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cross-posted from: https://derp.foo/post/119697
There is a discussion on Hacker News, but feel free to comment here as well.
Any job that can be WFH should be WFH.
Any job that can’t be WFH that requires sitting at a desk all day should give each person an individual office. The open office plan has been an absolute nightmare, and only benefits micromanagers. It’s a productivity disaster, and makes for a miserable experience, and only exists for the sake of surveillance. However, I doubt there are many jobs that can’t be WFH that require such a situation.
The real issue here is an intentional mis-framing, imo. Why must people get back to a traditional office setting? The only people who want this are employers who think that Butts In Seats = Productivity, and the only way to ensure it is to intensely surveil your employees. I also don’t give two shits if some real estate company goes bankrupt because business tenants stop renting their properties. Boo fucking hoo.
I’ve been working for a remote-first company now for over a year, and I won’t ever got back to working in an office. There is literally nothing about what I do that needs me to be physically present in any specific place. The problem isn’t “productivity” or “collaboration”, the problem is entirely based around a work culture that is fundamentally punitive, puritanical, and antithetical to life balance.
I’m very much WFH a huge percentage of the time. I don’t think I’m ever going to willingly go back daily or even weekly. There’s little to no point. Our society also should want to encourage WFH as much as possible just for environmental benefits.
There’s a lot of psychological benefits to having much smaller communities. It’s been shown that after about 150 people, we tend to not do so well. Seems like the technology is there. The psychology is sound. And our mental health is critical.
The intent and WFH could mean we all live better. Nicer places. Less commuting. Everyone just, happier.
Sooooo…… 💁♂️
Ehhh. I wouldn’t say the only people who want an office setting are managers. There are definitely some bonuses to going in to work for some people - a very “to each their own” situation.
But I think the distinction there becomes the “traditional” office setting, because, yeah, no one likes that corporate bull.
Isn’t it significantly cheaper for most businesses to be run remotely? What is the pressure of returning to work coming from?
It’s so much cheaper that my last job, which was a remote-first company, was able to pay to fly everyone and a +1 to an all-expense-paid resort for five days to do team building. All of that was cheaper than an office in SF where they were based.
It is!
Most companies make BS solutions for fake problems. Not going to the office exposes a large chunk of fake needs.
Do families really need two cars? If you aren’t commuting every day, probably not.
Having more free time means people are more likely to cook and clean for themselves. Can’t make money off of that.
How many suits do you need to own? None! You only owned them because you are supposed to wear them in the office.
Dry cleaners? No longer a bill.
Gas? When you aren’t sitting in your cities parking lot of a freeway isn’t bought as often.
Speaking of parking lots, you aren’t paying for parking anymore.
Daycare and dog walkers aren’t needed anymore.
Going up work is expensive and companies want us addicted to these fake expenses.
many companies have multi-year commercial leases they suddenly can’t get out of and lots of office furniture they can’t liquidate. it’s a huge investment that suddenly worthless. (boo-hoo!)
Sounds like they made a bad investment choice.
So, I think the thing to do is to let workers talk frankly with their immediate supervisor and they’re team mates, and then let people decide for themselves where they would work best from. Weirdly, most people don’t go to work with the intent to do a bad job and can be trusted to make that choice for themselves.
That being said, there are some legitimate reasons why some people want a return to office that extend beyond the “butts in seats means productivity” and “people will realize I’m not providing value if we work from home” that a lot of people jump to immediately.
Some professions benefit a lot from face to face communication and coordination. The job can be done remotely, but it’s a lot more work. Because rather than accidentally coordinating, you have to be deliberate with every interaction. Wfh has led to a lot less idea spread between teams in those areas, and often there’s little idea about how to promote “so I was talking with Jan on the other team, and we had this idea…” Outside of making it so people can randomly talk to one another.
Some businesses have significant investments in their office space. If they’re not using it the pressure to divest from an unneeded asset is strong. Because everyone has this pressure, they might lose significant money selling at a loss, or as a penalty for breaking the lease.
If they believe that the wfh trend will slow and possibly reverse to some degree, then they don’t want to sell when it’s cheap and be forced to buy when it’s expensive again. This is often coupled with the previous point.The final reason has to do with attachment and people. When people don’t see each other, they’re less attached to one another. If your job is just a place you quietly work and get paid, there’s less human connection stopping you from jumping ship immediately.
You are also slower to adopt the company culture, which aside from bullshit buzzword stuff actually has value as the set of poorly defined social contracts about how the company interacts with customers, and generally “does stuff”. The actual company culture that makes you know that project plans go in spread sheets, the project proposal in a text document, and how people expect the documentation wiki to be formatted. What style of gif to use to get a chuckle and make people remember the important bit.
It also creates some difficulties for new entrants to the workforce. A lot of people with little or no office experience have reported a much harder time getting situated without people nearby to lend a hand. That process is much harder if there aren’t people nearby, so some people want to encourage more people to come back to let that work better.In the end, these aren’t enough for me to think we should be forcing people back, but they’re worth considering and talking about as a company or team.
Force them to treat commute time (within reason) as work for which the employee must be paid, and you’ll see a bunch of companies blanch and do an about-face on their attempts to get people back to the office.
As for the primary thesis of the article, well, if I go into the office I’m the only person on my floor even if the building is at full occupancy—there are two desks in the basement and the other has been untenanted since a couple of years before the pandemic. I’d still rather stay home, and not waste the time and gas, even though it’s only a 15-minute drive along back roads.
I don’t know how you can factor commute time in. Is it my fault if my coworker decides to live twice as far as I do? Unless the company moves the office, the worker decided to work there.
Not your fault, but it hardly hurts you if your coworker is being asked to work an hour more than you are.
In some ways, it helps you because you would be more valuable, because you cost less.
I think you can factor it in along with all other benefits. Employees absolutely consider commute time when applying for work. If companies want employees in office and are trying to compete with employers that allow remote work, they need to start making a case for why the commute is worth it. Tech companies tried doing that with ping pong tables and beer, but now that remote work is so common that doesn’t carry much weight. Compensating an employee for commute time in some way seems like a reasonable benefit that companies should consider offering.
Mileage compensation is one thing, but not including it in hours you work. I guarantee that would create resentment and hostility in every workplace.
I think that differentiation is only a difference in how the benefit would be calculated. It would be quite a departure from the current state of things, but it’s worth being part of the discussion.
Assuming we’re all compensated at different rates based on our value to the company, then one person’s time is more valuable than another person’s time. As the employee, commute time and work time might as well be conflated since it’s time spent away from the rest of our lives. It’s different for the company, of course, since commute time is not productive work time, but if we’re talking about this as benefits that companies might offer in order to retain or attract employees then I don’t think the company’s opinion matters.
For the sake of discussion, let’s say it’s now the law to compensate workers for their commutes. Wouldn’t this incentivize employers to hire only people who live close? Further limiting the working opportunities of rural workers doesn’t seem intuitive.
Is it my fault if my coworker decides to live twice as far as I do?
I’d rather just let them sit in traffic thinking they gamed the system.
Well, I did say “within reason”. So the company would need to factor in how close the nearest available housing that the employee can afford is to the office, and/or where the employee lived before they were hired. So they can define a maximum distance that they’ll make payments for, but it has to be sane.
If there isn’t enough housing for their employees within a sane distance of their office building, maybe the company should move.
(There’s also a whole discussion in there on the extent to which employment is a choice, and who has the decision-making power.)
the company would need to factor in how close the nearest available housing that the employee can afford is to the office
Define “affordable”.
Are we talking for a studio apartment with a fold out single bed that converts the dining room into a bedroom, or are we talking enough land for your teenage kids to ride their motorcycle around without noise complaints - because the neighbours are too far away to hear it. Something in between perhaps?
There’s plenty of housing on the same city block as my office. And I can afford to live there. No way in hell would I choose to live there though.
My boss, by the way, lives so close to work he uses the company wifi network at home. He also starts work before breakfast and finishes work several hours after dinner, every day. And works weekends too. Your probably don’t want to get into a debate with your boss about working conditions - chances are they work under far worse conditions than you do, even if they have a private office.
That’s an implementation detail, but I would say: two-bedroom apartment or small detached house in decent condition (no bugs, rot, mold, etc, water and electrical working, not in the middle of a crime hotspot or environmental disaster, reasonable access to shops and services, no oddball problems like being on the approach path for a major airport) for no more than a third of the employee’s after-tax salary. A place where it wouldn’t be torture for the average person to live, with maybe one or two other people if it suits them.
This feels like a disingenuous argument formed to prove WFH is the better answer. Similar to the argument that salary shouldn’t be based on COL wherever the person lives.
I would love it if companies also paid for commute. It would be 2 -2.5 hours each day for me.
I can identify with this. I went on early retirement (5 years ahead of time) because I was sick and tired of an open-plan office that kept distracting me constantly. If I had to get something done seriously quickly, like consolidated month reports etc, I had to do it from home. My productivity was at 50% or less at an office because of constant interruptions, or colleagues talking at the desk next to mine.
And of course senior managers would have their own offices, so they could get work done.
The rule should be, if open-plan offices make so much sense for collaboration etc, then everyone gets an open-plan office, including HR and the CEO. They can also go meet in a meeting room for private conversations.
It’s easy to make decisions for employees when you don’t have to follow those decisions yourself… want employees back at work, yes then make it better for them.
I was very ambivalent about WFH all through the pandemic. But I had a job which involved hardware development. When I was forced home due to the pandemic, I had to bring half my lab home. When we were contemplating going back and being hybrid, I told my boss that I had too much physical shit to interact with on a daily basis to be in two places. I either had to stay home, or move all my shit back to the office and stayed there. But I had an actual cubicle and a lab there. If I needed privacy to get stuff done, I could sort of get it.
Meanwhile, I got a fully remote job offer and took it. It is more of a systems role, and I can do much more of it remotely, so it works well. I still make several trips a year to the home office though, in an extremely HCOL area. Their office is one of the super-open-floorplan offices. Before the Pandemic, I was told it was packed and nobody liked it at all. But during the pandemic, people literally got days of their life back because they no longer had to spend 2+ hours a day commuting.
They’ve been trying to get folks back to the office at least once a week, but they’re not forcing the issue. If anything, the managers end up there more often than the workers. When I go there, I have the advantage of being able to expense my travel, so I can stay close. And with the exception of that one day a week, the office itself is a ghost town. There might be a few dozen people in a place that can “hold” hundreds (like sardines). But on that one day, there are so many people talking that if I have a critical meeting, I just stay in my hotel instead. Plus, so many meetings are with offsite people anyway (the company has employees around the world) that even with so many people on site you’re still doing the meeting over the Internet anyway.
Open floorplans are an absolute joke. They need to die.
I’m an embedded software developer, I WFH since pandemic and in my basement I set up a small desk with power supply, soldering iron, oscilloscope, etc so I can continue to work with HW that company send me, it’s the best :) I never want to commute 2h again
Any tips on breaking into that kind of industry? It is a dream of mine to be an embedded software developer but my skills are very hobby-level and I don’t have a degree or anything.
I’ve worked with a couple “senior technicians” (companies will probably be goofy with titles without a degree) who were indistinguishable from some of the software engineers, other than the title. Some were hired off the bat as a software technician, and other started on the hardware test side and moved over.
I recently quit my old job which was desperately trying to claw employees back into the office (first 1 day a week, then 2, then 3) for a fully remote role. It’s been a breath of fresh air. My new team is spread all over the country and yet everything runs so much more efficiently compared to my old employer.
They do have a small office available in case anyone prefers that environment (or perhaps their home isn’t suitable for remote work) but there is no expectation or requirement to come in, other than a suggestion that each team meets face to face maybe a handful of times per year, if only to get lunch/drinks together or have a social day.
It’s working out great for them as it lets them scale the number of employees they have significantly while not spending any more on commercial real estate.
Honestly, that still would not be enough to change my opinion here about Work From Home. We have the systems and tools at our disposal to make the office life redundant. The notion that work from home employees largely abuse the privilege is simply an opinion without any hard facts to back it up. Indeed it is actually the opposite. Employees are happier and more productive. A minority may abuse the privilege but those are the ones you fire for cause. You don’t end a system that works overwhelming well. That would be kind of like scrapping a car because there is a small scratch on it.
The old notion of having to punch a clock is over as well!
Oh God, yes! I’m old enough to remember when people thought it was important to have quiet and privacy to think.
I used to love my job. All my life I’ve loved programming, and I used to love being able to solve other people’s problems for them by doing the thing I love.
The open-plan curse killed it for me. For years I’ve done as little paid work as I can get away with because I hate trying to think in an open-plan horror so much. It’s like having my brain in a blender.
I still program, and think, a lot, but I only do it for other people when I need the money.
I go to the office a few times a year, mostly for all-hands meetings that are often also parties. Any more than that, and I’m looking for a new job. Recently, the company mentioned something about making the office more enticing. That went over like a lead balloon. There are a lot of other companies in the same city with better pay for in-office and hybrid work, and many of us live 1.5+ hours away.
I mean, if they want to make it more enticing, go for it. Just leave me the option to not be enticed.
My workplace lets everyone work from home or an office as they see fit. Some people need different things to work best. Some people miss the face-to-face that they used to get in the office, so management put together monthly “we’re catering lunch, and teams are encouraged to plan whatever activities they think might work better in office for this day, but make sure it’s optional”.
So once a month I go and get some free food, and we do some face to face planning which benefits a bit from being together, and last month the team hung out and chatted for a bit after work, which was nice.
If management wants people in office, I’d much rather they try to make that happen by making being in office worth it, as opposed to telling people they have to or else. Carrot > stick.
No thanks.
Fuck that. I already have an office at home.
I wouldn’t return to work if you offered me the whole building.
for my entire career, 100% of my work has been on the computer. once in a while, I may have some client interaction, and for that videoconferencing is fin 99.99% of the time. the 0.01% it’s not, I can go on-site. I’ve never attended a meeting that couldn’t have been an email or that couldn’t be handled via videoconference. what managers I’ve had fall into 2 categories:
- The Quite Ones: these are the good managers who send short emails regarding project needs/goals and periodically check in on progress, providing feedback when necessary.
- The Overbearing Micromanagers: jerkwads who feel the need to constantly insinuate themselves into my process and assert their position of power just for the sake of it, often negatively affecting both my workflow and the end-results of the project itself. They send huge, monotonous emails full of corporate-speak which say very little, set regular meetings that waste time and accomplish nothing, and set capricious, pointless policies which often change equally capriciously. I suspect this is done because they’re too incompetent to do their actual jobs and are designed both distract from that and remind us “who’s boss.”
Obviously, the first can be dealt with 100% remotely, and the second has positioned themselves, through being terrible at their jobs and being terrible people in general, to require workers to be present, mostly to justify their own jobs which would amount to nothing if there were no employees physically present to subject to their petty torments.
so, yeah, give me my own office? that’s not gonna cut it, as it changes exactly 0 of the reasons why I never want to return to the office, which are the commute, the stifling work atmosphere, the management, and the fact that there’s 0 reason to ever be there physically anyway due to the nature of my work.
I don’t need an office, I already have quite a nice office at home to work from.
I had my own office for a couple of years. The commute, and the rest-of-the-office environment, isn’t worth it.
I fully agree with this article. Some years back I even left an employer for a lesser position specifically because they went from cubicles to open office. That kind of caused the company some problems as they were under contract with a tight delivery date, I was then the center of some engineering developments and they didn’t actually have anyone else at the time capable of stepping into those particular developments. I literally couldn’t think straight while crowded in the open with 40 other engineers and felt constantly exhausted. Some people just don’t do well in crowds, and management that treats employees like Lego blocks isn’t going to keep any competitive edge it might have.
