I wonder if this is related to the long commutes Americans have gotten used to. I'm not in the US, and while I would say I definitely appreciate the flexibility of being able to work from home (or from "not the office") every now and then, and I do like the present drop in meetings, I cannot fathom how people stay sane without a variety of other people around.
My productivity has definitely dropped, and it feels like my brain never really fully turns "on". It feels a lot like those times in university I decided to study for exams from home instead of going to campus. I can't explain it, but 9 out of 10 times it just feels bad, like the way your brain feels if you've spent the day watching TV or something (when, in fact, I haven't). This doesn't even begin to consider the social punctuations of work that are essential to my psychological well-being.
Does anyone feel the same? I'm a little bit worried that I just have a personality type that isn't well-suited for the remote work culture that is likely to become more prevalent after this crisis is over. I'm in my early thirties, but I've felt this way for as long as I can remember, independently of whether I was in a relationship, whether I was working or studying, etc.
You're clearly more towards the extrovert part of the spectrum. Please try to have empathy for people on the introverted part of the spectrum who cannot fathom being forced into an office with tons of people distracting them all day every day. Heretofore they (save for a lucky few like me) have been forced to not just fathom it, but live it.
The "half" of Americans mentioned in the article probably has heavy overlap with those introverts.
Honestly, your post reads pretty heavily to me of "status quo privilege bias". You fit the current status quo very well, and are expressing worry that a change to that status quo would hurt you, with out extending empathy to those the current status quo hurts badly.
The world is not going to flip to fully remote work. It's likely going to inch towards remote work being more prevalent or available. What you are expressing is a case of "When you're accustomed to privilege (your way of working being privileged in this case), then equality (remote work being equally available) feels like oppression."
Not saying that makes you evil or any thing, just pointing out that this is a pretty standard human bias that gets expressed and winds up working to defend harmful status quos all the time. Worth being self aware of.
I'm a well established introvert, and I feel the same as OP. It doesn't have anything to do with extroversion/introversion. It has everything to do with simply feeling bad because we recognize that we're not nearly as productive at home. Some people just aren't, and likely never will be, and that's okay. I consider myself lucky to be able to (a) recognize it, (b) care about it, and (c) have the option to go back to work.
> Extrovert / introvert. You're clearly more towards the extrovert part of the spectrum.
That's the thing: I don't consider myself very extroverted! Probably on the extrovert side of the scale, but very moderately so!
> Please try to have empathy for people on the introverted part of the spectrum who cannot fathom being forced into an office with tons of people distracting them all day every day. Heretofore they (save for a lucky few like me) have been forced to not just fathom it, but live it.
Oh I do, I really do. I guess I'm just a bit (selfishly) scared of what awaits people like me in the future.
If we allow ourselves a lot of optimism, workplaces will see the need to accommodate both kinds of people to a great extent :-)
> Honestly, your post reads pretty heavily to me of "status quo privilege bias". You fit the current status quo very well, and are expressing worry that a change to that status quo would hurt you, with out extending empathy to those the current status quo hurts badly.
You may be right, but to defend myself on this point I think it is in part fueled by the overwhelmingly positive press WFH seems to be getting in this crisis. Nobody is writing articles exhalting the virtues of regular offices (rightly so), and I guess I have all this praising of WFH a bit stuck in my throat at this point - it leaves me thinking "is it me there's something wrong with?"
> The world is not going to flip to fully remote work. It's likely going to inch towards remote work being more prevalent or available.
I guess I'm just afraid it'll be a reinforcing cycle driven by potential real-estate savings on the part of both employers and employees, and infrastructure savings on the part of society.
Well, here are two things to think about that may salve your fears:
1) There are just as many extroverts as introverts. You are very much not alone in your desires.
2) Management is overwhelmingly extroverts, because of the people managing required in the management profession. The C-Suite is almost entirely extroverts.
> because of the people managing required in the management profession
While I agree with the rest of your statements, I disagree with this.
Management is overwhelmingly extraverts because extraversion lends itself very strongly to the kind of elbow-rubbing that our culture sees as more important than performance for determining suitability for raises, promotions, and such.
I know some introverted people who are absolutely brilliant people managers. They understand leadership and what people need so much better than any extraverted manager I've ever personally met.
For all too many people, management isn't even about "people managing". It's about being on a power trip. And this applies triple to the C suite.
For the record, I'm an introverted manager (and seemingly a decent one judging by my record and the feedback I receive). I do find the people managing aspects to be pretty exhausting (though also fulfilling and totally worthwhile).
I have a similar reaction to the WFH hype. I prefer to be in the office but can WFH fine as long as I can interact with others remotely but I’m chafing a little at the “See I told you WFH works, companies will change their mind on WFH policies and the future will be glorious!”
I think it comes from discussions as if there is a right to WFH and they’re owed it which can come off a little self righteous and off putting.
The status quo bias is an interesting point, thanks for bringing that up.
For whatever reason, I need a physical change of scene to click my brain over into "work-mode". In college I couldn't comprehend how people could ever get any work done at home, but I had no problem studying in a library, or a coffee shop, or a classroom, and it's been the same after I entered the workforce.
As much as I enjoy derping at my home in comfy clothes on the weekends and evenings, I'm one of the people who actually appreciates the ritual of putting on nicer clothes, moving to a separate physical location, doing work there, and leaving my work there once I walk out of the building. Once I'm home and I kick off my shoes, I've entered a pure, work-free place where I can fully relax.
I suspect most people are in the same boat, and I'm curious: do you think you'd have the same frustrations if you had an office at work with a door you could close? To me, your post reads more like a criticism of modern cubicle-hell (or open-floorplan-hell), which everyone hates, extroverts included.
People can, and have been, calling the ability to work from home a privilege.
I think what you are calling "privilege" is an advantage, but it seems to me that because there is a consensus that "privilege" is bad, that's what everything is called whether it really is or not.
Have you seen the cartoon (there are many variations) comparing equality with equity? Where there are three people of different heights, and equality is where they each have the same height crate to stand on to see over a fence, whereas equity is where the shorter ones have more of a boost.
The thing that I noticed about that, is that it seems implicitly to be saying that advantage, if uncompensated for, is bad and shameful, while appropriate privilege is the remedy.
Isn't it reasonable to call it privilege when people are held to different standards, and advantage when people have different difficulty with the same standards?
All of this. I've been trying to maintain empathy for those suffering from lack of social contact when I feel like they are demanding sympathy while continuing to demonstrate that they never appreciated the routine suffering they expected me to accept.
A gross generalization, but definitely a common interaction I'm seeing/feeling.
My work is all meetings all the time, now. I’m on the phone most of the day. Little things that used to take 20 minutes now take an hour. I used to enjoy working from home a couple days a week because I got some peace and quiet and knew I could catch back up with people when I returned to the office. I went from loving to hating my job in the last three weeks. I am also constantly distracted by having the kids around and, you know, the end of the world. It’s not the isolation I mind it’s having to still work with others under these conditions. I think you have to have a very particular set of circumstances to enjoy wfh under these conditions and I doubt half of Americans have them. I suspect they just have a lot of free time around the house “working” and their jobs could largely be replaced with automation in the near future, but maybe that’s just a bit of jealousy on my part.
I think that you are just generalizing something that can't be easily generalized. I'm not happy with what's happening in the world - as I hope most aren't - but the work from home situation isn't a problem for me. I'm loving it. I have an older kid and both him and my wife, who's a stay-at-home mom, are doing a great job maintaining a quiet environment in the house.
One thing that makes a huge difference is having a dedicated room for work. I'm fortunate to be able to afford an extra room just for myself and I set up a mini office in there. It's so much better than an open office environment, I can't even compare. I really get "in the zone" there and instead of getting interrupted every minute in my sad FAANG open office environment, I can actually get stuff done.
I'll chime in there. Same experience. I've got a nice office upstairs away from everyone. I do two things every single day, all day, in that room by myself, and it feels amazing.
I do my work for a few hours, and then I hack on a personal project the rest of the day.
Then before bed I catch up with my wife for a couple hours and we watch something.
> I do my work for a few hours, and then I hack on a personal project the rest of the day.
That does sound like introvert heaven. Your company doesn't hold you accountable to your hours? If I could put in a solid 4 hours of work I would get just as much done as I do in 8, and then have extra time for myself and not the mental anguish of trying and failing to focus that whole time.
I'm a part time contractor so I work fewer hours, but yeah i totally get you. I'm at least as productive working fewer hours from home than more hours in the office.
When all of this is over, I hope that work cultures will have more space and acceptance for both our personality types.
(Although the pessimist in me just sees those of us who need the social interactions forced to WFH as managers notice the cost saving potential, while those who like the peace and quiet of WFH are forced to go to the office as managers notice the overall drop of productivity… but this is why you shouldn't listen to me for too long ;-))
Conversely for me, meetings have reduced because more people are using slack and email to communicate more frequently, and the quality of their communications has gone up. While i know that sounds like hell for some people, it’s where I thrive since I’ve always worked at multi site companies before, and it was the only effective way to scale communication.
So I’ve gone from having meetings all day, every day, to having half that amount.
When we do have meetings, I’m also able to attend without having to do as many context switches as before. I’m not having to leave my desk, put down my work and move somewhere else. I can work through the meeting without distracting anyone else.
I’d say my productivity is at least 2-3x what it was before this.
At the same time, I’ll also fully admit that this is entirely subjective to myself and everyone has different ways of working. I thrive with lots of simultaneous communication and parallel tasks, so having everyone talking in slack and email and meetings at once is my ideal situation because the information now actively makes it way to me, and my time spent having to wrangle things is very much reduced.
Yeah, I'm hardly ever in a meeting where all participants would be in the same room unless it's a special circumstance like an on-site get together or a small meeting with people who just happen to be in the same location. Even if all of us came into an office--which many of us don't either formally or informally--we'd still be on conference/video calls. In some ways, the current situation actually works better because you don't have the mix of physically present people in conference room(s) and people by themselves remotely.
(Before this whole thing happened some of the teams I work with already had rules to the effect that if some people were going to be on a remote video link, everyone called in that way.)
ADDED: I suspect a lot of people on this board work for small companies with co-located teams in a single location. You get up to companies of even modest size and you end up with people spread over continents and, for many of us, the daily reality is coordinating and having discussions across those continents.
Work from home does work better when you have daycare. The isolation of wfh gave me a lot of anxiety (other life problems factored in as well). I think a good balance is 1-2 days/wfh. Wfh degrades into work from coffeeshop.
If your meetings aren't productive there's definitely a problem in your org. I suspect meetings are being driven by those without a clear goal and intend to fill a whole hour talking. Just a hunch, thats some good ole internet armchair analysis for ya.
Long meetings are a symptom of a lack of planning imho.
"Long meetings are a symptom of a lack of planning imho."
Yes and a sympton of mgmnt/people(s) with too much time on their hands...and excess time manifests differently for some under WFH. They can't command and control as easily under WFH so what do?
In always say it depends on the meeting. I have a lot of meetings that are really working sessions, were we are constantly communicating and co-building. Those can take hours. That being said, there are generally bo more than 5 people on those types of menus
It's impossible to extrapolate what is best for everyone. Working from home is a great thing for me especially if they set core hours where everyone should be available for 4 to 5 hours a day. Trying to track down Morning Bob and Nighttime Nancy is a drag for us people who like 10am-6pm days :)
Right - it is not a rational response to the situation on my part, and this will be the natural consequence for many I’m afraid. The American workforce in particular will never be the same.
The problem is 100% with the way software is developed these days. Every company trains their staff to be as unproductive as possible with open plan offices, all the productivity is coming from quantity over quality, with every hire and every hour of training reflecting that.
Working from home is great if you have autonomy and can build a chunk of software with minimal oversight. But if your dev process revolves solely around collaboration in an open plan office then it's not going to translate well to WFH at all. You simply can't have 3 non-tech people for every dev that all need to be kept in the loop and are continuously making decisions when you're not physically there to keep the conversation grounded. Every big business job I've had has tons of these people that go out of their way to keep everything from the devs until the very last moment because "they're too busy" (with the last huge chunk of pointless work their decisions generated that could have been prevented with a 20 second conversation instead of 18 hours of bikeshedding meetings).
And devs are as guilty of this as everyone else. Right now things like code reviews and unit tests are the shit hot trend. "Agile" and "scrum" and whatever else are also red hot. The combination of both means the "default" way to build software is to break everything down into chunks that take hours, and run all the trendy processes on that time scale. If you're breaking every 45 minutes to do a code review, you're going to lose a huge part of the benefit of WFH, whereas in a hotdesking office environment you probably weren't going to build much momentum anyway so it's a much smaller sacrifice. The reason people are losing so much productivity is because before they probably palmed those tasks off to their in-office days so the 1 or 2 WFH days a week were highly productive (at least I know mine were). With 5 WFH days a week that's not an option.
The way to run a dev team remote is to give people more autonomy and bigger chunks of work, and tear down communication channels. Start measuring in weeks or months, let the engineers make the decisions and use their judgement on when to loop someone into a conversation. Teams need to be smaller, with 2/3rds devs and roles like product owner and BA providing support, instead of running the show. These roles need to be domain experts with a thorough understanding of what the business requires and an understanding of how software can meet that need. They should be a fountain of knowledge for the devs to access at their own pace, not just mindless machines that shit out JIRA cards with too much boilerplate. And devs need to take on more responsibility, broaden their non-technical skillset, and focus their tech capabilities more on the fundamentals (quality code that produces for the business), and less on setting up elaborate structures that require constant upkeep and communication within the team (huge test suites, elaborate cross-project CI/CD setups, ridiculous webpack configs, constant code reviews, endless NPM dependencies and convoluted patterns that restrict creativity and increase mental load).
If you want to be productive from home, you need to create an environment where you can just sit down for a few hours, get in the rythym, and produce quality software. If I think of any great software from the past, or the engineers that produced it, none of them were doing it in anything that looked remotely like the dev environments we have today. Shit, most of them did it from home, or from offices that were so cozy and personal they may as well have been home.
I think we've spent the last decade trying to distill software development down into some finely tuned machine that any old cog can drive, and counterintuitively, the further it goes the shittier the software becomes. When I flip through older books like Peopleware, it makes me cringe at how many of the lessons in there still aren't followed, and the amount of problems that were pointed out in the 80s and 90s that aren't only unresolved today, but have seen negative progress.
I see covid-19 as a chance to try something different. Most companies are going to continue to make the same mistakes, and mass WFH will never see adoption as long as they do. So you can pretty much put that dream to rest. But I'm going to be working from home a lot in the future, and try doing things another way for a change.
> And devs need to take on more responsibility, broaden their non-technical skillset,
I've been trying to obtain more non-tech skills within various companies for years now, but I get nothing but more JIRA issues. At this point, I've come to the conclusion that the non-technical workers who deal with the business requirements, revenue, customer interaction, etc. do not want the tech folks to have any control over their domain.
What would they be needed for if we could do both the business functions and also write the code they depend on?
That's true. I think they're still needed in some capacity though, just in lesser quantities than is usual, and with more focus on supporting development and more of a quality over quantity approach. The devs shouldn't be doing everything (unless it's a really small team or a startup), but I find there's a strong tendency to go too far in the other direction. Managers love overhiring, either to mitigate risk, because of budget fuckery, or just because they've been conditioned towards a certain team make-up.
So what ends up happening is instead of having one designer that helps design the look and feel of the app, and sets the direction for the devs if they need help aligning their work to it; instead you have 3 or 4 designers that get pedantic about every pixel on the screen and insert themselves into every stage of development. It's not the designer's fault, there's basically nothing else they can do to fill out 40 hours a week.
This is the huge problem with overhiring, it's so easy to just generate more work to fill out your work week, and work begets more work (especially for the devs, who are usually the only ones actually 'producing' on the team, so work flows down to them). So what happens is as soon as your team goes above capacity in a certain area, it affects development. And once somebody is on the team, it's really hard to remove them from the team. That's just human nature. Which is why it's so important to grow a team slowly and naturally, measuring the effect on the team and gauging team member's opinions at each step of the process.
When I start a project I want to start it with 1-3 people, and do not just the high level planning, but establish roles within the team at a low level. What will we be delivering day to day and what is our capacity? Then once you've got that you can hire conservatively around that. The 'usual' way of forming a team within a big business is complete bullshit. You're making all the decisions up front and trying to read the tea leaves about what your project is going to look like in 6, 12 or 18 months.
Re the last parts: I sure hope you're right, but I think we're both a bit jealous and/or afraid that it is we who are ill-suited for a coming WFH future :-/
Perhaps the future will be a mix...downsized offices that can accommodate a max % of company-wide employees at once? 50%?
A place where the CEO/csuite/salespeople can have meetings and others can really come and go as needed.
If I recall, WeWork was getting into this market/model whereas they'd sublease space for a smaller number of companies, sometimes even just one enterprise.
Just note that you’re not just working from home; you’re at home in the middle of a worldwide pandemic, attempting to get some work done. (That idea came from a tweet I read that I can’t find right now)
Everyone’s productivity is down when we’re preoccupied with if loved ones or ourselves might get into a dangerous health situation.
I’ve worked from home for nearly a decade, and I also feel my productivity is down. I’m choosing not to beat myself up over it, and trying to check in mentally with myself throughout the day to see if I’m spending my time the best way possible, even more than I usually do.
So if you feel your productivity is unacceptably down now, consider waiting until the pandemic is over - which could be a very long time - and then try again. For now, stay safe and healthy.
The study headline is that half of Americans prefer work from home. The other half either prefer working from an office or haven't made their minds up yet.
In my experience managing remote teams, including some people who are new to WFH, many people struggle with the isolation of WFH. For others, the honeymoon phase is short-lived as cabin fever sets in.
During normal times, the solution is to make an effort to get out of the house every day. Go to the gym, meet friends for lunch or dinner, and otherwise fill your in-person social needs somehow. The struggle with Coronavirus quarantine is that in-person social events are not allowed, so the typical solutions are much more difficult to apply.
> My productivity has definitely dropped, and it feels like my brain never really fully turns "on".
Now would be a great time to try a new morning exercise routine. Getting out of the house for even a 10-minute morning walk can make all the difference in the trajectory of your day. You can build up to a 30-minute run over time, but it's easier to engrain the habit if you start with a very low bar. Just get dressed, prepare a to-go coffee if you like, and go for a walk around your block. You might be surprised at how this sets a different tone for your day.
Long commutes aren't great, obviously, but they do serve a functional purpose of partitioning your day between home and office. Try to find a replacement activity that performs the same partitioning step at home.
> Now would be a great time to try a new morning exercise routine. Getting out of the house for even a 10-minute morning walk can make all the difference in the trajectory of your day. You can build up to a 30-minute run over time, but it's easier to engrain the habit if you start with a very low bar. Just get dressed, prepare a to-go coffee if you like, and go for a walk around your block. You might be surprised at how this sets a different tone for your day.
It sounds like I'm about to quibble with you; that is not my intention, but: I have tried. I know how incredibly effective exercise can be to kick me out of a ditch in normal situations, but it's having next to no effect currently. It still makes me feel better, but it doesn't turn my brain on. I strongly suspect I need the human interaction :-/
> It still makes me feel better, but it doesn't turn my brain on. I strongly suspect I need the human interaction :-/
Which is OK. Have you tried having "virtual coffees" with your colleagues? Let's say every one or two days at a fixed time? Or even 1-1 calls with a colleague that feels the same about it? It doesn't have to be about work. Believe me when I say that this is much more common than you think. In the very beginning of the "lockdown", some colleagues still tried to go to the office for that exact reason. Then it became mandatory in my company to work from home, so they couldn't go anymore. The truth is that some people DO need human contact more than others. The only way you have right now is to "fake it until you make it" with virtual coffees, etc. Plus, whenever you can, go out, even for short walks (check your local regulations and in general stay safe).
> Have you tried having "virtual coffees" with your colleagues?
Yep. Virtual coffees during work hours. Virtual beers after. It just doesn't cut it for me. I've narrowed it down to me being fine small-talk with friends in person, but feeling extremely awkward small-talking on a screen. It's probably the same mechanism that has made me hate "general chit chat" phone calls for as long as I can remember, while being comfortable with general chit chat in person.
> The truth is that some people DO need human contacts more than others.
I always knew this was the case for me, but I somehow thought that as long as I had a good set of friends and loved ones in my life, I would be fine with not seeing people on a regular basis. Turns out that's not the case.
> The only way you have right now is to "fake it until you make it" with virtual coffees, etc.
Yep. All in all, I can't complain. Everyone I know is healthy and employed. It could be a lot worse. I feel like a whiner now, but this was the umpeenth news story exhalting WFH and I couldn't refrain from commenting any longer.
> Plus, whenever you can, go out, even for short walks (check your local regulations and in general stay safe).
Yes, thankfully this is fine where I am now (the curve is thoroughly flattened, hospitalizations on a good decline for more than a week, and society will slowly start reopening next week). Stay safe, and best of luck to you!
It's not a matter of "they haven't come around to my opinion yet, but they will." Some people just like working with others, in person, face to face. And some activities are impossible to do from a computer screen, miles away (fashion or product design, for example.)
> It's not a matter of "they haven't come around to my opinion yet, but they will."
Exactly right. That's my primary problem with all of these opinion pieces that WFH is the future.
Having managed remote/WFH teams for several years, including a lot of WFH veterans, I've seen a lot of the downsides of WFH that aren't immediately apparent in the first few months.
It's difficult to convince people that long-term WFH has downsides because so many people want to believe that they are more productive and happier never leaving their own homes, when in reality that's not true for everyone. Especially over the long-term.
For example: In my experience, the people who were most confident that they would be more productive at home were most likely to have performance issues after several months. Ironically, the people who were concerned that WFH might negatively impact their work were more likely to succeed because they made no assumptions and instead put in the effort to make their WFH experience a success.
"Ironically, the people who were concerned that WFH might negatively impact their work were more likely to succeed because they made no assumptions and instead put in the effort to make their WFH experience a success."
The more cognizant you are of the downsides/risk in a situation, the more you can mitigate them early and often. Sounds like the latter are pragmatic, self-aware, and successful in adapting.
I did when I started working from home. I was lucky to have a manager who knew about habits and patterns to fix that. A lot of this isn't about going to work but about our habits and patterns.
For example, I have a room I go into and close the door. When I am in there I am working. When I am out of there I'm not. It's like a mental switch. I also use some tricks to keep be from being distracted like a pomodoro timer.
Doesn't work for everyone. But, I learned from training my dog that situational training can be important. If we are training ourselves we might need to train ourselves to be productive at home.
100% agreed. Important patterns for me are having the same breakfast, lunch and dinner times with dedicated time to eat without work. Shutting down work at a fixed time at night. Waking up at a fixed time.
If it stick to those I tend to automatically start making other patterns to make those times work.
That would be awesome to have, unfortunately, I live in a small 1 bedroom apartment. So I either work on the living room, were the TV and my wife are, or on the bedroom :(
I'm in a small apartment too, where my partner (and dog) are also here. We've both got corners set up in different rooms (I'm in the bedroom) and if I'm in my corner, I'm working. It's less about having a full room to dedicate to being a home office, and more about making a space (no matter how small or open) dedicated to working.
Yeah I hear you, but I've been unable to make it work so far. Sometimes when this happens in the office, I would go exercise, and more often than not the flip would be switched afterwards. Doesn't work at home.
I've noticed the same tends to happen in the office if others are not around (if, say, I swap a holiday for a work day or something and am alone when I go in).
We’ve spent our lives making work the center (US probably more so than EU). What you are describing can read as “I can’t bare WFH” or it can be “the pandemic severed me from my social circle, that happened to be at work”.
For me, at some point I realized that work friends replaced most of my social circle, but when I changed companies, I lost touch with most of them. This felt disturbing when I realized that and I have since made the effort to cultivate the friendships and keep in touch better. This had the side-effect of no longer relying on the office for friendship/social contact outside of family/SO.
I really don’t think we are talking about adapting to WFH, as much as we are seeing the effects of social structures that have emerged from concentrating people in offices. These have some overlap with work (promotion politics in most places?), but are largely orthogonal to the actual work at hand.
While I haven't thought as far as retirement, I don't think I agree with the basic sentiment here. It's not that I need my "work friends". It's that I need my "work friends" while working. If I and all my "normal friends" were financially independent and didn't work (somehow I find it easier to picture, albeit far more unlikely, than retirement – go figure), I wouldn't feel robbed of social interactions at all. Well, maybe in the pandemic, but that's besides the point.
"Work friends" have some special properties: they share the good and the bad of this work thing you're currently enjoying or stressing about. They're both trapped at work, which hopefully is an interesting enough place, yet it's hopefully not the center of anyone's lives. I think there's some value to this shared experience, even though it of course doesn't "outrank" "real friendship".
Interesting view. I’m not a psyc major, but that almost sounds like a coping mechanism with the “trapped” sense. From that angle, office doesn’t sound like that happy of a place either.
Sincerely hope that you are able to untrap yourself in all circumstances and get back to the happier state!
Personally it took me at least two years to learn to work from home. The key for me is actively rebalancing your social life and interactions on outside of work activities. That's not intuitive because we are so used at getting some interactions everyday automatically in a job, so if you don't take action you will end up in a social deficit very fast.
> The key for me is actively rebalancing your social life and interactions on outside of work activities. That not intuitive because we are so used at getting interactions automatically in a job, so if you don't take action you will end up isolated very rapidly.
This seems reasonable. It's a shame it's a bit hard to try out these days ;-)
I'm about 2 years into working from home, and recently came to a similar conclusion. Unfortunately rebalancing your social life is a bit challenging given the circumstances :).
If I might ask - what was your approach for increasing outside of work activities. I recently moved to a new city, so I'm still figuring this part out.
adittionally to what others have commented, make sure that the room you're working in has enough sunlight and (I can't stress this enough) is well ventilated. It also helps if you can walk outside 5 minutes every hour or so (lawn, terrace, whatever's available). Somewhere where you have open air and you can focus your sight on things that are more than 5 meters away.
As for the long commutes, I'm from a big european city and I still have almost a one hour commute to work. Granted, it's public transit so I can use the time somewhat (netflix on my phone, ebooks or whatever) but it's still two hours that I could otherwise use at the gym, having beers with friends or watching a movie.
> As for the long commutes, I'm from a big european city and I still have almost a one hour commute to work. Granted, it's public transit so I can use the time somewhat (netflix on my phone, ebooks or whatever) but it's still two hours that I could otherwise use at the gym, having beers with friends or watching a movie.
Yeah true. I was thinking more of the American-style car commute. While I agree that time spent commuting is time lost, also on public transit, the American car commute seems like an absolute nightmare to me, far worse than WFH ;-)
A commute is a commute, at least in your car you are not jammed in with a bunch of people. You can also throw in a podcast, your own music, climate controlled to your liking. I would rather commute in a car than on a bus or train.
I worked in downtown Boston for a bit over a year. Taking the train in was better than driving assuming I was going in and out during commuting hours when trains were fairly frequent. But it was still driving 10 minutes to catch a 6:30AM train and taking 90 minutes to get to my office including a short walk. 4 hours of commuting, even if very little of it was driving, was not something I could have sustained longer term even given that I traveled or worked from home a decent chunk of the time.
I feel the same. I've found that having a dedicated work environment can help, e.g. a separate office room with a proper desk, chair and monitor, although realistically that's not possible for a lot of people including myself currently.
I currently don't have that, but I did in the past, and it sadly didn't help for me.
It seems to be people related: I've noticed the same tends to happen in the office if others are not around (if, say, I swap a holiday for a work day or something and am alone when I go in).
I have a staff member that sounds similar to you. It's not that she's unaccountable for her own actions, she just has a hard time 'turning on' her work brain without some kind of incentive or external motivator.
I worked with her to come up with regular (weekly) check-ins, monthly goals, and changed the annual review process to include those items. I would never have that amount of micromanagement for anyone, except her, because it's what she wanted/needed for productivity. Maybe look into that with your direct supervisor? It helped her immensely. She has an external motivator that she needs.
For me, it helped, because measuring remote worker productivity is hard as hell, unless you have sales, you make something, or you decide to measure by number of lines of code or some other arbitrary measure. It was a god-send in a very 'grey' work area.
> I've found that having a dedicated work environment can help
I would also definitely recommend that if you work from home, you get a separate office room. But I also struggle with bouts of not feeling motivated to work. The office is no miracle cure for that.
Oddly, I'm in the exact opposite camp. The constant drop in's and busywork meetings at the office were taking up an hour a day, at least.
Now, I do have an office to work in and my mom comes out to help with our son and my in laws live a few blocks away (we're luckier than most). So our set up makes it so I have a foundation to succeed with work from home, but if things were "normal" and school were in session I'd love to do this 3 or 4 days a week and go into the office for weekly meetings. Even though, we're doing those over ZOOM right now.
You have a higher need for social stimulation than some people.
My productivity has gone up measurably. In normal times, I get plenty of social stimulation outside work so I don't need any from work.
While I think many organizations will retain remote work for some percentage of their workforce when the crisis is over I don't think we're about to have a revolution. The generations in charge came of age with face-to-face being the way people got things done. They aren't going to change.
It's kind of funny how the 21st century created office and factory jobs. For the most time, people worked where they lived.
Maybe we realize now that technology allows us to move a huge portion of office work back to where people live. Not necessarily a bad thing if you ask me!
That's definitely part of the appeal to me. 45min one way of walking plus subway (and ±10min for subway schedule shenanigans, thanks MTA) is gone, so now I have a significant chunk of free time at the beginning and end of my day.
And as a subway commuter, there's also definitely a "getting yourself mentally prepared to go out into the world and endure the subway" period that I'm quite glad to skip.
Its crazy how exactly this describes my mental state when i am "working" from home.. I have colleagues that swear by it though, so i guess it differs from person to person
My commute is definitely a big part of why I strongly prefer to work from home. Every workday I'd waste 7am - 9am and 6pm - 7pm in transit or getting ready (putting on a suit, shining my shoes, packing lunch, packing/wearing rain shoes so my dress shoe soles don't get ruined, getting the kids ready for daycare etc.). It feels like I have an extra 3 hours in my day.
The commute was also mentally and emotionally exhausting: making sure I caught the subway on time, cramming into a packed train so I wouldn't miss it and have to wait another 20 minutes, listening to make sure the train didn't suddenly go express and skip my stop, being alert for people that pickpocket you or might get confrontational...
I don't miss the social aspect of work at all, but that might be more specific to my workplace (an investment bank). The people are nice enough, but there's little socializing and coworkers are often out traveling. I spent most of the time on the phone with people in other states anyway, even before this crisis. I think I've actually been more productive.
That said, working remotely has been a difficult adjustment. I am working a lot - basically nonstop 8am to 8pm, with a few very late nights recently - and haven't found a way to disconnect in the evenings yet. My wife and I are very anxious, but it's tough to disentangle the WFH experience with the anxiety we feel about family and friends getting sick, the heightened risk of being laid off, our upset clients dealing with shuttering their businesses, the dire headlines, and the broader uncertainty of how society will emerge from this crisis.
I came across this video message [1] from a previous submarine captain which I think is relevant in the WFH context as well. He mentions having a routine, clean environment, enough downtime, de-escalate conflict early and communication as key ingredients to coping with self-isolation.
Start by figuring out a routine for you and try to stick to it.
I'm not from that generation but I wonder if people in the 50s or 60s saw long commute as a proof of progress and something to look for. Meaning better and cheaper cars, more "opportunities", bigger companies and centralized hubs far away, etc etc
I'm in my 50s, and I have struggled to keep commute times to a minimal my entire life. I currently am working for less than I am accustomed to simply because I have a private office and a 20 minute commute (or a reasonable 30 min. bike/scooter ride). A little less money won't kill me, but one more rush-hour commute across that WA-520 bridge just might.
I can't say that my parents differ on this topic. I'll note that your comment was not the easiest to parse, so perhaps I misunderstand you.
Was driving a lot seen as a positive thing in the 50s ? and if so, did it led to a distorted urban organization where job hubs were always way too far and now we're seeing the negative side of this, because driving is linked to pollution, and wasted time rather than progress/future/freedom.
Would you feel the same if you had a dedicated office, or if you had a videoconference meeting to start the day? That way the feng shui and social pressure would still be there, but you don't lose part of your day (and income) in commuting to and fro.
>My productivity has definitely dropped, and it feels like my brain never really fully turns "on". It feels a lot like those times in university I decided to study for exams from home instead of going to campus. I can't explain it, but 9 out of 10 times it just feels bad, like the way your brain feels if you've spent the day watching TV or something (when, in fact, I haven't). This doesn't even begin to consider the social punctuations of work that are essential to my psychological well-being.
>
>Does anyone feel the same?
I can't believe no one mentioned it yet: Mental compartmentalization based on where you are is a very real thing. Everyone experiences it, some more than others, and if you want to be productive working from home, learning how to work with it is of key importance.
For good work from home hygiene it's required that you isolate a physical space dedicated for work only tasks, like a home office.
Some people can get away with having a separate computer or seperate user to separate their space while using the same desk. Having a work account that blockes reddit, ycombinator, youtube, and the like helps, but as a general rule of thumb the easier it is to switch spaces, the smaller the isolation between them. ie, if switching users takes 10 seconds the isolation is small, but if you need to walk two minutes across the house, it's going to be a much stronger isolation. This is one of the tricks the rich use, by having an office far away from their bedroom in their house.
If you don't have things in your room to play with, like a tv or something, then the digital space separation works well, but if you find yourself fiddling with a tv all day while on your work account, it may cause problems. Alternatively, having background noise can help and turning on a ratio or tv in the background while working can accelerate productivity. It depends on your mental frame and how you think of it. In your situation it may be better to set up an ad hawk work space in your kitchen or living room.
This space separation is recommended in just about every work from home guide you will find, and it is a well studied phenomena, going back to the vietnam (or korean I forget) war where they were able to get 98% of solders off of heroin using the same tricks: the addiction was tied to physical cues like a physical room, or a friend. Get rid of those physical cues and the mental part of the addiction would vanish for all but those using drugs to avoid their problems. Same mental process, but studied in a drastically different subject.
I've worked from home since 2001, except for a brief 2 year stint at Google. I think I'm far more productive at home because I have:
- An office, with a door I can close
This was going to be a big list, but I actually think that just about sums it up. The cube environment at Google was utterly intolerable, and made it hard to concentrate. It didn't help that the guys in another group next to us had a game where they flew rc drones around for fun, or the folks on the other side of my group that were always discussing food, or the loud door to a lab behind my desk that was constantly slamming, etc, or just the constant stream of people walking by my cube.
At home I have a door that I can close. I can think. So I get a lot more done.
I'm not saying all office environments were terrible. Before 2001, I worked doing research at a University and I had a fantastic office with a door. I think I was just as productive there as I was at home. Because, again, distractions were minimal.
Honestly IMHO having office rooms with ~4 (in exceptions 5 or 6) people is the bottom line for allowing productive work for any job needing concentration (and it's healthier either way).
I never understood how some companies promoted the mass offices as a good solution for the employee, sure it's maybe cheaper for the employer but that normally the wrong end to save money.
I've worked in a large loft with ~10 people, a 4 person room a 5 person room and a pseudo single room (it didn't had doors and was ineffective 3 person room).
My experience:
- The more people in the room the less the productivity even if it's a large loft.
- But if having to share a room with someone who is chatting all the time is even worse even if its a 2 person room.
I'd prefer my own office. I worked with 3 others in a room and it was still distracting. I got much more focused and less self conscious if no one was there. I turned the lighting, climate, and windows just how I liked, and boom, productivity increase.
What I wouldn't give for a cube. To my left and right in our open office are engineers who are normally quiet. The row in front of are all business strategy people. They never stop talking. They're on the phone, they're having meetings, they're casually chatting. There's nothing at all to block the sound or the sight of them grouping up in 2s and 6s at each others desk. One even has a rare sight in the office, a desktop phone.
The "cube" I had was a mega-cube with 6 people. Our group was spread among 2 adjacent mega cubes, so the divider was eventually removed, making a 12-person cube.
I had an end spot, and I had a portable whiteboard shoved between me and my neighbor to separate us, and I built a wall of empty Hint bottles around my desk to isolate me from the aisle. That removed a lot of visual distractions, but it was still quite noisy.
Speaking of this, one guy in a building across the street basically built himself a hut out of cardboard boxes glued together. It was amazing.
I've actually been in a similar situation except it was a former stationary closet that they had put counters around and there was five to six people in there. It actually wasn't that bad as we all face away from each other, and everyone was quiet. It was only 5-6 people of noise instead of the entire floor's.
Companies need to try to separate functions as much as possible. It's reasonable for people to find an empty office or conference room for occasional impromptu meetings or calls. But some jobs--recruiting, biz dev, etc.--basically live on the phone. It's not realistic for them either to shut up or find a room every time they're on a call.
I also worked at Google after almost 20 years of working at home. I didn’t mind the cube environment because I worked from about 6am to 3pm, giving me a few hours of quiet heads down time every day. My last job before retiring at Capital One was the same, I started work early in the morning for heads down work time, was available for brainstorming, etc., then knocked off work mid afternoon. I really recommend time shifting for people having problems concentrating in a cube environment.
I did the same thing. I would get to the office before 6 and have 2-3 hours of quiet time. That was the only way that I was able to get anything done.
The bad thing is that, almost 5 years later, my sleep schedule is still screwed up because of this. I have a really hard time sleeping past 5:30am, and I'm afraid its damaged my health.
You didn't find that there was pressure to work later? I tend to prefer to come in late because you can control your bound on that, but leaving early makes you look bad (despite the irrationality of that), and its just easy to fall into the habit of "oh just another hour, I will still be home for dinner..."
There was some, but we tended to put a bound on meetings to 10-3. I had a good excuse in that I had hard deadline of 3:45 to pick my son up from school most days. The days that I stayed late, it was mostly for social events. Either TGIF on thursdays, or group celebrations which were generally at 4.
YES. Early morning time is the most productive time for many people. It's all downhill after lunch.
The problem is, many companies are more hip about WFH than hour shifting. It's not a thing. If you start coming into work early to get more done, you will get the looks if you don't stay in the office until 6:00PM, just like everyone. That is not sustainable.
However, if you are a European or Indian offshore, then hour shifting is built in. Onshore, night owls are hard-working, and early birds are slackers - because no one can see them work.
What I am saying is, a lot of office work is optics. Being there and within line of sight of everyone counts more than being productive and in the zone. It's dumb as fuck.
> YES. Early morning time is the most productive time for many people. It's all downhill after lunch.
For me and many others it's right the other way around. The single way you can kill my productivity is to force me to get up earlier than 8. Now with Corona lockdowns, I can get up at 9 (!) and actually feel rested!
I have an office with a door, and I generally prefer to go into the office, but the company is converting to cubicles, one floor at a time. When my floor gets the ax, I will probably transition to 100% WFH. This experience has shown me that I can do it.
No wonder given that the daily commute is both mentally and physically taxing for most.
I've been working remotely since 2015 and have already decided to settle in a perhaps less attractive, but definitely cheaper neighbourhood so that I could have some office space in the house.
In the long run it's probably going to cost as much as the sum total of fuel and vehicles used over the years, but the main benefit is not having to go over this stressful routine of negotiating my place in a stream of cars.
Make sure you account for the value of time saved. Time is precious and there's never enough, if I can find a way to add 40 more minutes to my day I'm going to value that immensely.
Don't use it for additional time spent working uncompensated! Your commute wasn't paid for (typically), so don't give that time away to someone else for free now that you're saving it.
Personally, having a long bay area commute, i now use that time instead to sleep in AND go for longer walks with my dog, that we’d usually reserve for the weekends
Your employer doesn't directly pay for you to go to school, but most people would still see that work eventually pays for education.
Commuting is similar.
But I agree with the gist: if you figure out how to be more productive, eg by doing some task faster or by eliminating your commute, there's no moral obligation to hand over all the gains to someone else.
In my case, the current situation adds 10 hours to my personal time. Thinking hard about moving to a remote-only position next. Sadly, moving closer to the workplace is out of the question because no force on earth will bring me to live in a densely built up city ever again; I reject urbanization for myself. I'd rather enjoy a green, quiet countryside.
The big problem I've run into being remote is that while I can live anywhere and would totally fine living farther away from the bigish city I live near, my partner works in a field that determines that we live close to a major university and I'd feel like an ass for having 0 commute while she has to drive 45 minutes just because we could get more house/land/whatever farther away from the city.
Wouldn’t this problem be even harder to deal with if you didn’t work remotely? You only need to plan for the radius of one person’s commute rather than limiting your housing options to a balance of two locations.
Totally, not saying it isn't a problem in that case either, but rather that remote is hailed as this "you can live anywhere, move to the cheapest city you can!" solution when it's not (for most people).
It's a choice to work a non-remote job though. My partner could work, but it wouldn't be remote, so she's a stay at home parent while I work remote, enabling us to live somewhere rural (which also happens to be cheaper; one income easily supports a family of four).
Both people in a relationship could work remote jobs to enable geospatial freedom, also a choice! When someone says that working remote isn't a solution though, that's not accurate. They're saying, "I've chosen a work arrangement that is incompatible with remote work".
That's something we've been looking at recently, actually -- moving somewhere cheaper, but the problem we've found is that there just really aren't any jobs that she's interested in in the area we've been looking at (even outside of her current field, which she wants to leave anyway) -- we're looking at one spot in particular because of my mountain biking hobby and because I've lived there and have a lot of family there --, and we don't have kids, so it's hard to determine "okay, is it fine for us to just move and for you to have no idea on what job you want to do there?" even though my income is more than enough to sustain us (4x hers).
For her, the idea of doing that -- moving with no job or even an idea of what job to do there -- doesn't sit well. She doesn't like the implied dependence on me and that others may see her as a failure because she doesn't have a job for X time or an idea of what she wants to do. I can do all I can to convince her that that isn't the case and that not everyone has their sights set on something when they're in high school/college (I did, which doesn't help). Ultimately I think the change would be good since I think her job/boss in our current city is toxic and mentally rough, such that moving to an entirely new area with totally different prospects could create a positive.
People get used to most things. A few weeks after winning the lottery or losing an arm, they are mostly as happy as they were before. (Mostly! Not completely.)
But I read somewhere that the misery of commuting is strangely resistance to the hedonic treadmill.
I suggest you look up more recent research on the hedonic treadmill and winning the lottery and losing a limb specifically. I’m very confident winning the lottery durably raises life satisfaction and that it takes years, not months for losing a limb to be mostly but not entirely gotten over.
Entirely resistant if I remember correctly. You don’t get used to commuting, you forget what it feels like not commuting, like you don’t get used to feeling like crap because you don’t exercise or are sleep deprived, just forget what normal feels like.
I can understand but these things are different for each of us. I love my 20 minute low stress commute. I listen to podcasts or think about problems in an isolated day. It breaks work life from home life and helps with boundaries. Obviously some commutes are worse than others but we all have different needs.
People really ought to put the number on their post (like you did; thank you) so we know where they're coming from.
I was in the Bay Area, and one of the big reasons I left was the 3-4 hour commute. For a while, it was manageable, as the train provides some ability to work, but towards the end CalTrain was just falling over from lack of capacity. Packed to the gills trains, trains breaking down, hell, even derailments.
Moved, and cut the commute in half; it's only two hours now, and it feels wonderful. Somewhat hilariously, biking is the same speed as public transit. Sadly, my public transit still no longer really supports a working; too packed.
I'd love to have a 20 minute low stress commute. But I also don't equate "low stress" with driving, regardless of podcasts.
(Unless you have a 20 minute commute on public transit. I must spend ~30-40 minutes of my commute simply getting to public transit.)
Yeah, all these things are choices. I live an hour from Philadelphia. I could make more in a big city but I like my salary to cost of living ratio. I could also walk to work if I moved into the town center but would have to up my spending on housing and lose my yard. People have lots of choices they can balance. I lived in Cambridge for a while. My apartment was a 15 minute walk to the T (public transit). I could have been right on the line but my rent would have been 50% more at least. It was a choice of what I was willing to spend and what kind of inconvenience I would tolerate.
I'm anticipating that most HNers prompted to comment here will be those thinking this unlikely or wrong or whatever. Every time something positive about remote working is on HN, only those opposing it seem to comment...
So, anyway, here's my vote in favour of remote working!
I've worked from home for the last 10 years straight, and two years in the decade before that. Working from home has always been best for me.
Historically, colleagues have always been amazed I get anything done, and wondered about how teams can possibly function etc etc. Lots of people have been skeptical.
And now so many of my colleagues are working from home, and all the awful destruction hasn't happened, and in fact many people are saying they've never been more productive...
> I'm anticipating that most HNers prompted to comment here will be those thinking this unlikely or wrong or whatever.
On the contrary, this seems like the most honest take on the topic of remote work preferences.
The headline says that 50% of Americans prefer working from home. That suggests that 50% prefer working from the office or aren't sure yet.
In other words: Some people like to work from home. Some people don't. That's the point that many of us have been trying to make all along.
When quarantining started, a lot of the WFH advocates came out of the woodwork and declared an early victory for WFH. There was an influx of hot takes that office spaces would be closed forever once people saw the benefits of WFH. They all ignored half of the population who really does not benefit from working from home.
I don't think people are ignoring the half of the population that does not benefit from working from home. It's that, historically, we've been ignoring the half that prefers it. The default in America is to come into the office every day. Yeah, great, there are people that work better that way, but the current situation has forced us to re-examine that way of doing business and we are realizing that there is at least as many people who don't work better that way. This half of the population, up until about 6 weeks ago, was the one being steamrolled into the office culture.
In a broader context, it opens up lots of questions about tangentially related questions. Things like climate change, or urban planning. In my area, sprawl is a problem. Lots of people live in the suburbs and commute. This combined with the harsh winters mean the roads are constantly getting chewed up, and there is always a struggle to find the tax dollars for proper maintenance. Growth is up, and so there are debates between those who want to expand highways and those who want to use tax dollars for something else. The desire to eliminate a commute is leading to gentrification and people being priced out of their communities.
Additionally, requiring a physical presence limits career opportunities. My field has a lot of jobs concentrated in a few hubs like SF and Boston. But there are lots of reasons to not want to live in those areas, and for those who don't wish to, career prospects are severely limited.
We also make lots of concessions to our quality of life in order to be able to work in the same physical space. Lots of Americans spend hours commuting to and from work. At the same time, we don't exercise enough, we eat poorly, and we work too much. All of these are at least somewhat related to not having enough time in the day, and working from home would at the very least give back people the hours of the day they spend traveling between work and home.
I think the honest take on remote work preferences is that there is no one size fits all solution. But up until a month ago, we were largely forcing a single solution on everyone. There's always been excuses: worries about decreases in productivity, claims that we don't have the internet infrastructure, insistence that real work is done face to face. But the reality is that in many cases those simply aren't true, and we are making lots of sacrifices by propping those excuses up.
> The headline says that 50% of Americans prefer working from home. That suggests that 50% prefer working from the office.
If you even glance at the article that's just not true. The remaining vote is split between 'Prefers the Office' and 'Unsure'.
If you were to split the 'Unsure' based on the current ratio of 'Prefers Home':'Prefers the office' between the 2, you're looking at closer to 42% 'prefer the office'.
> If you were to split the 'Unsure' based on the current ratio of 'Prefers Home':'Prefers the office' between the 2, you're looking at closer to 42% 'prefer the office'.
I updated my post.
Given my prior experience managing remote teams, WFH tends to come with a honeymoon phase where people enjoy their new freedom but don't yet miss the social interaction of the office. Over time, some people tend to get cabin fever and feel isolated, especially if they don't have strong social networks outside of work. I wouldn't be surprised if some of the "Prefers Home' group switch to 'Not decided' or even 'No' over time.
I've been full-time remote (work from home, with a 3-year stint of work from RV) since 1995. It's always worked well for me, and I've been plenty productive enough to keep employers happy. Raised 4 kids in that time, too, including homeschooling. When it works, it works!
For every positive WFH anecdote, we can find someone who performs worse with WFH.
That's the problem with using anecdotes to make sweeping decisions for entire companies: It doesn't acknowledge the differences between people.
Ideally, we'll end up with a mix of remote companies and in-office companies, and the people who prefer each style have plenty of options to choose from.
Holy shit. I'm involuntarily WFH at the moment with two kids in kindergarten age and one in school age I'm "home schooling". It "works", but productivity gets a major hit and my sanity is on the line. Did you have a stay at home partner at the time or are you just a super human? :-D
I am in the camp of, it works for some but for a majority of workers and more important, managers, companies need to put forward some effort to train them to be effective. some are ineffective in the use of their time and subject to distraction. training can mitigate this.
however we also need consider that some corporations are way too proud of their headquarters or other buildings and having them fully staffed is part of that pride. something that also needs to be addressed.
now work from home can also means it can end up in a situation where you need to compete more on a world stage for employment. once some companies adapt to having remote workers does it really matter where they are? this can lead to wage erosion and even at times cultural conflicts.
I think alot of people will want to go back because they've now associated working remotely with being in an isolated jail cell. Also I'm sure couples and people with kids are ready to jump out their windows.
I wont be going back to the office for a number of reasons, however, and I think everyone should boycott the office as well. Weather you want to work in the office or not should ultimately be the employees choice.
1. Commuting pollutes.
2. Commuting is lost time. Almost a month of lost time every year.
3. Office spaces are expensive. Without them, companies would have lots of extra cash. Ideally that extra cash goes to wages or hiring.
4. VR workplaces can be and will be a sufficient substitute. You can get about the same quality of social interaction + more in VR as you can in meat space. Its a different experience and until you try it you aren't really entitled to an opinion.
5. You can go to the gym whenever you want (assuming businesses open up again).
I'm sure there are other benefits that I'm missing.
You make a compelling case for more people to opt to working from home given the choice. I wonder in all of this whether or not we might be losing something. I'd say that co-location (and possibly commuting) are a part of a larger ecosystem. For instance there are a number of businesses that cater for the office based folks. This could be providing breakfast, lunches, coffees, cigarettes (vapes), etc. In some cities you have coffee shops/restaurants that are mainly open during office hours. Without the offices many of them wouldn't be there. These may be businesses of various sizes employing several people. Then there's the staff required to maintain the office space from receptionists, porters, security, cleaners, technicians, etc. Then there are the pubs/bars that people go to after work (one of things I miss when home based). I could go on. You could argue that many of these people could simply be employed elsewhere. I think we should consider the potential ramifications of the shift before we jump full steam ahead.
These are definitely valid concerns but usually the way changes happen is slowly and then suddenly all at once like we are witnessing with COVID-19 or as we saw with the transition from horses to automobiles, and from blockbuster to netflix. Technology is an incredible force and slowing it down is hard. Ultimately it will come down to which companies, bussinesses and people display the most adaptability.
Not everyone has all these downsides when working in an office.
1. I walk to work.
2. It's a 25 minute walk each way. I don't consider it lost time,
Agree with 3 and 4.
5. I can and do go to the gym whenever I want. Typically at 2 or 3pm to avoid the lunch crowd.
I don't have data, but I would feel pretty confident that the vast majority of Americans don't share your experience. The number of people who can walk to work within 25 minutes is likely miniscule, and therefore requires some amount of time in traffic, often substantial. And virtually every other point follows from that fact.
VR facial expression and body language is still pretty low fidelity, but the technology is going to continue to improve. Most of the tech for capturing facial expressions exist already so it's a matter of integration.
For me the current tech is sufficient for office style social interactions, but maybe not suitable for everyone just yet.
I was working from home before the virus. The difference for me now is that my other colleagues work from home too. The quality of our meetings has improved, and I feel that I'm on a more even playing field now (in term of evaluation for instance). It's great. I'm also collaborating more closely with some colleagues with whom I had little interaction before.
That being said, working from home is not for everyone. Not everybody has a good working environment. Some people get distracted, feel lonely, or are unable to maintain good work/life balance.
It really has pros and cons. What I hope at least is that it will be less taboo in the future and more employers will be open to that option.
> That being said, working from home is not for everyone.
Actually, even work (in any particular set of circumstances) is not for everyone. And still, people do manage.
For example, open offices are not for everyone. Yet they do happen.
Imagine, if at your future employer, you could simply decide whether you want to WfH or not. And they would plan the office accordingly. They would rent less space. Why not give people the freedom?
> or are unable to maintain good work/life balance
Happens to me in an absurdly trivial way: pre-antiviral-WFH I was taking my main meal of the day as lunch at the office, now it's dinner at home. After lunch it was easy for office life (and caffeine) to get me back to speed. But evening side projects don't stand a chance against the digestion passivity of a full dinner. A full lunch at home isn't possible for me because at that time of the day I'm just not hungry enough unless the food is prepared for me.
I'm going to strike a very different reaction to most here: I miss my office!
The office is where I work. Home is where I don't work. I have a 30-40 minute subway ride between the two for changing gears. Home-no-work. Office-yes-work. Sudoku and Kindle in between. It's a pattern I hadn't realized I'd so strongly driven into my mind.
The first two weeks of this pandemic? I accomplished nothing. I sat down and tried to work at my desk (I even have a dock and a KVM switch so I could use my dual-monitors, keyboard, and mouse) and I did almost nothing for two weeks. I just could not change gears. It was agony.
I finally was able to get working again by moving from my desk to a chair beside it, with just my laptop. I have no pattern for this place- it's a chair usually covered in stuff I need to put somewhere so I have no really deep patterns for what I do when I sit here (is my own self-psycho-analysis). I'm still not as productive as before, but at least I'm getting some things done.
Even then, I miss running into people in the kitchen that I haven't talked to in a while. I miss grabbing lunch with friends from other departments. I miss that first 15 minutes of the day where we're all waiting for the caffeine to kick in, asking what the weekend plans are. The social aspects keep me sane.
And right now I'm trying to train new guys. One guy, we started him during the lockdown by just mailing him a laptop with instructions for how to get on the VPN. Training people remotely is hard. Even mostly-remote companies often start new people in the office for a week or two, then send them back home. There's video calls and screen sharing- it's not the same. I find it very difficult.
I have many criticisms of modern offices, but I still want mine back.
This article (like most discussion of these work styles) conflates remote work and work-from-home. I feel it would _greatly_ help clarify discussion to keep in mind that these aren’t the same thing: the latter (WFH) is _mostly_ a subset of the former (work from a location of your choice), and of the two, “remote” is _much more enabling._
WFH is okay. It beats an office. But it blurs the lines between work and not-work life further than they already are unless you’re highly skilled in setting boundaries, and if you have kids or other dependents it’s a fresh challenge to stay focused every day.
Working remotely, in non-pandemic times, opens up real possibilities. The young and the restless can try the nomadic worker thing; that looks like it’s be fun for a while. Coworking (in the small community sense, not WeWork) gets you the separation of work and home on your own terms and can be a fabulous balance for the extroverts (and also introverts) among us. And WFH gets rolled in there as well.
At present moment, as the world suddenly is all doing this at once, while confined at home—of course these concepts will be conflated. But let’s be deliberate to ensure we aren’t setting ourselves up for a world where managers get suspicious of you for leaving the house during work hours. That sounds worse than the situation we started with.
I think that I have relevant experience to talk about the advantages and disadvantages of working from home. In 1998 my wife and I moved from California to the mountains in Central Arizona. Until 2016, I almost exclusively worked remotely and sometimes I took long periods off work to write books and enjoy nature hikes. For about a decade I only accepted about 20% of offers to provide service.
Working remotely got old. In 2016 I worked on a project at Google so we lived in Mountain View for a while. I really enjoyed the change of working in an office (and the food was good). After we returned home, I accepted a gig to work for an AI company in Singapore and after that worked onsite managing a deep learning team at Capital One (an excellent company to work for, BTW).
We are back home now, and I am retired except for writing and working on a commercial software product (in Common Lisp) in the semantic web/linked data space. Frankly, as much as I love my day to day life, to be honest I really miss working in a team with face to face brainstorming, etc.
This can be heavy and I need to talk about it but feel it runs people off, but I had a recent suicide attempt resulting from years of chronic pain and increasing isolation. I am not getting enough help or support. The relevance is how you mentioned you miss face to face and as I sit here alone trying to recover I see how terrible an effect the increasing isolation has had on me. But I live rural with no support network and no options. Looking back it's why I was far better mentally in a city. People need people...even the introverts. I don't fit in politically locally, cannot find support online. Even healthy and wealthy people get down when all alone.
I am on cloud nine right now. No commute and there is an open window 2 feet away from me. For comparison, I normally have a 40 minute commute and work in a basement all day. In the winter, it is dark when I go in and dark when I come out. Real nice.
I am not sure about the productivity aspect. Since I am client facing and most of my clients are on furlough my main work source has dried up. I'm doing other stuff for the team but none of it has KPIs.
A dip in productivity is a problem for your boss, not for you. Anecdotally, I'm much more productive at home because I can take breaks whenever I want instead of getting burned out after working for 3-4 hours at an office, but knowing that I still have to stay there for 4 more hours.
How about, after working 3-4 hours at the office, you go outside for a walk before you start on the next 4 hours? I know people who do that, and I think it's a great idea.
People who stretch their budget to live in the best school district they can afford, which usually comes at the cost of spending their life in a car (or train or bus) commuting as far as possible.
I think it depends on your type of work and personality. I personally was already half WFH, and all WFH is way too much for me. I just need at least a day where I can go into meetings in person. I get a motivation boost from interacting with everyone and getting feedback in person in meetings, but it's not like I need that every day. It's not the same on the phone or web conference, and that might just be something that will evolve.
Same here, I have been struggling organising my time more then usual and since my company works as hourly I'm getting lots of anxiety, never knowing if I'm working enough or not.
I usually work remotely and always had fantastic productivity up until the lockdown.
Now I'm really depressed and have terrible productivity.
Not being able to go socialise with friends, see bands in concert and hang around in coffee shops has had an enormous impact on my wellbeing - it's entirely possible your productivity woes are due to the social impact.
People that are different than you, effectively. Some people work better from home, some better from an office, and some work best with a combination of the two (in some days, home others). Some of it is also training, the more you work from home, the better you tend to be at it.
About four or more weeks. The problem is that my space is relatively cramped, so hard to isolate. But even if this was a larger space, I've realized I miss my colleagues and just the ability to query them face-to-face.
Yes, but most people don't like their job, and don't want to be productive in it. On HN, we have a lot of passionate people, but as soon as I go into the corporate world or the administrations, the feedback people give changes a lot.
As someone else mentioned, the real culprit here is probably long commutes. Personally, I've worked remotely for 5+ years and don't like staying at home all day. The perfect setup for me is a small office that I can walk to in 5-10 minutes, preferably with a gym and coffeeshop en route. I get out of the house, interact with people, and have a designated work space, without having to sit in a car or a crowded subway train for an hour+ each day.
Honestly remote working to save commute time is awesome. But there are a lot of problems with it too for e.g. mentally unstable people or situations where people can't setup a proper work environment at home (as it's to small for it).
So while I like remote work a lot I think it's best "in general" to only have it just part of the week.
Honestly best is still to not work remote but have a way to work of 10-15min walking or similar (e.g. cycling, reliable public transmute). Enough time to clearly separate work from home and think a bit.
Naturally this is very unlikely to happen.
But worst is if cities are seperated in "residential" and "office" areas as this will make transmute times spike. Having a nice intermixing it much much better. Sure it doesn't guarantee short travel times (or else you would need to potentially move every time you change the job). But it allows them.
I decided to look for a new job after our management only very reluctantly let us all work from home (it was very obvious they just don‘t trust their employees to still do their job when not on site). My productivity has gone up due to no more walk-ups distracting me with questions whenever they like and I don‘t have to waste an hour in the subway every day. My next job will for sure be remote, or at least for a company with strong remote support.
I've been joking with my coworkers that I'm never coming back to the office when this is over...
I'm sorta serious but not sure I'd be allowed to. We were already allowed 2 days per week of remote working but 5 seems like a stretch.
FWIW I have a dedicated office at home and no kids. Commute is not a factor - I live ~7 miles from the office, it takes 10-15 minutes to get there or get home. There's also an alternative ~7 mile route that is almost entirely bike path I can ride to work on.
I’m very curious about the sampling methodology here. This is anecdotal, but I am a millennial and precisely zero of my friends prefer working from home. So there must be bias in one of those two samples.
The survey was conducted using mechanical turk for American workers with full-time jobs. We didn't control for age, as you can see in the age breakdown of "are you more productive working from home," so had some age groups more represented than others. The margin of error is 4%.
So that raises some red flags, because turkers are WAY more likely to be favorable towards WFH conditions. They already do that!
I heard on WFH opinions there are two groups of people, one that think this will usher in a new age of productive freedom working from home never having to commute again, and the group with kids.
I should add our juniors are getting screwed. Usually we spend a lot of time training and coaching, now at home they're mostly ignored. I think our intern class is going to get cancelled too.
My company cancelled its intern program this year. I actually did hire one but I was very proactive in making it happen and barely got it done before shelter-in-place kicked in. It's really challenging for both sides compared to last year due to lack of in person but it's working.
FWIW, this is going do depend highly upon the individual companies. Our own is continuing to bring in and work with interns, even though it does cost a bit more in terms of a FT individual’s time.
It's also more problematic right now because of the lack of childcare/school. If that resumes, then the child distraction problem goes away (but leaves other issues like: lack of social interaction, sub-par home office situation, etc).
Personally, even though my commute sucks, there is something to be said for having 8+ hours around adults. I've also noticed I am less eager to interact with my 4-year-old now because she's always around, always needs something, always loud (even with the office door closed), and I feel guilty that she's not getting the attention she needs. Schools re-opening would totally change this.
Oh, yes. In the olden times, I could hop on the subway for 20 minutes and get to a magical place with free food, good coffee, an actual full-sized desk, a monitor bigger than a 12" portable, and no fights breaking out every 45 minutes or small people coming in and saying "Dad? Daaad?" just as I had a hold of an idea.
That probably suggests there's an urban / suburban divide, too, where the people with enough real estate to set up a full-on home office are much happier with the results. I don't even know where I'd stick a 27" monitor if I ordered one.
Having your kids with you is a transitory thing, when school starts back up the problem will decline sharply.
It’s worth remembering that these are not your standard work from home conditions - you’re being kept in due to an emergency, and trying to also get some work done.
I wouldn't call 18 year transitory. Yes the problems decline, but there are still issues with working from home with kids. Generally space and noise becomes an issue as well.
I think the parent comment means that in "normal" circumstances the kids are not at home all day making it less of an issue. I don't think he meant that they will move out (plus in the area where I live there was a sharp rise in rents in recent years and it's now much more common for people to stay with there parents _much_ longer. Like meeting a 24 year old person living with their parents (again) isn't that uncommon. (Not that common either)).
I worked at home for 9 years and then I had kids. (They are great kids but they make working at home hard.) That was enough for me to not want to work at home anymore. I then got a new job, and then covid-19 hit and I am working at home again. Argh!
We can structure our choice of house around kids, e.g. an attached office with separate entrance. An office complex with facilities and maintenance costs on the order of $600/mo per desk, which is about what a city commute costs.
Don’t people miss social interaction? I don’t understand how these articles are written. As a single man living on my own, this lockdown has made it pretty lonely.
I really don't... could spend a year without seeing anyone in person. I am married and absolutely enjoy my wife's company, but looking back at my life I've often enjoyed just being alone. It's so peaceful, I can't understand why people dislike it so much.
I definitely miss some people – mostly my parents. But I don't really need my coworkers in my life, even if they are great people
Outside the lockdown when I want to have a social interaction, I call a friend and go to a bar, or I organise a boardgame or roleplay session. I can choose my friend but I cant choose my coworker.
I do miss my co-workers and am currently working in the most fun team I've ever worked in. Now I wonder if that might be because for once I did get to choose some of my co-workers.
I've been WFH for 4 years and my social interaction is going to lunch with friends most days and mountain biking with groups when I can. Unfortunately, that's been halted with the restrictions in my state. You can still have social interaction while working from home, it just takes more effort than being in an office everyday.
The social interaction from working in an office? Not in the least. My work could mostly be categorized as SW development, and I've been doing it 100% remote for ~5 years. My wife has worked freelance editing from home ~15 years.
We don't see much of each other during the day, as we're busy with our jobs. Not commuting frees up time for social stuff like meeting up with neighbors, going for walks or cycling, meetups, practical pistol practice/competition, etc. The stuff involving larger groups is on temporary hiatus, but stuff with another pal or two are still happening.
Several of my friends live in different states and we don't see each other IRL that often. I have a couple one-on-one and group Telegram chats going with them where we discuss a variety of topics, which is a surprisingly good social outlet.
Overall social interaction or in-office social interaction or specifically with your coworkers?
As WFH for over a decade:
- overall social interaction is fixed by hobby groups, going out with friends and/or SO (either post-hours or for lunch) etc
- in office social interaction can be fixed by working out of coworking space. Not my cup of tea and I do enjoy silence, but it works for those who want it. Podcast over headphones may be good enough for some too.
- interaction with coworkers over online is fine IMO. Especially if you get to see them IRL once in a while. It may feel weird at first to just talk crap for 10 or 20 minutes before/after conference call. Random calls just to talk both work and life might feel out of place at first. But on the other hand that's what people do at office, eh?
For me, I enjoy social interaction with people I actually choose to be with. That's family and friends. Colleagues are nice, but if the only reason I'm interacting with someone is because we are getting paid to be in the same place at the same time, its not something I'm particularly missing.
I have friends and hobbies outside of work, but I still miss my "work friends". If you're going to be somewhere for ~8 hours a day, I find it's nice to have some company.
Yeah, and while one's "work friends" may not be the perfect kind of friends (otherwise they tend to migrate to being "regular friends", no?), they have on important property to me: they're around during work and they punctuate work with social/human interactions. Sometimes those interactions are annoying and disrupting, but my god I'm realizing how incredibly important they are.
A partner, kids, a family, those might last longer than work friends who will likely move on from the friendship once they change jobs. I used to be in a similar situation (living in an expensive city, my only friends were work friends, and home was a lonely miserable place). Started doing remote work, earning the same amount of money, own a pretty decent mansion, and have permanent friends and people around me. Isolation or not it doesnt really bother me. The notion that for a decent career one should sacrifice everything is a trap. While we slave away in large corps, earning money, our employers pretty much already do what i said i am. One can still be a great engineer or whatever without a shallow life.
THE BIGGEST thing i HATE about office work is the shoulder surfing. i go insane with rage when some idiot is standing behind me while i'm trying to figure something out, i feel under the gun and i start to make mistakes. i have huge anxiety issues and that doesn't make it an easier. not to mention the fact that if i wanted your damn input, i would ask for it.
since working from home, my anger and anxiety level are at a lifetime low. i don't have bleeding ulcers and i actually get a 4 mile walk in in the morning since i'm not rushed to fight traffic. my life is so serene now.
People used to all work from home. If you read a bit of economic history, it seems that working in an office or a factory is a rather recent invention, only a few hundred years old.
Prior to that there was something called the "putting-out" system, where you'd sew some clothes or whatever and put it outside for someone to collect. And they'd leave you some raw materials.
I'm also of the WFH persuasion, but I'm unsure whether it's great for people who are starting their career.
For experienced people, they already know what the business is about, they are more likely to have kids and need a longer commute from the suburbs.
For people on their first job there's a lot of informal learning that happens in the workplace. You run into more people randomly at a traditional office, and you learn more about what exactly your role is.
What would probably make sense is for businesses to get more relaxed about whether you actually come into the office. If there's no meetings or requirements to get immediate feedback on a given day, why make people sit on a train for an hour?
> Prior to that there was something called the "putting-out" system, where you'd sew some clothes or whatever and put it outside for someone to collect.
Something similar to this exists in rural Germany, at least in Brandenburg, mostly for fresh or preserved produce where you leave a donation in return.
Not sure if generalizing something like this based on a survey from "over 500 Americans" is correct, but anyway. I believe that most millennials will definitely feel more comfortable working from home permanently (I'm one of those) however there are a lot of other factors to take into account, as mentioned in other comments it can depend if you're more introvert rather than extrovert, do you have the appropriate workspace, tools?, commute time. It can be incredibly tough if not stressing to be working on a rather small place without a desk, a proper computer/laptop, kids/toddlers hanging around you, random noise coming from outside, etc. I think the point is clear. IMHO it really depends on the resources and environment that each individual is able to have.
I have found that working from home is great, right now. During normal times, though, I could not really handle doing it for more than a couple days a week.
I suspect the reason is that my wife and kids are at home right now. So I can close the door and they will leave me alone, but I still have a sense of them being around. So I am comfortable. But during normal times, the kids would be at school all day and my wife would be at her office. So then the house would be empty except for me, and then I get a little stir crazy after a couple days.
We will find out eventually, when offices reopen. I am secretly hoping that I will be able to continue working from home while maintaining my sanity.
I've been working from home for the past month, and honestly I'm tired of it. Perhaps I'm just more outgoing than I thought, but this whole forced WFH episode is really proving to me the importance of face to face communication.
For many/most people working from home is something new that is "forced" on them. I have been working from home (or on the road/'wherever I may roam')(wander)(wander) 80-90% of my time and I really enjoy it.
For people who just started WFH they may combine WFH with virus, kids screaming, lockdown, isolation, etc.
Circumstances are not BAU right now, for 99.9% of us. Once this blows over, and the infrastructure remains in place, and business start making their typical revenue, it will be interesting to run the same survey and compare it with 12 months ago.
sorry for the Metallica reference, I couldn't help myself.
Yes I'm in the same situation and I was thinking the same thing reading the negative comments. It's important to not conflate the work from home aspect with the lockdown aspect.
I've been working from home a minimum of one day a week for 10 years, frequently 2 days a week - and for rare bursts of a month, the whole deal.
The reality is that environment more than makes up for all of it. At home, I completely control my work environment. Sure, there are elements to communication you have to change - amongst other things, but working from home is fantastic if you WORK from home.
I find those days at home are significantly more effective - and the clients, partners, and employees I've worked with have always agreed. There's also a lot to be said for face-to-face time though.
Whenever I read these WFH HN threads and see all the comments about people who "just can't do it" I'm always curious if it's truly that they can't enjoy working from home, or that they are doing it wrong. Have worked from home for the better part of 10 years off and on and some things that make all the difference:
Have a dedicated office. Yeah you aren't going to be as productive on your kitchen table or your couch on a laptop as you would be in a quiet dedicated room with a desk, multiple monitors and clear delineation between work and play time.
Get the kids/dog/whatever distraction dealt with. You don't have kids at your office, why would you think your productivity wouldn't take a hit if you have them around at home while you are trying to work? Not now obviously because Covid, but under normal circumstances, send them to day care or whatever arrangement you gotta make to have quite during your business hours.
Figure out your coms! If your team/company isn't built around remote work, obviously there are going to be issues. You have to have a strategy for communication that's designed for remote. Both to keep you from feeling like an island or second class citizen and also because remote communication requires a totally different regiment than the random water cooler check in.
If you are doing all of these things and remote work still isn't your cup of tea I'd love to hear about it. If you aren't doing most or all of these things, It's probably not remote work that is the problem, it's how you are treating it.
Exactly the same thing would happen if you asked people if they'd rather be on vacation forever. Yes, but after a few months, they'd be begging to get back to work.
I once took three months off work when I had a pretty sweet severance deal. Let me tell you, going back to the office from 10AM to 6:30PM was HELL. It ruined worked for me. I realized that there was, you know - life.
It's the sort of epiphany you get after you retire ("oh crap, I worked too much and now my healthy years are gone"), except this time a lot of people will realize it when they are still young.
- on site for 2-3 small tech companies (10-100 employees) between 20 and 60 minutes away (depending on traffic)
- fully remote for a tech company 5 hours drive away (with on-site visits 2-3 times per year)
- a blend of on-site and remote at my own discretion for a tech company 20-45 minutes away
- fully remote as a contractor with occasional (monthly-ish) on-site visits
What I have learned through the years is that my needs change with the growth of my family and the dynamics of my work. I have by far enjoyed working the remote/on-site blend because it allows me the freedom to make a mature decision about my own work needs each day.
What we especially as thought workers ought to be advocating for as an industry is the freedom to CHOOSE where we work each day, not a fully-remote mandate or an on-site mandate. To me, this is a compromise among many concerns, such as infrastructure costs, accountability, collaboration, a quiet work environment, and generally the ability to break up the monotony of doing the same thing every day.
My last two roles had management expect you to be in the office because they had spent a lot of money on the rent/furnishing even though 50% of the companies roles could be done remote. Now Ill admit it is easier to walk over to someone's desk to ask a question then the endless are you free email/phone call tags before all this COVID-19
I suspect this is going to have a pretty profound impact on the commercial real estate world. Aside from workers wanting to WFH, anecdotally I know of a few now cash-strapped start-ups that are very seriously considering breaking their leases and having much more of the work force WFH.
If you live in a city right now, just peer out at all of those sky scrapers. A huge amount of that is currently empty office space that costs a fortune. For many companies the idea that this space was truly optional was absurd, but right now companies everywhere are seeing that they have to be able to do 100% remote to survive.
Within a month an office space has gone from essential to being more and more of a luxury, way more expensive per employee than a automatic espresso machine.
I suspect a small but non-trivial number of companies will break their leases in the coming months. But far more companies will emerge from this crisis no longer believing that every employee needs a desk in an office.
It was in the `70s that I first heard the concept "Telecommuting". I knew right off I would have to learn a skill set that allowed me to do that and started exploring the options.
It took me until the late-1990s to get there, but that's when I started working from home full time. Right now I have my office in the basement of our house. It's quiet, and spacious, and cluttered with the stuff I tinker with.
For me, the "shelter in place" thing we're going through hasn't really changed much at all in my routine. I prefer being alone in a quiet space when coding and have spent most of my days doing that for the past 20 years.
Since I could choose anywhere to do it, I chose the Ozark Mountains. I packed up and left Malibu and haven't regretted it for even a moment. I've hardly spent any time at all sitting in traffic since I got here. Before then it was common to spend a couple hours sitting in traffic getting to and from work. And often the same on days off going somewhere to have fun.
But it's not for everyone. My wife is way too social to spend much time alone. Right now she's on the phone or facebook almost all day chatting with friends and family, or watching TV.
I have all kinds of stuff to do aside from coding. We've got a big yard and a few acres of forested land with a menagerie of "critters", a barn, and a big veggie garden. All of them wanting my attention. I spend most all my time at home working on something. Shoot, I have to remember to drive my car now and then to keep the battery charged.
Most of my friends in LA could never live here. My wife struggles with it. She was raised Lake Forest, Il and loves whooping it up "Downtown". For me, all of Los Angeles felt pretty much like a "Downtown". Malibu Canyon St. Park in the Spring is actually a lot like the Ozarks, and I did love it there. But I hated sitting in traffic. I felt like I was wasting my life doing that.
Many people are blaming the commute, but I've been working from home for almost 6 years, and I actually miss the commute. Especially the bus, but the train was nice too when I had to switch. It was a nice buffer of being able to read or think quietly to myself. The start and end of my day were absolute. Whatever I didn't get done would have to wait, and I wouldn't start until I got there. Along with the social interactions, and having more choices for lunch in my immediate area, the commute is in my top 3 things I miss about working in an office.
What I don't miss is waking up early and getting ready, picking out clothes, combing my hair, and all that nonsense every single morning. I even had 8 of the same exact outfit when I worked in an office, and it was still such a drain.
I think the difference is that for you, many of those same things can be accomplished by choice. You can still have an absolute start and end to your workday, you just have to be proactive about it. You can still take the same amount of time to read or think to yourself. Perhaps the requirement of a commute makes doing those things easier, but its entirely possible to do the same thing by simply being more mindful about it.
For those who hate their commute, being forced into the office every day doesn't offer the same latitude for adjustments to their personal lives. And many of those things you enjoyed are only possible via public transportation. Given the woeful state of public transportation in much of the US, many commuting are doing so in cars, which don't afford the same opportunities for peaceful self-reflection and unwinding.
You could still get on a bus or train every morning and afternoon? You just need to make the journey a loop so you arrive back at your house each time!
As someone who has done remote working more or less exclusively for 6 years, the current state of affairs for most homes does not reflect the reality of what "Work From Home" looks like in normal, non-emergency times.
You can't competently work from home full time and also manage children. Even for people without children, they are dealing with co-workers who are juggling a new normal, have not set up dedicated work spaces, are fumbling to learn how to use zoom/meet/hangout etc...
I say all this to point out that, even in non-ideal conditions with little to no preparation or planning, most people would still rather work from home.
Work from home should be the STANDARD, not the exception, for white collar work.
The simplest way I found to explain that the representative sample size is independent of population is via coin flips and dice:
We can flip a coin an infinite number of times. But to get a good handle on whether it's biased or not, we only need to sample a very finite number of flips.
My point was that sample size is too small. According to Standard Occupational Classification [https://www.bls.gov/soc/] there are 459 broad occupations.
Multiply that by age group and you still haven't tossed a coin even a single time for every combination of occupation/age group.
And OP's point is that you don't necessarily need to have representation for all of those occupation/age group combinations. It's highly unlikely there isn't high amount of overlap in perception among those occupations. There's going to be supersets of those occupations that are fairly homogenous. So you really don't need a huge sample of respondents and coverage of all of those possibilities. You just need the makeup of the sample to be reasonably representative, and that's the problem with this poll. Seems like it was conducted in a way that the respondents are not representative.
IF done right, 500 can be representative. Although considering the number of jobs out there combined with age groups and gender, I guess you'd need a few thousand carefully selected participants to get valid results.
No need to carefully select participants. If you do random sampling with a large enough sample, the proportion of all subcategories should reflect the population at large.
Well, a survey usually tries to extrapolate numbers from a sample smaller than the total. They do this by trying to get a representative sample. Also if you were to ask each and every American about their stance on remote work I think that would be called a vote and not a survey.
I don’t necessarily want to WFH permanently, but i do treasure the large reduction in my commute that happened in 2010 for me. I would be hard pressed to go back to the days where i was losing almost 3 hours a day in a car.
I've been remote for two years and don't want to go back to the daily commute. I've been happy to sacrifice one room in my home to be an office in exchange for not running the traffic gauntlet each day. The one thing I still prefer in person is whiteboarding. We have good collaboration tools but none of them yet match the efficiency of people in a room together working on a common whiteboard. There are digital whiteboards that might fill this niche but currently they're too expensive to distribute to entire teams. Maybe over time this will change.
As a freelancer, especially in between on-site projects, I made a habit of getting a workplace outside the home, explicitly to avoid all the distractions of the home. For a while, I rented a desk at an office, but I've also worked in the lobby of a work-friendly hotel, I've tried working in the library (but their wifi sucks) and various other places. Anything but home.
Personally, I can definitely do away with my commute (while it's short, it's still a twice a day anxiety event)
I think there is something to be said about the autonomy we're given while at home. No pretend needed when your interactions with coworkers are purely work-event driven and not social for the sake of "team building" or "Culture".
Give me a paycheck to do work, beyond that transaction I shouldn't owe any more of my mind and body to a job.
The 25-34 age range had the most “Yes” I want to work from home. I wonder if experience made the later years want to not work from home, or what caused that.
Not in my case, no. They're not school aged, and are at home during the day. Elementary schools where I am run roughly 9-3 as well, except on Thursdays when they run 9-2.
Maybe I could make it work, but I would still prefer to have an office to go to most days.
The current situation isn't ideal. Everyone at my employer has working from home since the beginning (20 years ago, I'm at year 4 here) and it's been great, but my coworkers who all-of-a-sudden have kids at home during their workday who would normally be at school have seen a drop in their productivity.
2 kids at home. I am dying to get into my office and work. The interruptions are just insane. I don't think I'll be a lot more productive in the office but I sure as hell will be a lot less stressed. Also my office is very quiet with almost zero interruptions.
But surely actually working from home wouldn't involve taking care of your children all day. When you actually go to work, your children are presumably not sitting at home unattended all day, correct? You either have a spouse who can take care of them, they are in school, or they are in daycare. So working from home shouldn't be any different, and the only reason it is now is because all of those things are closed due to the pandemic.
I don't mean this to be rude, but it doesn't sound like you have much experience working at home with children around. I don't think you should be so quick to assume you know the solution to a problem/situation you have no insight in to.
Maybe what you're describing would work for some people. But to so confidently say it's a blanket solution for everyone and is not actually a problem, is frankly laughable.
I have been working from home with 2 children under 5 for 6 weeks now. So you are the one being quick to assume something that you have no insight to.
> Maybe what you're describing would work for some people. But to so confidently say it's a blanket solution for everyone and is not actually a problem, is frankly laughable.
Please explain to me in what situation what I described wouldn't apply? When people work in an office, they have to have some form of childcare. Daycare, school, or a caretaker/spouse at home. Obviously those are not available right now in the pandemic, but if we are assessing the viability of WFH typically, then why wouldn't they work just as well as they do when traveling to an office? What is laughable about that line of thinking?
I have to say that I'm lucky if I get 4 productive hours in on any day, and most colleagues and peers I have talked to say something similar. That makes me want to ask here as a sort of informal poll, how many hours of the working day would you all say you normally spend working?
My anecdotal experience: fewer of them have children. When you have small kids, it is harder to work from home and be productive. I’ve had coworkers who only came to our shared office to get away from the distraction of working at home.
I've been working from home (in full time positions for a couple of tech companies) for the past ~12-13 years now. During that time I've done both purely-technical work and managerial work (managing other remoties).
I'm excited about the work-from-home revolution that's going on here, and I think it will benefit society and some level of work-from-home will stick for the long term, for many people. However, it's not for everyone. Some people just don't like the remote work lifestyle at all. It's also not for every kind of job or office.
I think we'll see a lot of hybrid arrangements in the post-covid world. Some offices might institute work-from-home only for tuesdays and thursdays. Or just have everyone come into the office on Mondays and cram all the important in-person meetings into that day. Or in some situations it will be an at-will flexibility (come in for specific meetings when it makes sense, or come use the office like you would a co-working space when your home life is a little crazier because the kids are out of school for the summer and/or there's a contractor remodeling the kitchen, etc).
I think most seemingly-virtualizable businesses that had offices before will still have offices for the foreseeable few years, but by implementing various hybrid policies they could see their average headcount onsite per day shrink significantly over time. For many the office will become optional and/or a part-time thing. One way they could react to this is to downsize their commercial real estate the next time contracts are up. Another way they could handle it would be to remodel the space they've got, trading out cube-farm areas for more private offices and private conference rooms that can be reserved ahead, which will draw some employees back for more hours on-site, until they find a balancing point.
The deeper transition for managers is getting away from the control-freak model of tracking "hours worked", and starting to focus instead on the "things done". The reason you hired your employee is not to punch a clock and stare at a wall for a fixed number of hours; you hired them to accomplish goals, and you're actually going to have to focus directly on measuring true work rather than time in a post-office-hours world. Once you break free of the chains of time-tracking, all kinds of efficiencies that benefit both the employer and the employee are unlocked through remote and flexible work arrangements.
The survey doesn't say how many people they asked, but looking at their chart sliced by age it's a very small sample: looks like ~30 in the 55-64 age group? They also don't say anything about how they found their participants. I'm pretty skeptical that asking these questions to a large representative sample would give similar results.
I'm skeptical of the 19% who can't work from home.
BLS says that food prep, transportation, production, healthcare practitioners are the 3rd, 4th, 5th, & 7th most common jobs. This totals 43 million, most of whom probably can't work from home.
https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes_nat.htm
Edit: Another commenter claims the author sampled workers through Mechanical Turk. WTH.
- Seventy-nine percent of workers can work from home at least some of the time? Maybe the ones your survey reached, but I'm pretty sure I've read the real fraction is under 30%.
- "Do you think your employer will make working remote permanent?" is a bad question because it's easy to interpret it multiple ways.
Understandably so. I'm working remote for 7 years now, and before also for over 10 years. I'm at least 10x more productive. No interruptions is the biggest cause. And only asynchron communication, in written form.
Also I do much longer hours, because it's much more fun, and I can take a siesta nap when I need it. I'm an extrovert btw.
Anytime a poll or election comes back 50/50 you seriously have to critique and justify whether any actual signal was uncovered. A yes/no question being answered 50/50 on the face of it tells you nothing. It’s good she breaks stuff down here, but that’s all ex-post rationalization - keep that in mind.
WFH for almost 2 years 50-60%. Due to corona now 100% for almost 2 months. Used my car 3 or 4 times the last 2 months instead i often walked or used my bicycle, before i used the car at least 5-6 times a week. So WFH can definitely help to save the planet from global warming
I think it is easy to say this in the first few months of working at home, but after an extended period of time it can be unbearable to spend so much time in the same place. Cabin fever is very real, and human beings are social animals who want to be around people.
Yeah, but after the pandemic is over, if you're still working from home you can go out to restaurants and bars in your free time and hang out with friends, unlike today where your office and your social space and your restaurant and your bar are all your living room.
I have been working remotely for 6 years and I mostly love it. My wife has been working from home for about a month now and she is not a fan. Lots of people just like working in person with others.
I do like working from home, but I will admit that my hygiene has suffered. I don't shower daily and that bothers me. Obviously not enough to actually do anything about it.
TL;DR: A job search website (Zippia) surveyed 500 people about their work from home preferences during the Coronavirus-related quarantining period.
No mention of the study methodology. Given that this was performed by an online job search website, it's not clear that they invested effort into collecting unbiased samples. Visitors looking for new jobs on a somewhat obscure online job search site aren't exactly an unbiased sample.
Regardless, I think the important takeaway is that work from home preferences vary. Not everyone enjoys working in an office. Not everyone enjoys working from home. And not everyone has made up their mind on the topic yet.
They also asked whether or not people thought they were more productive working from home. 44% said yes. When asked if people thought their companies would move to permanent WFH after this, 17% said yes.
Sadly many tech workers can barely afford more than shared accommodation or tiny apartments. Wondering that is the half that would rather waste away in crammed offices, long commute hours and lack of privacy from flatmates.
If companies wouldn't have to afford expensive offices, there would be more affordable space available for residential. Provided there are suitable rent regulations.
My productivity has definitely dropped, and it feels like my brain never really fully turns "on". It feels a lot like those times in university I decided to study for exams from home instead of going to campus. I can't explain it, but 9 out of 10 times it just feels bad, like the way your brain feels if you've spent the day watching TV or something (when, in fact, I haven't). This doesn't even begin to consider the social punctuations of work that are essential to my psychological well-being.
Does anyone feel the same? I'm a little bit worried that I just have a personality type that isn't well-suited for the remote work culture that is likely to become more prevalent after this crisis is over. I'm in my early thirties, but I've felt this way for as long as I can remember, independently of whether I was in a relationship, whether I was working or studying, etc.