.
I much prefer remote life, but it's true that there are some aspects of in person work that are better.
A few years ago I had my team's desks moved to be next to our sales team. I wanted to overhear their conversations and phone calls to get a deeper understanding of client feedback and how clients used our product. It worked out well, and we got into a much better place in terms of feedback and requests.
During covid I've also had a very strong indicator of how clients view our product - the entire sales team quit over time.
Who cares? I care about my family and friends. If I match with someone at the office, then it will happen anyway with remote work and I don't need to be force to interact in the hopes of having a better relationship. I work for work, not to socialize. I socialize with people by choice, not by force. And those people are those who I like.
>Unexpected things occur in the office. Maybe you overhear a conversation that makes you think about your career, or during drinks after work you end up discussing a new cool startup idea with colleagues. None of this really happens when you stay at home.
I don't need the unexpected to make me think, thanks. I like to take command of my own life instead of waiting for unexpected wind blows to drive me somewhere or make me think of where I want to go in life. I'm sorry to hear some people need that. Maybe therapy would be good for them. Or, you know, talking with friends.
> Those perks, admittedly, may be hard to understand for the average introverted, socially anxious software dev.
I feel sorry for the people who feel the need to put others down in order to try to prove a point (for which arguments are lacking, and therefore they resort to ad-hominems).
Creating real connections with co workers from my experience is not possible via zoom / google meets. There is nothing that can replace real human interaction as far as creating relationships.
The office rumor-mill produced a lot of bad politics in my experience
There are ways to establish communication to humans other than going into work to use their keyboard and monitor.
Around 9/11, I was responsible for a major system component that turned out (shocker) to be a lot more work than anyone had estimated, so I spent the week before and the month after 9/11 working fully remote so that I could dedicate every waking hour to the component. Putting aside the lack of balance, it was the most productive I have been in my life despite the high distraction of the news in the outside world.
But the last two years have been nothing like that. Some of that is my current role, and some of that is that building complex systems requires more coordination, but it also seems to me that there is some issue both around engineer depth on average (previous example, everyone was fluent in reading code and it spoke for itself) and that software these days in large companies has just so much internet-group overhead.
And video conferencing is a punishment in most large companies, worse than a phone call because it seems, to me, to result in people paying less attention. I may be alone in that though.
Because they have to live in expensive urban areas near their workplace. Their money would stretch much further if they could remote-work from rural areas.
Working from your bedroom with a desk crammed in the corner is a serious downgrade IMO from having an office with good vibes.
Nowadays I believe WFH is kinda the norm in IT as long as company policy allows. I love the hybrid mode: two days in office to relax, three days at home to help wifie with kid.
This is not working from home, or working anywhere
If you think working from home means you have time to "help with the kid", you're wrong.
Sure but some of us are just more extroverted and have better energy in the office. Also having a clean separation of work vs home context can be helpful, training the brain "this is work time"[1]
I think it's totally fair to point out if people are opting for the office just due to a lack of need fulfillment elsewhere in life, but don't think its wise to assume it's only that by a wide margin.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Doorway_Effect
This. We have managed to completely fuck up life style of the segment of the population to the point that they have no life outside of the office. This is sick.
http://bowlingalone.com/
I agree about the distractions, it's extremely bad with the open office model and hard to get anything done for me. I would much prefer cubicles or dedicated offices.
It was by far the least favorite work environment I've ever had. It was lonely and unproductive for me, with a 15 minute - 2 hour commute depending on traffic. I came home from work angry every day. I have no idea how I lasted almost two years in that environment.
I really enjoy open offices. My next job was all pair programming all the time. No assigned desks. You just showed up and sat down with a different person every day. For me that's the most productive way to get work done.
For the last 3 years I've been working from home and don't see myself going back to an office ever again. I enjoy my time at home too much.
Everyone is different and not every company has to work the same way.
Or rather did you talk frequently and ensure that you weren't stepping in each other's files? How did you make changes to shared APIs?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_Programmer%27s_Works...
"My Briefcase", in Windows. It was like cloud shared storage, but using removable media.
https://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/bob/clarisworks.php
1) Not every office is Silicon Valley Open Office Garbage
I personally think this is the biggest issue.
We never threw in with the "open office" bullshit. Offices have doors. We don't have that many cubicles, and they're generally for contractors/consultants/etc. Every time we started having cubicles, it was time to move to a bigger office.
People hate commute traffic--that's sadly unavoidable in the US. But they didn't seem to hate our office (I could, of course, simply be blind like so many stupid managers).
2) Not every job is solely writing code.
I need a lab. My juniors need a lab. They don't need to be there every day, but they do need it regularly. Expecting them to set this up in their apartment is unreasonable.
3) Junior engineers need mentoring
Maybe the fact that software does this quite so terribly is hiding this need.
There is a lot of friction between simply mentioning something to a staff engineer after lunch and setting up a specific zoom call. There is also something about the staff engineer overhearing something "minor" that junior engineers are struggling with, correlating that multiple of them are having similar issues and setting up something to fix a process or educate people.
4) Lack of face to face time increases conflicts
This is anecdata. However, people who don't actually meet face to face regularly don't cut each other the same slack that those who meet regularly do. I don't know why. Although, we could probably paper over this by having regular lunches.
I like working from home. But I also liked working at the office. They are two different modes that serve two different purposes.
I will, however, agree that 9 to 5, 5 days a week in the office is dumb. At the very least, significantly condensing the number of "common hours" and letting people commute on off times needs to increase. This was happening, but very slowly. Covid accelerated this.
I likewise very much prefer working from home and find I get more done, but wanting to get an idea of what it's like from someone who's seen and done both over the long term.
Edit: I never worked in an office again after I resumed programming after the dotcom bubble burst. Another anecdote: I got called into HR because someone complained I was yawning too loudly.
It's hard to imagine now how this could be done without the internet and a distributed vcs like git.
I’m sure all the blue collar construction workers would totally respect the PM even more than they do now if they didn’t show up on site…
There is an awful lot of privilege going on behind the scenes in these WFH debates.
The construction we've seen recently had a PM, and they were on the site about 20-25% of the time. Parts of their job can be and should be done in an office (or from home), but I can't imagine that they wouldn't visit the site regularly while keeping the quality and the schedule goals...
If companies want people back in offices, make them enticing. Have perks! Imagine everyone getting their own room, with a nice desk and maybe small couch and mini fridge. Having a shared personal assistant to take care of some things, work related or not. Heck, even something as small as a free daycare would be a huge motivator.
If you want people back, start treating them like people and not cattle.
1. Kill the panopticon (open offices) 2. Employers should bear the cost of ALL commuting
The panopticon is truly dystopian, and whenever I’m in one, the hair on the back of my neck never lays flat. I feel watched (because I am) and it isn’t pleasant.
Forcing employers to bear the costs of commuting would really up-end things. We’d all be working from home really damned quickly, and I suspect there’d be massive gains for the environment, climate change, etc.
Indeed. I didn't mind at all going to the office the first many years of my career, where I always had a private office with a closing door.
But with open offices, I'll do everything I can to never be there.
I hate open offices, but having worked in all formats, open offices are bad for mental health.
When working on MPK West for FB, they built an open office to house 3,000 employees with only 5 offices (with escape hatches) for the c-suite.
Or if you like open office, you could go that direction too.
With that said, I do have concerns. These issues center around a shift in benefits offered as a result of this new paradigm ( hate using that word but ) around the nature of work. I.e. the gig everything economy coming to your job...soon
Many folks in the US work a 9to5 not just for the pay, rather for healthcare and stability. However, it's only a matter of time that employees will become even more API'ified / made into independent contracts / etc. I know that many will welcome the flexibility - some though will not understand what this means.
I do wonder how the US will be able to handle this continued move away from 'trad' employment, given our rather odd situation of one's medical being tied at the hip to one's employer? Those that work in other jurisdictions need not fear the loss of a job as much as a US citizen. Literally, you could die ( just look at how many of those that were made unemployed during the pandemic lost access to medical. )
Just my musings...
First, "gig workers" can't work across the board. Companies working on products often need people to have deep understanding of the product. We all know how costly it can be to lose say a software engineer who has a few years tenure.
Second, if the gig-economy were to become very widespread, it may finally be a push to have a true, sensible market for health insurance in the US. If employers no longer pay insurance carriers/brokers to cover their employees, these carriers will need to come up with products people can afford.
Something the size of the insurance industry is going to shift about 5-10 years after the general market. So if you're worried about short term gigification of your job, you might want to look into private insurance/benefit options now. Over the long term I think it will take care of itself.
Imagine how up-in-arms if they gigified programming. It has already happened in places, but what if they wholesale a price per line of code?
This will get a lot of replies but honestly, a codebase that is spaghetti from gigification may be cheaper than non-spaghetti codebase at 100k - 200k/year * number of developers and work just as well for the domain it is in.
If you can put the "it won't work" aside - imagine they figure out that it does. That rage right now - how is that not applicable to the people getting gigified right now?
Comparable to how you don't see day laborers doing pipefitting.
"37% of jobs in the United States can be performed entirely at home...by people in India or Eastern Europe for much less money"
The current situation is not going to shift even more jobs to India. Reasons being, good engineers from India are already moving to the US in sheer numbers, and good talent is unlikely to remain at Indian IT consultancy companies.
Anecdotally, I have worked along with very clever engineers who happened to be Indian nationals living in the US, but I have yet to find an above average engineer working at an Indian IT shop and based in India.
For example, I imagine Coca-Cola is willing to pay more to have the person writing their ad copy be someone who has been immersed in American culture from birth.
What I do fear is interest rate starting to rise and the implications of that on our industry but that's another thread.
Don't hold your breath.