I have worked from home for 16 out of 22 years of my professional working life. Some people can hack it, some people can't. My first job out of college was WFH because the company I worked for had an office that was full. I spent the first 2 weeks at my boss's house (one of the founders of the company). After that we used Lotus Sametime (think corporate instant messaging for you youngins).
After that job I spent a couple of years working in offices. It was absolutely helpful in some ways (I worked and learned from smarter people (MIT, Dartmouth grads, etc) and less productive in others (employer tried to work us 100+ hours per week for months on end). Looking at the code you wrote at 3am the next morning and wondering what the hell you all were thinking (pair programming) was eye-opening.
I am so much more productive at home and more importantly I'm happier. Sure, it's nice to see people I work with a few times per year. But the fact is we're distributed all over the country (and the world for that matter). My neighbor works at IBM. She's been forced back to the office where she spends her day on Zoom calls. It's madness.
Shame on companies who use RTO and AI to disguise layoffs. Fuck these companies. Man-up and just say you want to save money.
~16.5 * 6 days. Most of the time folks didn't work Sundays. One night I was so exhausted, I would park my car in a parking deck (at 3am I was the only car there), I managed to back my VW Golf into a massive pillar (just a bump, but still.)).
This was early on in my career - I'd already had 2 years of dev work under my belt. But most of the devs there, this was their first gig out of college. They didn't know this wasn't the norm I guess.
Yes the commute was awful (Boston). If I left for work before 6:15am I would get to the office in 15 minutes. After 6:15am, it was a 45 minute traffic jam.
They would feed us dinner. Nobody died. They had their own gym, and yes showers at work too. I quit after a few months. They laid everyone off 9 months later. I should have taken the hint right away when I saw they had private nap rooms with beds, alarm clocks and everything. Can't make this shit up. Loved my peers there, but the company (management consulting company trying to turn their "IP" into software) had a shit culture. Our managers were trying to make partner and didn't give a shit who they grinded into the ground to get it.
I think WFH is good for some people but not good at all for others.
For example, I don't usually do well at all. I get distracted all the time, my brain doesn't seem to feel it's in work mode and so on.
I actually prefer to commute (I take the tube, read and listen to music; my brain is gradually turning on) and work from the office, have some chitchat, meet new colleagues, enjoy the snacks and beverages and then once I'm done I go home and the commute back is like a shutdown of my work brain.
To each his own I guess, I highly dislike polarising opinions (WFH is the best for everyone! or Everyone should be in the office all time!).
Being at home 100% of the time works if I have perfectly clear tasks and deadlines. But as soon as there's something that requires collaboration with multiple people it's just SO MUCH EASIER to do it in person with everyone physically in the same room.
Zoom is good and all, but it's always janky the more people are in the meeting.
On site you can get more of the subtle hints off of people and the conversation flows better when you can talk over each other without the software deciding whose voice gets through.
Then you make the decisions you need and can hole up in your comfy home office for a while before needing to emerge again to collaborate.
> Zoom is good and all, but it's always janky the more people are in the meeting.
It's the little things, isn't it? Like when someone starts talking one second before you finish and you can't hear them, and then you ask them to repeat, and there's some lag, and you are not sure if they really said something or it was a glitch... Then you lose 20 seconds doing the "did you say something? No no, it was my cat passing by" and everyone lost focus.
I think it's a platitude, but of course a "non-restricted hybrid" is the best choice, so when you want to work from home you just do, and when you prefer to go the office you go there.
Full remote is not for everyone. Full time office-based can be hard for parents or people living far away (or just suck if the office is noisy/messy).
That's how we work. We're officially a "remote-first" company, in that nobody is required to come into the office or work at specific times of day unless their work physically requires it. People still come in most days because we have nice big monitors and it's hard to get parts off the 3D printer remotely. (It still feels sci-fi as hell to be able to design a part and start printing it, all from the pub, though!)
I'm going to make an argument centered around hygiene. Many people in this world have certain bathroom habits, but generally we believe a modern bathroom is probably the best place for us to handle things. Some people don't, some people find it perfectly fine to piss in a corner if they really need to out on the street. What are you gonna do?
We can easily show a lot of people why WFH is the correct way, but some people will ... you know, still enjoy a good piss on the street. It's like, something is wrong with them you know?
So we can't really consider the pissing on the street people's (in this case, the people that love the office) opinions too seriously. It's unhygienic.
> I'm going to make an argument centered around hygiene
Instant win in any discussion because nobody wants to be considered unhygienic, even if it makes zero measurable difference. Same as "security" because nobody wants to be blamed for a security incident, even if costs of potential incident are less than the costs of maintaining security solutions. Same as "return to office" because nobody wants to be blamed for negative consequences of WFH even if they're negligible.
Working from home has increased my productivity tenfold. No idle chitchat, no wasted hours commuting, and full control over my environment. I’ve reached peak productivity, and there’s no compelling reason for me to return to the office.
I think you'll find those same people were wasting an equal amount of time in the work place as well. They just find other ways. I know one guy who was writing their novel at work, because it only requires a computer/is discrete.
One of the productivity boosts I’ve gotten from wfh is the ability to have a 35 minute nap in the afternoon. Amazing how much better my work is compared to the post coffee break work that was equivalent when I was in office.
The idle chit-chat, the wasted hours commuting (cycling rules), the lack of control are the essence of work life. WFH is largely like a chicken in a cage, just pooping out eggs without even being able to rotate.
> The media have jumped all over it with breathtaking headlines every time a company mandated a full five-days-a-week RTO... But those media reports may be giving the wrong impression, and in fact very little has changed since the beginning of 2023 in terms of actual office attendance and the percentage of full paid days worked from home
The core thesis of this, with data to back it up, is that there was a RTO push in the wake of COVID, but its stalled since 2023, and the amount of workers returning to office has been flat. The partial WFH or "hybrid" schedule is clearly shown in data, with huge variations in certain regions between different days.
> The average occupancy in the top 10 office markets in the latest week was still only at 54%... with Houston being at 65% at the top end and Philadelphia being at 44% at the bottom. The epicenter of WFH, San Francisco, was at 45% (chart from Kastle, click on the chart to enlarge it):
Which looks to be pretty constant for years based on their data. And, again, there is huge daily differences showing hybrid work is popular, but also not equally.
> The average occupancy on Fridays in January was 28% in San Francisco and 30% in New York City. Even at the high end, in Houston, it was only 48%.
The final bit of interesting data, which cements their thesis that WFH is here to stay.
> In January 2025, over 29% of all full paid days were worked from home, up a hair from the Januarys in 2023 and 2024.
> So the share of WFH has given up about half of the Covid spike (which peaked in June 2020 at 62%) and then got stuck at a share that is roughly four times higher than it had been in 2019 (7%).
> here was a RTO push in the wake of COVID, but its stalled since 2023, and the amount of workers returning to office has been flat
Presumably because a lot of the push for full RTO was just a means for companies to implement layoffs without calling them what they were. Once the target was achieved, everything went back to business as usual, including WFH.
"Kastle Back to Work Barometer"? Another company placing subtle suggestions that working from home is not really working? Of course, a provider of access control systems is also interested in keeping the office real estate sector healthy...
It's worth noting that it was a growing trend even before the pandemic and lockdowns only put the proverbial foot in the door for the general public.
I took my first remote role in 2015 and even back then it wasn't my only option. What's more interesting is that organisations which were remote first only doubled down on it after 2020, as e.g. cutting flights was a great way for them to save money.
All that being said both then and now promotions are more likely to be dispensed to those who show up.
I've been applying for tech jobs in Australia and what I've seen is almost all tech jobs are hybrid, with 2-3 mandatory days in office and the rest up to you. Have not encountered any 5 day mandatory jobs, and few 100% remote.
Which makes sense to me. In office is very much useful for collaboration, team building, etc. But you aren't doing that 5 days a week anyway.
What's fascinating to me is how much everyone seems to have accepted the "per week" framing, which puts an implicit 20% lower bound on the ratio. In-office may be useful for some things, but I see very little thought given to how little of those things you actually need, what the optimum frequency is (rather than the overall amount), how clumping days in a row might affect things, or how those in-office days should be coordinated between teams.
My hunch is that team-building and the more social aspects need far less than justifies anything like once a week; and collaboration is always best done at point of need, not to a schedule, in my experience. That need might be week-long! That can happen! But to assume everyone's best served by some arbitrary ratio is patently absurd; so much so that I find it hard to take arguments for it in good faith.
I will acknowledge that new starters and juniors do need hand-holding, and in most companies that's hard to substitute out. The mechanisms for doing that face to face are well established. But I don't think that's impossible to migrate to a mostly remote experience.
If I had to do hybrid, I would MUCH rather 1 week per month than 1 day per week, even though it would technically be more time spent in the office. And I would much rather 3 months per year than 1 week per month, assuming corp subsidizes a hotel room like all business travel. Both of those alternative schedules allow me to move out of my employer's expensive location which to me is the number one selling point of remote work. 1 day per week means I still have to live there.
Personally I find 2-3 days pretty much right. If I ever need to talk to someone I just have to hold it for tomorrow and chat in person. But still allowing for flexibility for the random stuff you might have to do (doctors appointments, rental inspections, etc)
I interviewed for a UK company that said 5 days in-office was a hard requirement. I politely declined and the interview ended shortly thereafter!
Seems like a massive time waste for no benefit. I go to the office 1-2x a week and that's enough for me to meet my team members and collaborate. But any more than that is too much!
I also have 2 mandatory days but they are completely useless. Due to the hotdesking I'm sitting next to people I have nothing to do with. On the same calls as i am doing at home because my entire team is in other countries.
And such a transparent one at that. Companies closed offices and significantly reduced footprints in offices that stayed open. Now they're ordering employees to return to offices that do not exist anymore or that do not have enough workspaces for them.
It is a method of layoffs not an excuse for - they will fire 20% of people no matter what. It is as good if not better than the old way of doing things which was based on the picking teams in the playground and a dartboard.
They're copying a technique from the minimum wage employer playbook, where you would lay people off, replace them with whoever (or no one at all) and rehire your original staff once they softened up while firing those new hires who proved problematic.
Of course companies don't do it in concert, so weirdly it's easy to both get hired and fired in this space, but net effect is that people keep getting paid minimum wage.
And therein lies the crux of the issue - our employers are pretty well synchronized in their layoffs so they're not worried that their projects will stall for a few months, as everyone else's will as well.
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After that job I spent a couple of years working in offices. It was absolutely helpful in some ways (I worked and learned from smarter people (MIT, Dartmouth grads, etc) and less productive in others (employer tried to work us 100+ hours per week for months on end). Looking at the code you wrote at 3am the next morning and wondering what the hell you all were thinking (pair programming) was eye-opening.
I am so much more productive at home and more importantly I'm happier. Sure, it's nice to see people I work with a few times per year. But the fact is we're distributed all over the country (and the world for that matter). My neighbor works at IBM. She's been forced back to the office where she spends her day on Zoom calls. It's madness.
Shame on companies who use RTO and AI to disguise layoffs. Fuck these companies. Man-up and just say you want to save money.
Add commute time... did it stink? Did people shower? Did they eat? Did anyone die?
This was early on in my career - I'd already had 2 years of dev work under my belt. But most of the devs there, this was their first gig out of college. They didn't know this wasn't the norm I guess.
Yes the commute was awful (Boston). If I left for work before 6:15am I would get to the office in 15 minutes. After 6:15am, it was a 45 minute traffic jam.
They would feed us dinner. Nobody died. They had their own gym, and yes showers at work too. I quit after a few months. They laid everyone off 9 months later. I should have taken the hint right away when I saw they had private nap rooms with beds, alarm clocks and everything. Can't make this shit up. Loved my peers there, but the company (management consulting company trying to turn their "IP" into software) had a shit culture. Our managers were trying to make partner and didn't give a shit who they grinded into the ground to get it.
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For example, I don't usually do well at all. I get distracted all the time, my brain doesn't seem to feel it's in work mode and so on.
I actually prefer to commute (I take the tube, read and listen to music; my brain is gradually turning on) and work from the office, have some chitchat, meet new colleagues, enjoy the snacks and beverages and then once I'm done I go home and the commute back is like a shutdown of my work brain.
To each his own I guess, I highly dislike polarising opinions (WFH is the best for everyone! or Everyone should be in the office all time!).
Being at home 100% of the time works if I have perfectly clear tasks and deadlines. But as soon as there's something that requires collaboration with multiple people it's just SO MUCH EASIER to do it in person with everyone physically in the same room.
Zoom is good and all, but it's always janky the more people are in the meeting.
On site you can get more of the subtle hints off of people and the conversation flows better when you can talk over each other without the software deciding whose voice gets through.
Then you make the decisions you need and can hole up in your comfy home office for a while before needing to emerge again to collaborate.
It's the little things, isn't it? Like when someone starts talking one second before you finish and you can't hear them, and then you ask them to repeat, and there's some lag, and you are not sure if they really said something or it was a glitch... Then you lose 20 seconds doing the "did you say something? No no, it was my cat passing by" and everyone lost focus.
Full remote is not for everyone. Full time office-based can be hard for parents or people living far away (or just suck if the office is noisy/messy).
Who the hell enjoys office snacks?
Also my office often has great snacks. We also have a barista and that alone is worth it.
We can easily show a lot of people why WFH is the correct way, but some people will ... you know, still enjoy a good piss on the street. It's like, something is wrong with them you know?
So we can't really consider the pissing on the street people's (in this case, the people that love the office) opinions too seriously. It's unhygienic.
RTO people are trying to make the world worse.
Instant win in any discussion because nobody wants to be considered unhygienic, even if it makes zero measurable difference. Same as "security" because nobody wants to be blamed for a security incident, even if costs of potential incident are less than the costs of maintaining security solutions. Same as "return to office" because nobody wants to be blamed for negative consequences of WFH even if they're negligible.
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I think that chicken in a cage is much better metaphor for staying at the office than for WFH.
Good riddance then.
- People hanging around socializing loudly rather than working
- The unhygienic and jerk habits of previous users of hot desks
- Uncomfortable, unergonomic hot desks
- Pointless, wasteful, and expensive commute times and expense
- Inferior meals and snacks
- Contracting things from ill people who refuse to stay home
- Disruptions
- Superficial interactions
The core thesis of this, with data to back it up, is that there was a RTO push in the wake of COVID, but its stalled since 2023, and the amount of workers returning to office has been flat. The partial WFH or "hybrid" schedule is clearly shown in data, with huge variations in certain regions between different days.
> The average occupancy in the top 10 office markets in the latest week was still only at 54%... with Houston being at 65% at the top end and Philadelphia being at 44% at the bottom. The epicenter of WFH, San Francisco, was at 45% (chart from Kastle, click on the chart to enlarge it):
Which looks to be pretty constant for years based on their data. And, again, there is huge daily differences showing hybrid work is popular, but also not equally.
> The average occupancy on Fridays in January was 28% in San Francisco and 30% in New York City. Even at the high end, in Houston, it was only 48%.
The final bit of interesting data, which cements their thesis that WFH is here to stay.
> In January 2025, over 29% of all full paid days were worked from home, up a hair from the Januarys in 2023 and 2024.
> So the share of WFH has given up about half of the Covid spike (which peaked in June 2020 at 62%) and then got stuck at a share that is roughly four times higher than it had been in 2019 (7%).
Presumably because a lot of the push for full RTO was just a means for companies to implement layoffs without calling them what they were. Once the target was achieved, everything went back to business as usual, including WFH.
I took my first remote role in 2015 and even back then it wasn't my only option. What's more interesting is that organisations which were remote first only doubled down on it after 2020, as e.g. cutting flights was a great way for them to save money.
All that being said both then and now promotions are more likely to be dispensed to those who show up.
Which makes sense to me. In office is very much useful for collaboration, team building, etc. But you aren't doing that 5 days a week anyway.
My hunch is that team-building and the more social aspects need far less than justifies anything like once a week; and collaboration is always best done at point of need, not to a schedule, in my experience. That need might be week-long! That can happen! But to assume everyone's best served by some arbitrary ratio is patently absurd; so much so that I find it hard to take arguments for it in good faith.
I will acknowledge that new starters and juniors do need hand-holding, and in most companies that's hard to substitute out. The mechanisms for doing that face to face are well established. But I don't think that's impossible to migrate to a mostly remote experience.
Seems like a massive time waste for no benefit. I go to the office 1-2x a week and that's enough for me to meet my team members and collaborate. But any more than that is too much!
For my team we picked Mondays, so we can have our chats and meetings then and focus on work the rest of the week.
They're copying a technique from the minimum wage employer playbook, where you would lay people off, replace them with whoever (or no one at all) and rehire your original staff once they softened up while firing those new hires who proved problematic.
Of course companies don't do it in concert, so weirdly it's easy to both get hired and fired in this space, but net effect is that people keep getting paid minimum wage.
And therein lies the crux of the issue - our employers are pretty well synchronized in their layoffs so they're not worried that their projects will stall for a few months, as everyone else's will as well.
In a competitive market, there would be defection from any layoff cartels, to gain market share.
If the employer has a monopoly, they are mostly competing with themself.