> Researchers analyzed survey data from 7,704 employees at a large healthcare organization.
I’ve been remote and worked for remote companies for a long time. In my observation, the well-being is bimodal. The people who adapt well to remote thrive. There are a lot of people who think they’re going to love remote who ultimately flame out from the loneliness, isolation, lack of visual boundaries between work and home life, and lack of externally enforced routine.
It’s really sad when the latter happens because it’s almost always someone who was hired for their great work and abilities. Then over time they get drained and you can see that the remote work wasn’t what they expected.
It’s basically impossible to predict who will fall into each category at the interview stage, or at least I can’t do it. Prior remote work success (not just experience) is the best indicator but it’s hard to evaluate, too. Some of the most difficult remote hires I’ve worked with had past remote work experience, but it’s only after being hired that you learn they struggled at those companies too.
Another factor beyond individual suitability to remote work (which certainly varies person to person and even within a person’s lifetime due to lifestyle changes), is the work situation itself.
One thing I don’t see mentioned in these discussions much is that someone might be perfectly content WFH when given clear goals and autonomy to execute in a neutral political environment, but do a few unexplained mass layoffs, give muddy direction or tighten the leash with stricter policies or new monitoring software and watch paranoia and depression take root (this is true in-office as well but I think gets amplified over Slack due to a stronger prisoner’s dilemma effect).
Unfortunately due to the power differential, any disruption to output caused by these situations will still be blamed on the individual contributor.
Slack and Zoom are a massive parts of the problem. Because "my boss can read it" sure does curtail a lot of conversations.
You are left in a situation where you miss out on all sorts of hints that people just aren't putting out. A string of tepid yes's on the way to get coffee is a much different signal than a string of yes's with no context in Slack. Things may be different again on zoom because of equipment quality and connectivity and peoples willingness to be a certain way on camera (and when looking at themselves).
I have seen at least half a dozen work place kerfuffles in the last 5 years that would have been avoided entirely if people were regularly co-located.
Unless you're small enough to get away with a very open and free culture (both business and personal) then there is a lot being left on the table that requires work to be re-gained. Many organizations are still bad at this.
Agreed, the loss of some opportunities for signal like is definitely one of the downsides.
One thing that helps a lot is occasionally mixing in (non-recorded) video or phone calls, and having a lightweight way to initiate one.
Text chat: "quick call this afternoon?" "3pm ET?" ":thumb-up:" <call added to calendars>
For that matter, making 1-on-1 text chats mostly private reduces the chilling effect of perceived boss panopticon. The company might retain logs for various reasons, but the only access is through Legal, and only for exceptional events.
(Though, there may soon be an additional chilling effect on communication within a company: people will realize it's an individual problem if the company's third-party team communication SaaS is profiling them individually in company chats "for AI training", and using/selling that various ways. There's already a lot of SOP performative and gaming behavior in our field, especially when it comes to obtaining jobs and getting good performance evaluations and promotions, so we can extrapolate what will happen.)
I love my remote company for being mostly cameras off. We’re not even a small company at all. It’s so much less stressful than constantly being on Zoom on camera.
I load the dishwasher and do other small chores while I have 1:1s and other non-hands on keyboard meetings. It’s amazing for my home life. Thank goodness for modern noise canceling headphones.
I don’t feel like these small social cues or in-person signals are actually that valuable when it comes to completing tasks to make the company money. It’s really easy to avoid kerfuffles: hire the right people who exude the right values and don’t care for drama. Don’t hire people who are vindictive assholes.
From what I have seen, layoffs tend to go hand in hand with pushing for more work from the office (which companies hope will help them get rid of some employees without severance), so if being in the office helps combat layoff paranoia and depression, there's that.
I personally don't have less paranoia now I am in the office 3 days a week (and probably won't have less when I will soon be forced to come in 5 days a week either), but I only talk to "my" team via Teams no matter if I'm at home or in the office, because they're spread over several locations (and no, it doesn't make sense to do RTO in these conditions, but that just reinforces my certainty that all the talk about "increasing efficiency" is just BS and they simply hope to get rid of people, no matter how competent they are). In the meantime, I don't really care one way or the other, but if they want to get rid of me, they should at least offer me some money for it, I won't do them the favor of just leaving voluntarily (especially not in this economy).
You say your team is remote "anyway", but RTO precisely is about connecting with other people OUTSIDE your team, working on internal politics, and you act as an interconnection point between the remote team and the local network.
I think the two of you are thinking/talking about two different things.
In most workplaces before ~2020 individual teams had designated desks/islands - all team members were sitting next to each other, actually every individual had their own permanent desk.
And you could have a quick chat, pair program, and even adhoc whole team meeting by just removing your noise-cancelling headphones and talking to each other.
Though of course bigger/longer meetings would still be better in a meeting room because of big screen, not being nuisance to other people ...etc.
Most workplaces now do some variant of flexi-desks. At best a group of teams is allocated some specific area/desks, at worst it's completely random which desk you get.
And to have a chat/meeting you often need to still do it via conference call, or get into a meeting room.
Between that, and usually having some people from the team still WFH on that day (many workplaces don't even have enough work desks or cafeteria - for everyone to come into office on the same day) - you now need more meeting rooms than before.
And for some reason they didn't add more meeting rooms, even when redesigning office buildings.
Actually, you both misunderstood what I wrote: the team is spread across multiple locations in three countries. They all work from their respective offices, but for meetings we still have to use Teams. That's especially galling: my company is more than ready to embrace remote working tools when it's to its advantage, reassigning people as it sees fit, but it now completely denies the advantages of remote working/home office to its employees. Actually, because of budget restrictions, I have never seen any of the team members (except the one I'm in the same office with) in person. My company is one of those typical multinationals that grew through mergers and acquisitions and now has offices all over the world - but I'd bet it's not one of those that come to your mind, somehow it managed to fail to build any sort of brand recognition, mostly because it's a B2B company.
I was brought on to a team as WFH - there was an office, but most of the team I worked with were in different states. But a lot of folks had left 6-12 months previous. I was stepping in to a void, and just had some jira tickets.
Manager above me wasn't technical, didn't know my project, just said "get done what you can". I worked and filled out timesheet. I was pinging the ticket owner, no response. Tickets were for an external client. Asked manager to arrange meeting. Took 2 weeks. Got a meeting with the external client using the system who had put these tickets in. "That was Jeremy, he doesn't work here any more... I think he was talking to Glen". Well.. Glen left our team 6 months earlier.
Emily at the client I was talking to had no idea what this was for, cause she only started 2 months earlier. Another week later she said "I don't think we need any of this - whoever asked for it is gone, and I have no info".
I had recorded... probably 130 hours on a few of these tickets mostly just trying to get stuff to build. Emily couldn't update tickets because it was tied to Jeremy who had left.
2 weeks later I had some department head at our company about 4 levels above me call me on my personal phone and start yelling at me telling me I'd put the project way over budget, I was 6 months behind schedule, and was jeopardizing the entire client relationship, and she was threatening to fire me. Apparently the whole budget for the project was 60 hours - I'd more than doubled that plus whatever people before me had done, etc. But... the client contacts I had had no idea what it was for, or really even who wanted it in the first place. I remember this woman saying "the budget was only 60 hours - you blew it up!" I said "I never gave those estimates in the first place, and there's no one here who even knows what this code is to even ask". "None of that matters, we may lose this client because of your incompetence...."
That was pure insanity. I left shortly after - already had something else lined up, but was on the fence about leaving (devil you know vs devil you don't). At that point, I knew I'd had enough of this devil. I left for another remote/WFH position.
This was also ... towards the end of 2020 - depths of covid, lockdowns, etc. Crazy times indeed.
Next time go to your manager and say "I'm seriously considering axing this project and I want your approval to do so. x, y, and z are no longer applicable and the landscape of the client relationship has changed in the interim as well."
re: department head at our company about 4 levels above me... -- what could be going through this person's mind when they continue yelling at someone after the situation has been explained? A friend got screamed at by some upper level person for being three months behind on a project. They contined screaming even after my friend explained it was his first day at the company.
I used to have a hybrid job. The company culture was oriented for 100% remote, because it was 100% remote until RTO happened. The office space felt like a coworking space where everybody was a remote worker who just happened to work on the same project in the same company. Nobody ever approached anybody, everything was over Slack. We did have meeting rooms but everybody preferred calling in from their desks. Even for the daily standup! Most miserable workplace experience of my life.
I interpret the study findings not as remote workers being happier, but on-site workers being less happy in remote-oriented companies than on-site workers in on-site-oriented companies.
I will say I dislike remote work in terms of how much I enjoy work or how effective I am at my job. But having a 100% remote job has made me far more able to maintain my house and be present for my children when they’re still very young. So if we were weighting overall life satisfaction that outweighs the extent to which it alienates me from my job.
Now maybe my employer has reason to dislike that I’m probably like 80% of the worker I would have been if we were in office, but the 80% has been enough to exceed expectations on my performance reviews so there doesn’t seem to be a problem. He has the equivalent of an F-150 that he only ever uses to commute to the office. People seem to be into that.
Commuting wears you out. The energy and stress saved from not having to drive in bumper to bumper traffic or ride public transportation can add a good deal of productivity.
I feel the opposite. Before the pandemic, I would have said I'd 100% want a fully remote job if I could have it. I even looked at applying to Gitlab because of that. And then the pandemic hit and I spent 2 years working from home all the time. One of the surprising things I learned in that was that I need a commute. I need a physical separation of work and the rest of my life that lets me mentally shift gears from thinking about work things to thinking about home things. I needed some time to just listen to music or a podcast or audio book without any other demands on my time.
And I found that going for a walk or something like that to replace the commute didn't have the same effect, for a number of reasons. There was the mental hurdle of forcing myself to try taking the walk instead of going straight from A to B since I was already there. There was the fact that while I could try to flush home concerns from my mind on the walk, coming back to my home where all those home concerns are right there for me to notice when I walk through the door meant that all that mental flushing was for naught.
Now I admit that I am fortunate enough to have a commute where I'm rarely in bumper to bumper traffic, and it's less than a 30 minute drive. But at least for me, a commute is a vital part of my work routine.
My best situation was a commute to work that was about 45 minutes door to door and involved a 30 minute bus ride. I mostly got to read novels on the bus. It was nice.
I was childless and petless then though. The thought of squeezing everything in between school drop-offs, pick-ups, after-school scheduled activities, and dog walks is when things get really annoying.
I'm the same way. I absolutely need a commute and a hard bifurcation of my work and personal environments. I've been paying for coworking services of some kind since COVID. That and having a separate work phone has helped a lot.
I'd probably feel different if I had a 5-10 minute walk to an urban office but I never had. (Did have a very short suburban commute for a while, but people I knew were always pulling dangerous stunts when they saw me walking to pick me up so I pretty much gave it up.)
I didn't hate the 25-30 minute driving commute I had at one point but I had to go in pretty much every day even in the snow which wasn't great. This was a time when you were pretty much expected to go into the office other than a rare state of emergency.
Latterly I had about a 30 minute driving commute again but I was doing so much travel that I wasn't consistently in the office that much.
In the last twelve months ive had electricians, plumbers, kitchen renovators all work in my home while I was wfh. In an age gone by I would burn annual leave to deal with this. I dont know how I could handle the logistics of full in office again.
It really depends on the company culture. Where I work (in the bay area) people come to the office two days a week, but those days are when everybody schedule the important in person meetings. Focused work happens rest of the weekdays at home.
it says a large healthcare org but does not say if that's a care provider where on-site jobs will be completely different from remote-compatible ones, or an insurer where most jobs could be done mostly on a PC.
I get this. What we are missing out on now is being able to read the room and environment PROPERLY. Hybrid jobs won't do this well. WFH won't, above a certain percentage of people working from home, in general, usually.
> lack of visual boundaries between work and home life,
This was the major one for me, in addition to the other stuff you mentioned. The "always at work" feeling was reinforced by the management style of remote work being like, we expect you to be generally available to respond at any time in a 12 hour window, sometimes more (because everyone works their own schedules across multiple timezones). In an office this separation is clean, and if I'm responding to messages or working at home, it's generally accepted this is outside the norm and I'm perfectly free to just shut the laptop off until the next morning 99% of the time unless I am on-call. It's nice.
The first thing I did when I went back fully in-office was tear down my home office and turn it into a game room. I generally do not even use a computer in my home. Sometimes we have enforced WFH days due to various things or events, but I established the understanding with management that generally I will not be expected to work full days from home outside of emergencies and I take those days off.
I understand some people love it, and I have a good office environment which helps, but the downsides (general office annoyances, commuting, lunch expenses, clothing expenses, etc) way outweigh the downsides of working remote for me. I got severely depressed and burnt out very quickly.
I have my desktop computer where I do my own stuff like games in the same desk where I put my work laptop, and yeah sometimes it feels like I'm never really done as the transition is just closing the laptop and switch the monitor input, one thing I like though is that we do mob programming so when it's over it's truly over as we share responsibility rather than me having to finish something on my own before a deadline.
But yeah I'm thinking of putting a second desk in another room for work, I don't want my own house to feel like an office.
I find that what I usually do it just leave the house for a bit too, eithe for a walk, to the gym, or to the grocery store. Having a some moments away from the "bad screen" before the "good screen" is wildly helpful for me.
> The "always at work" feeling was reinforced by the management style of remote work being like, we expect you to be generally available to respond at any time in a 12 hour window
That's not a management style, it's a 12 hour on call which needs to be compensated without appropriately higher pay and comply with work time regulations.
I am doing well with remote because I'm pathologically introverted and find that being around people is exhausting. I can imagine things being the other way around for extroverts and that is saddening.
I think the introvert / extrovert thing is oversimplifying things too much. I'm a very introverted person, and my favorite thing to be working on is stuff that's in the background quietly making things better in invisible ways. But that's the whole reason I want to be in an office with other people. Because I'm aware that I need people to know what it is that I do, and it's easier for me to make that happen when I can interact with someone one on one instead of having to blast stuff into a chat with 30 other people reading, or having to carefully pick my words because all the side bands of human communication that I've put so much effort into learning to read and use are gone in the sterile text of the screen.
We all know networking is an important part of your career. As an introvert, networking is a lot easier when I'm in a space where people already are and I can be seen, even if I'm not always being heard. And when I am heard in the office, it's usually among small groups of people, maybe 10 or less. Having to network by being actively visible and speaking in big open channels with 2-3 different teams and a few layers of management all watching, that's terrifying as an introvert but that's also how most companies run their chat systems because otherwise everyone has hundreds of channels that they have to keep track of and remember whose in what places and copy discussions around. Since it's easier just to have massive groups of people in one channel and have everyone use the larger channels most of the time, being remote and on slack is actually far more draining to me as an introvert. I also do best keeping tabs with what's going on when I can keep one ear on the other things going on around me instead of having to stop what I'm doing and intentionally scroll through pages and pages of slack messages.
And yes, because I'm introverted, being in person with a team of people that includes extroverts means I get human social connections that I need and would otherwise not seek out because, again I'm an introvert.
Honestly the lack of empathy about this topic from top management is extremely disturbing.
Nothing else in my career has ever changed my opinion about a CEO as quickly and drastically as hearing them completely dismiss it as noise, when hundreds of employees explain how negatively forced RTO affects their well-being and productivity.
I saw some management being hesitant about enforcing back to office at least part-time. But the way a lot of companies did hiring during COVID it was going to be pretty hard to put the genie back in the bottle unless they wanted to lose a lot of people. I'm familiar with one company that really hesitated to shove a lot of people into an official (as opposed to remote) category but they eventually gave up after closing some offices.
My "first-order costs only" spreadsheet put RTO at like twenty grand a year. I had no idea.
I started playing around with the idea of how much it costs to have a job based on location and it was interesting to see how different variables changed the final wage and how that played out against a map of the city.
$20k for the company to facilitate your workspace or $20k of net cost to you the employee to comply with RTO? If the latter and assuming a reasonable commute (15-35 minutes) one way how did you arrive at that number?
The first step is nailing down the numbers that everyone understands and agrees with.
I start with the stated wage on a job description and attempt to calculate the value of any additional benefits to arrive at the hourly rate a potential employer thinks my time is worth. Vehicle cost is similarly straightforward since wear and mileage calculators are standardized and you're already budgeting for parking if you need to.
However. Once you collect a handful of data points the rest of the process is entirely personal. For example, a one-hour commute each way sounds terrible unless that's the only time in the day you have to yourself, but if the traffic is never smooth or you need to switch trains three times it might be a wash.
The key point is to determine if a specific activity is solely work-related and if I get anything else out of it, and then apply the dollar value this potential employer sets on my time as above.
Now take a look at your food situation. Do you and your partner meal prep every Sunday without fail? Do you start your day at the Starbucks drive thru? Now take a look at your responsibilities. Do you have children? Do you have pets? Now take a look at your wardrobe. The list goes on and it's all situational.
The interesting part of the project was seeing how much home location + commute options + work location affect net pay by just dragging a few markers around a map of the city. I was adding average residential rent by location last time I touched this and felt like the project was turning into a map of the de facto minimum wage in my area.
To answer your question this was $20k net to me, mainly from maintaining a vehicle, eating out of the house, and keeping up my in-office appearance.
Well on the employee side it’s more complicated than you think. You have gas, yes, and then mileage on your car. And then working in an office means you have to take more time off to deal with mundane things like “the plumber is coming today”. And then 30 minutes of commute is 1 hour a day, which lowers your effective wage. And then of course there’s various other costs like food being more difficult and expensive, higher risk of serious bodily harm or death due to automobile use, and the biggest one: COL. living close to work can easily double your COL for no real gain.
Depending on the city, you could easily be looking at a 100% cost rise in rent, a few thousand on car maintenance and gasoline depending on your car a year, a few thousand on food, about ~12% reduction in wage, and a few days of lost PTO.
> biggest one: COL. living close to work can easily double your COL for no real gain
This is I think where hybrid (with weekly attendance) really makes more sense in theory than in practice, ending up as worst of both worlds depending.
With in-office you pay a premium for location that is good for commuting.
With remote you can choose a cheaper location without the commute constraint (maybe 50% off), somewhat offset by needing more space to setup a proper home office (add back 10-20%).
With hybrid you still need to be close enough that 2 days/week of commuting is tolerable and ALSO need space for a home office.
I guess if you consider your commute as purely work time then it starts making more sense. Maybe I’m unusual in that I don’t loathe my commute and see the time as 100% personal time.
The way I view it is that personal time means time id spend if work didn’t exist. If work didn’t exist, I wouldn’t commute. So, to me, it’s work time.
Yes it’s “easier” (sometimes) than working, but it’s still time I dedicate to work. Its entire purpose exists because work exists.
I used to have a really gnarly commute (1.5 hours one way, so 3 hours total, 3.5-4 if there was an accident). The level to which it affected my finances is one thing, but it absolutely demolished my quality of life. I couldn’t socialize, sleep, or even cook for myself due to the exhaustion. And spending minimum of 12 hours a day sitting destroyed my body and mental health. Not to mention traffic is not peaceful, it’s stressful. You have to constantly be “on” and paying attention. Even a single second of distraction can be an accident.
I generally agree that commute should count as work time more often than not but its complicated when you can take advantage of the commute to get other things done near your work site or along the route. E.g. if you commonly stop to get groceries half way from work to your home then perhaps you would have needed to spend time for that trip anyway. But that's more of an excuse for a 30 minute or less commute, not for over an hour.
I absolutely think employee's would try to game it if companies paid out commute time. Some companies do pay out travel time, which is a similar concept. I think you just have to accept some amount of gaming, that's life.
On the employee side, the solution is to ALWAYS factor in your commute time. A job that pays 20,000 dollars more a year can easily not be worth it if the commute is insane. If you have to double your rent to make it work, it's probably not worth it.
I factor in commute like I factor in other benefits, like health insurance and PTO. My salary can't necessarily replace those, so they implicitly have a higher value than money alone. It would take a really nice salary to override them. And I think that's why we see absurd salaries in places like Seattle. They know employee's are doing this calculus, they can't afford to pay 100,000 like you can in, say, Texas.
For me, the biggest thing was simply my ability to work in a quiet environment with little distraction. We went from an open office floor plan that was so loud I wore noise canceling head phones and a baseball hat to block the buzzy lighting to my own desk, in my own home, feet away from a bathroom and kitchen cleaned and stocked to my standards.
>Prior remote work success (not just experience) is the best indicator but it’s hard to evaluate, too. Some of the most difficult remote hires I’ve worked with had past remote work experience, but it’s only after being hired that you learn they struggled at those companies too.
I often tell people that I'm unusually well suited to remote work because I've had a lot of practice. Starting in high school I was out more days than I was in owing to health problems, yet I still managed to knock out 11 AP classes because I got really serious about reading the textbook and actually studying on my own time. This was even before I discovered spaced repetition systems.
By the time I actually got to college I realized these techniques were not only more effective and enjoyable for me than sitting down in lectures, but that the vast majority of students never actually had to build these muscles to begin with. They really struggle when the courses get too big to cram into a class session, but it's not because they're dumb or anything - it's literally just an endurance sport they've never played.
I feel those same muscles are the ones I've been using in remote work, which I've had the good fortune to do my entire career in at least a 60% capacity and more often a 100% capacity. Remote work likely feels deeply unnatural at first, to people who aren't used to putting in focused sweat at a desk in their own room far beyond what traditional education typically requires.
I hope my own children develop this ability too, although I'm not really sure how to get them there.
>By the time I actually got to college I realized these techniques were not only more effective and enjoyable for me than sitting down in lectures, but that the vast majority of students never actually had to build these muscles to begin with.
This reminds me of a CS class I had in college with a bad professor. I knew the guy by reputation. We had like 4 tests that class, and the only time I stepped foot in the class room was to take his tests. I didn't bother with his lectures. I simply read the book and read the supplemental materials. The looks of outrage I got when it was revealed I got the highest grade in the class were priceless.
The most undeniable examples were when we worked at a company that had offices, but allowed people to work remote at their discretion.
The people who were burning out at home would become revived and re-energized when they came into the office for something and would stay that way for a week or two.
Then they would slide back into burnout and social problems (assuming benign interactions were hostile in Slack or that people were backstabbing the. was common) the longer they were away from the office.
Some people had the self-awareness to start bringing themselves back to the office for a few days each week and would directly admit they struggled to work from home.
It’s really not uncommon and readily acknowledged in every offline remote work environment I’ve been in. It’s only on social media where you run into claims that remote works well for everyone.
Likewise online you run into claims that full remote or hybrid can't and doesn't work for anyone, and we all interpret observed dynamics at work to construct theories supportive of whichever configuration is our favorite (WFH/Hybrid/In Office) or as evidence the one we dislike is worse. In reality the situation is messy and complicated and heavily circumstantial, depending on team/company culture and dynamics and working styles.
For instance, I've observed dynamics like what you describe at various orgs, and what they had in common was a lack of psychological safety. If people are responding defensively to benign messages then it tends to mean they have a reason to expect hostile messages. Hostile messages are not a given.
One common way this arises: a company ostensibly offers flexible remote work, but in practice strongly prefers in-office work, and enforces this via social pressure. Remote work has a small social cost that accumulates each full day that one works remotely. These remote-oriented workers then have to periodically show up at the office primarily to ingratiate themselves to management and their peers. This is incredibly common, and might even be the default configuration for an org that permits flexible WFH.
I don't think this is intentionally malicious, BTW. It's simply what happens when you make a policy shift without considering your team culture as well so that both working styles are supported as first-class citizens.
It strikes me how broad the range in work experiences are. I have never had coworkers who cared about anything besides getting the work done. The idea of politics in the workplace is foreign to me, but I know it is common.
I had a lot more of that experience before the first dotcom bubble burst. Harder and harder to not know your coworkers political beliefs even if they do not talk about them at work now.
I’ve talked with colleagues that have confirmed exactly what the parent comment is saying. They benefit from the external structure, routine, and separation of work/home life.
Some people just don’t want to work next to their gaming PC, completely unsupervised. Others live alone and don’t live near their friends and family. Both these groups (can) suffer from a fully remote environment.
I fully support coworking spaces for folks who need the in person socialization (especially in the context of entry level and juniors), but I will leave the labor force entirely before I ever go back into an office (~12 years remote, ~25 years in tech). I have a partner and kids, coworkers are not my friends (we simply share a paycheck provider and a body of shared work), but I understand other lives and the needs of others differs. Your social needs are not my needs. I get to eat lunch with my partner every day, see my kids more, no commute, etc.
You also share a professional social network which is something you own separately from any company and I have found to be very valuable and strengthened by in-person work.
Either at the company or at home (though I mean working at a coffee shop sometimes isn't so bad). Coworking spaces might help
with socialization and some people need it but I am not sure how that benefits who you work for.
I get that. I said as much. Though suggesting employers should have no say in where their employees work on generally work protected by intellectual property law is tricky. If they have an office, usually that is where they want you to work if the goal is an office setting. Some companies do not and rent out coworking space. Different.
Very anecdotally, it seems to go both ways. If there is a relatively local office, people are generally expected to go in. If there isn't, the employee often pays (but not always).
I believe some tax accountants say it can be used as a write-off (just like a certain number of square feet of where you live, if it is only and demonstrably for that). But as far as preference, I would be surprised if a company with an office somewhere near would be pleased with you working in a coworking space. Maybe some but big companies, probably legal issues (VPN or not).
I am curious, do believe that a company or an employee is responsible for paying for a ersatz "coworking space" (ersatz, in that the employer did not choose that as a place for their employees to work)?
Every remote company I’ve worked for has offered a ~$500/month stipend for coworking, and I’ve never been told no when negotiating with a non remote company for it. With that said, I could see companies that don’t value talent refusing such a request. Vote with your feet until labor rights improve over the next several decades due to politics and structural demographic working age cohort compression.
I've worked remote most of my career. Starting in the late 90's if you squint hard enough.
I built my first little company as remote-first before we knew what to call it. I had to be very careful who I would hire, since only a relatively small percentage of folks (around a third, by my estimate) were ready and able to be self-motivated and disciplined enough to work remotely.
And my company was built with remote work in mind from the ground up. Asynchronous comms, everything written down, very well established information systems and work process, etc.
I then worked for a company that became remote by accident. They were obviously an in-person company that never once sat down to figure out a remote-first work culture. It was the most exhausting and unproductive work of my life. Constant meetings, almost no concept of async comms, etc. That company would have worked 1,000% better as an in-person traditional company and the lack of mature process or strict guidelines could have been papered over.
My rule of thumb now is that any company that expects you to be on more than a very small handful of Zoom calls a week is not worth working for. If you need meetings to sync up work like that, you likely have horrible remote work infrastructure, tools, processes, and culture.
It seems a number of companies somehow combine the absolutely worst aspects of in-person work with the worst aspects of remote work and expect to see good results.
Now - my absolute favorite way to work - was when my little company got acquired by a larger company and I effectively ran a small division where we worked remotely, but came into the office if/when we felt like it. That worked because everyone else had to be in the office though, so it wasn't exactly fair. But man, being able to take a 15 minute train ride downtown to spend a day or two in the office each week if I felt like it after I woke up each morning was by far the best of both worlds for me. I could do different types of work in each location to sort of break up my week, and get the benefits of the in-person socialization and relationship building with the lack of scheduling stress and deep focus time remote working gives you.
Still though. I cannot stress enough how shitty Zoom calls are. Anything to do with video calls will be completely banned from any org I run should I ever get the startup itch again. At least on the engineering side of things. Either in person meetings if you must, or phone calls so people don't need to be uselessly staring at a screen for hours each day.
I've found that following an Open Source model of collaboration works well for remote companies. And it gave me a hiring pool of talent with demonstrable abilities to get shit done without needing to be in an office. No open source project is running daily standup video calls.
Exactly the same thing happens with in-office work. I've certainly had that experience! But it's hard to talk about because in-person work is the "default", and it feels like if you have problems with that it's a sign of problems with you.
(Not to mention that, in both contexts, it's very hard to pull apart being remote vs in-office from other aspects of the work and culture.)
I've always thought that the same discipline needed to work remotely, is the same to start your own company. When you start a company, you have the same isolation, lack of coworkers for socialization, and no boundaries between work and home.
It also requires you to be a self-starter.
I've been working remotely since 2007. Thew few times I've had client visits reminds me all over again why I hated working in an office.
By the end of the COVID lockdowns, I was ready to RTO, at least as least hybrid. Just to get out of the house and see people other than my wife and dog during the work week.
But, half of my team (plus my direct boss) is remote and couldn't come in even if they wanted. So, all meetings are still on Zoom. But, at least for the half who are here, I can get some water-cooler gossip and face-to-face 1-on-1s.
Some struggle regardless of remote or onsite because office job culture has become fucking stupid FOMO fueled social animal farm, not a meaningful economic contributor in real terms.
That never comes up though as the dogma must survive.
Loved remote working from 2019 to early 2026. No doubt it was the best type of job for my health as there was little stress and I was never lonely. I made sure I found new friends (like in 2024 I found a happy hour group via Bumble for Friends of 6 other dudes in which we gather every Tuesday. Also, one of them is my European travel buddy as his kid now lives in Europe) and strengthened other friendships.
I am now one of the millions out of work techies yet Im starting a new job and career in healthcare soon. Definitely am missing remote work but i need to pay my bills. Further, IT especially web design and development is a dying field especially with the upcoming voice Internet paradigm shift I see and in which Open AI is working on now (wrote about such here https://ryanspahn.substack.com/p/openais-rumored-speaker-bel...)
It's definitely not just you. It's the "camera on" portion that exhausts me. I do frequent Teams audio calls throughout the day as my team is across a very large area. When I interview candidates, it's generally camera on and I can only do 1-2 day.
Could agree with this more. I've worked 100% remote for the last 6 years and had quite a few years of hybrid remote work before that.
Not everyone is as well suited to it because you have to implement your own boundaries and discipline. I used to get a majority of my social interaction at work, now I have to make sure I get out with friends, or even just to the store, to make sure I'm not just in my house all day toggling between work and personal life.
But any downside I have to manage like that is more than offset by being at home, with the temperature how I like it (I always froze in offices), with my dogs, able to go pick up my kids from school, and with an ideal desk setup (43" monitor, quiet uninterrupted space, able to use voice mode on Codex without disrupting others) that I couldn't have in an office.
For some people, an office is an accommodation - they need that not-home space with other people in it. For others, a home office is an accommodation - a very convenient/local space with very few distractions.
It should come as absolutely no surprise that putting someone somewhere they do not feel accommodated is going to reduce performance.
I also really reject this boomer-esque idea that in-office helps underperformers underperform less. Instead I find it helps under-performers _appear_ to underperform less because they can chat up the boss and more visibly do performative stuff like showing up early or leaving late.
In my situation above we were accommodating people. They got to choose where they worked.
The problem I was talking about was with people who asked to work from home but struggled with it.
Some of them did start coming in to the office more when they realized what was happening. Many did not, believing that work from home was best for them.
> In my situation above we were accommodating people. They got to choose where they worked.
this sounds like the WFH people might be treated the same way as the in-office people. as in you're retaining an in-office culture but people can choose to WFH. that is not the same thing as being a remote working company. the culture is completely different in an org that successfully does remote working.
as a functional example on the social side, people booking in time to just hang out and chat. even if it's work chat but just more relaxed chat. build in some social element beyond just treating it as cogs in a 9-5 machine. add an extra 30 minutes to a team update call to just have a chat with everyone -- including folks in the office.
edit -- to be clear, managers need to be doing that ^
I think I like where you're going with the "accommodated" or not framing. I feel that most companies' offices, especially tech companies, have lately just taken to straight-up not accommodating people. The company crams nothing but minimal, 4ft desks in, edge to edge, with zero partitions whatsoever (… let alone an actual wall to form … an … office …) but want to pretend as-if that's somehow accommodating. Add in crappy chairs, bad keyboards¹, 3 hour commutes, etc. and it's just so "wtf?" that, yeah, remote work — for what flaws it does have — ranks higher. I have a better equipment, a better desk, more space, more quiet / room to concentrate — I can build an office that exceeds what my employer will provide — and I can do so in spite of today's ludicriously priced real estate market where I haven't even really got the room to do so.
And with RTO, it seems that wasn't even rock bottom, now that employers are straight-facedly suggesting things like "hot desking".
> It should come as absolutely no surprise that putting someone somewhere they do not feel accommodated is going to reduce performance.
I agree, but this required corporations to admit they're the problem in not properly accommodating employees. That is the problem: corporations would far rather blame performance on the employee than any sort of self-reflection.
(¹as accommodated by the employer. Even when I worked in an office, I did have a custom keyboard, but it's something I paid for.)
It's where you're in a pen with rows of desks and you just have to use whichever desk is free, you don't have your own desk. If you have any stuff you need to work beyond what's on the desk (say, accessibility equipment), you might get a locker (these are often underprovisioned) and you have to cart your stuff to and from the locker every day. It is awful.
I’ve found the discourse around commute times to be incredibly hyperbolic. 90 minute one-way commutes are an extreme outlier for professionals (USA). Genuinely like two standard deviations from normal.
100% agreed. i flamed out while remote working at $LAST_JOB. it was a combination of a changing cultural dynamic, changing expectations of my role (which i wasn't comfortable with) and a lack of necessary staffing.
remote work was a blessing for me. but turned out the ceo didn't want us remote working.
i tried repeatedly to communicate what i needed to do my best with my boss and the ceo. but the ceo fought me on all of it.
>There are a lot of people who think they’re going to love remote who ultimately flame out from the loneliness, isolation, lack of visual boundaries between work and home life
This used to be me but pair programming / in-call collaborative working solved 100% of all of those problems.
Even the work/life boundary was solved because as soon as I dropped off the call at the end of the day my brain immediately switched off work mode.
These days the first thing I do in a new team is try to suss out who else is a bit like this and try to work out a collaborative working pattern that works for all of us.
It's not just more fun it's almost unreasonably effective. People who work non collaboratively tend to make more mistakes, bugs and worse decisions.
Too bad so many companies insist on top-down management practices that actively make this harder: planning and tracking work in individually owned tickets, individual stack-ranked performance evaluations, "productivity" metrics that don't account for collaboration or shared learning...
(This is something I've repeatedly noticed in discussions about getting people in-office, and about open office plans vs individual offices: the same managers who push these changes through in the name of "collaboration" create a bunch of other management processes that strongly disincentivize collaborative work.)
But in environments where I've been able to do this effectively, it's always been great, far better than going of totally on my own!
this is enormously self destructive as well. when employees are stack ranked, pitted against each other, discouraged from collaborating the quality of work drops off a cliff, customers get unhappy and profits suffer.
executives are perfectly rational about this though. more profit usually doesn't matter to them anywhere near as much as having more power over their reports does.
Would love to hear more tips. This is me too, and I suspect some of my team members. I've been trying to build in more collaboration into tickets (e.g., an acceptance criteria that is "talk to the rest of the team about the decision you make on X aspect of implementation"), and I'm looking for more.
Those collaborative conversations are so often fruitful in ways I don't expect.
I mostly just focus on trying to find one or two people who like pairing and always suggest to do it with them. I always aim to be positive, anti judgemental, understanding, curious, etc. so theyll feel comfortable.
One of my coworkers in an old company set up a "slack" watercooler channel he would always pair in with an explicit invitation that anybody who wanted to drop in could at any time, even if it was just for a chat. That was cool.
"office hours". a dedicated afternoon where anyone from the company could drop in to a running call and just ask me anything about engineering. bug reports; features; questions; feedback; anything.
building in an extra 30 minutes on team catchup calls just to hang out at the end. usually end up talking about some work stuff, but in a more relaxed/social way.
demo/learning sessions. how to use databricks, how to do X, how X works, this cool thing we built.
There is no mention of how many of the surveyed workers are even able to work remotely. A large healthcare organization is likely to employ many people who must be on-site in a hospital or clinic to even do their jobs, from doctors and nurses to orderlies, food service, and cleaning staff.
It is easy to imagine that the ER staff might report lower well-being than someone on the admin staff who works from home on their laptop all day.
Don’t coworking spaces solve some of the issues? I am one of these people that hates working from home and loves going to the office - the chat with colleagues, the exercise of bicycling to the office and back, the context switching between work and not work - otherwise I loose myself in the work. All of that is awesome for me.
When I was playing around with remote work, (before the pandemic and before it was cool) - I figured most of this can be offset by just going to a coworking place - and even better - friendships you form from there seem stronger, because people are less anchored to the company and more to the “place” - more open to friendships. Plus you can pick and switch your “office” as desired for your mode of travel and preferences (or even switch cities, travel around)
I worked remote my entire life, I have never worked in the office (I did occasionally go for socialization purposes at one company), that's 20 years working remote. Would that be sufficient of a proof?
I am not looking for a job, just trying to figure out what would be sufficient to convince you of good remote work skills. I am happy where I am at (a full remote company, yes)
> here are a lot of people who think they’re going to love remote who ultimately flame out
I'm the opposite. I avoided remote work, figuring I'd hate it. Then COVID forced it upon me. And now I won't even consider a job unless it's remote-first. I'd allow for remote-friendly definitions of hybrid though.
I just flamed out exactly as you describe. It's my second time also. If anyone has any tips for some kind of counseling or coaching or anything else, would be much appreciated.
Get a few responsibilities in the outside world, or someone who'll make demands of you. Get a dog.
Half of group therapy is just being in a group. Groups that require you to be rested and fit and provide a local social network orthogonal to everything else in your life include intramural sports, hiking clubs, radio repeating, crafts and markets... and they're all comfortable with nervous individuals showing up.
It's worth being very honest with yourself about what you're feeling. If going into the office fills a void, you should realize that you are now handing a load bearing portion of your life and psyche to your employer. If you are laid off, you will be devastated. Doing the work to get your personal life to a place where you want to work from home because you enjoy your own company, friends, family, pets, environment... is very much well worth it in the long run.
Being able to work remotely is like being sentenced to prison and then finding a get-out-of-jail-free card.
I always strive to do my best at work and make a good impression. But I have absolutely 0 interest in the product, the mission, the culture, the personal or collective aspirations of owners, shareholders, leaders or "leadership", or who they are as people. I generally like my coworkers and we get along, but that's not worth a 2 hour round trip in the car, or using a public washroom, or eating in a cafeteria, or sitting uncomfortably at a desk all day, or listening to everyone's boring stories.
The best part though, is no team building nonsense, no company BBQs or pizza days, no casual Fridays, no boss dropping in for a one on one, no psychos trying to get the energy level up with a "LETS GOOOO TEAM!!"
Just doing a good job for good pay and being treated like an adult. I didn't know working could be like this when I was starting out.
WFH people want to do work, take meetings, and just overall get things done. Sure they also want to be at home so they can use a 15 min break between meetings to start laundry.
RTO people want to do work, take meetings, and overall get things done while there are others around them working. RTO people need other people around them constantly.
This is the conflict. WFHers are happy without forcing RTOers to work in the same manner. RTOers are only happy when they force WFHers into the office.
WFHers want to be left alone to do their jobs. RTOers need others to be around them to do their job.
I prefer working from an office and I also work on the subway and at home. I actually prefer people _do not_ watch me work. I am introverted, but there are benefits to working in person that aren't replaceable over Zoom. (There are also trade-offs!)
Separately, why do some commenters think that their personal experience is representative of Everyone? It's so mysterious to me. Not everyone who wants to WFH or RTO have the same needs, perspectives, trade-offs, living situations, working styles, etc. The world has nuance.
> Separately, why do some commenters think that their personal experience is representative of Everyone
Without unsolicited personal opinions, there wouldn't be much conversation. And what then, have only people state verifiable truths? Only permit the exchange of pure fact?
> WFHers want to be left alone to do their jobs. RTOers need others to be around them to do their job.
This is just not true. It makes a sweeping statement about two groups of people with certain preferences, then assertions about how they work / what they want.
People can express opinions, while investigating (or at least leaving room for) nuance.
My company just had an RTO announcement and I kid you not the head of HR said “well I like working from the office” as if that’s a reason why we should as well.
> WFHers are happy without forcing RTOers to work in the same manner. RTOers are only happy when they force WFHers into the office.
You're completely leaving out that WFHers are forcing the RTOers to work in a completely different (and in my opinion worse) way to accommodate the WFHers.
> WFHers want to be left alone to do their jobs. RTOers need others to be around them to do their job.
Or RTOers want to be able to collaborate with their co-workers while WFHers want to sneak away to do laundry and make it impossible to communicate with them in an efficient manner? I don't need them around just to work, I need them around so that I can have a dialogue with them, instead of sending a message that may or may not be answered this week because I have no idea if they are even "at work". I'm exaggerating, but I hope you were too.
First, RTOers can work with other RTOers, right? Or are you suggesting RTOers can’t do their job unless everyone is in the office? Because that is the exact problem I’m describing.
Second, if WFHers aren’t available and responsive, they should be put on a PIP and then let go if they don’t improve. WFH is not an excuse to not work. With my team, everyone responds quickly. If they don’t, they don’t last very long.
> This is the conflict. WFHers are happy without forcing RTOers to work in the same manner. RTOers are only happy when they force WFHers into the office.
If you work from home and I work from the office, you're forcing me to collaborate with you using remote tools, which is just remote work with a longer commute. In this sense, (some) WFHers are only happy when they force RTOers into Microsoft Teams.
Of course, there's a much better compromise available to us. I could be on an in-office team with others like me, you could be on a WFH team with others like you, and we'd all be happy.
Many workplaces are global. Even when I’m in the office, I’m still on Teams meetings all day long.
Your conclusion is exactly my point. People should work on teams that fit their work habits. Where that falls down is when management hires for WFH but then asks those workers to RTO.
Debatable. They take issue with getting dressed and acting appropriately in an office, I can't imagine they're particularly hard working people given a commute is a hard no for them. You'll complain you haven't got time to do the work next
And if you're job can be done without anyone needing to speak to you, or you to them, it's probably not that important and ripe for AI to take off your hands, so enjoy it while you can autist
I’ve witnessed it first hand, WAY more work gets done when people WFH than in the office. The constant stop bus, or coffee breaks, or “let’s walk over to the other building for this meeting” taking 10 minutes rather than just opening teams and joining the meeting in time.
The WFH team I manage is one of the most capable and hardest working teams I’ve ever been on. You can take that outdated attitude elsewhere, thank you.
We collaborate all day long on teams. Various work focused and non work focused chats are constantly happening.
Ive also witnessed this first hand and had the opposite experience. A significant number of WFH employees were not doing the work expected of them. Yes this is a management issue, but many companies have crappy management.
I'm not convinced that people who want to work from home are magically motivated differently by work and to do work than others... They're human, better and worse, like everyone else.
its not magic its just some nature and nurture. i like wfh bc most of my relationships growing up were distracting troublemakers and slackers. when i had time to myself i noticed i actually accomplished things and then when i worked with others i ended up doing their work too
other people grew up with healthy, cooperative relationships
That's how I know that all the people who like RTO are just lying to force everyone back to office. Since the lack of loud noises, interruptions, distractions etc. make me much more productive in HO, the same must be true for everyone else.
It's like being taken hostage with people who are pretending to like it. Meanwhile some of them have personal lives so bad or they're so afraid of being alone that they genuinely do like it.
You just don’t require 40 weeks in an office to make friends. You can, and should, go to social gatherings outside of work. Including ones where you’re exclusively surrounded by complete strangers.
Friendships often form out of shared experiences. Work is one kind of shared experience. So is joining a club, or going to a concert.
I think a lot of people don’t do those things, because they’re so tired from work. Which is understandable, but then you have to make friends at work. And that’s really not ideal.
me too, but its the vast minority of all companies i have been in the past 35 years. i don't want to sit in a room or even building with the rest of the drones of whom i have no clue what they are doing there expect burning money and wasting time of others.
but sure there are enough exceptions to turn up once in a blue moon to have drinks with the new peeps who seem nice on slack.
Whats cynical about it? You work with people who you have befriended, probably because you have the sort of personality where that works.
Not everyone is like that. It's not cynicism but a fact of life that some people do not get on with people you find in tech companies, IT departments, offices, etc or do not enjoy the environment.
You should examine your own narrow view of this and realize that there are many types of people out there other than people like you. That someone else experiences life in a different way isn't a personal failing.
My view is narrow, yet you're siding with OP who is categorically defining team building activities, company BBQs, pizza days, etc as nonsense? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
> Meanwhile some of them have personal lives so bad or they're so afraid of being alone that they genuinely do like it.
One of the definitions of cynical is "bitterly or sneeringly distrustful, contemptuous, or pessimistic". I'm not trying to argue that my way is the only way, I'm just pointing out that some people (me) have fulfilling personal lives AND enjoy chit-chatting with coworkers in-person sometimes.
I think we can all agree that remote work is great for some people. And we should be able to agree that some people genuinely enjoy things about working in an office too.
How much extra do you get paid to drink the corporate koolaid? I ask this because some of the most miserable people I know were the kind of people that were all-in on serving the corporation at all costs only for it to burn through everything else in their life, especially when they get laid off.
Do miserable people not deserve to make a living? Companies should be able to accommodate their disabilities by making sure they are not around others who may be affected by their presence.
I should know better than to make statements in dumb topics like this. It's like dipping a net into a pool and just filtering out weird takes like this one.
Honestly I framed this poorly, sorry. I wasn't arguing for accommodating all miserable people but my comment implied an extreme position I don't believe.
People who feel they need to enjoy the company of their co-workers in any way are the insufferable ones. Do you need something work related from me? Great! I can probably help. Otherwise leave me the fuck alone. Why? Because dealing with the weird, annoying reactions of the 99.999999999% of the population I do not get on with becomes very tiresome very quickly.
Miserable because we don’t enjoy fake company bullshit like team building lunches and dumbass nontechnical managers that know less than we do but get paid more? Have fun drinking that company koolaid.
I agree 100%, you get paid to do your job, anything above this is charity to the shareholders/executives/managers. I work as a contractor so get paid for days I work, I've watched permanent staff who were perfect corporate bots get the boot while I stayed as I focused on the work.
Everyone always seems to assume everyone else is a corporate bot and they are the only true mercenary just working for the money.
I’ve seen so many contractors who think they’re so smart for being contractors and not loyal to any kind of company… turns out they do the same shit an employee does just gets paid 5x less, and when they’re booted no one really gives gives a shit about them. Okay…
I was a contractor for 14 years, and I kept running into people like you that didn't realize I got paid a lot MORE to come in and fix the problems that the full timers couldn't.
Reminds me of the folks I tell I work in "IT", and they think I fix printers all day.
> I generally like my coworkers and we get along, but that's not worth a 2 hour round trip in the car
How can you be fine with having 0 interest in a job but commuting is some kind of deal breaker? You managed to man up about the rest of the stuff but not the commute?
No wonder America is fucked. My friend visited an office over there once and EVERY SINGLE PERSON in there was morbidly obese, single finger typing. I'm not surprised they complain about having to drive, next they'll be complaining about the actual work and how it doesn't fulfill them the peasants
Your first point makes sense, but the second part? The reason American health is so bad is that we are required to own and operate a vehicle in 99% of this country. That's what makes us obese - not having walkable environments other than in the largest cities. Having to drive to the nearest food which is almost always fast food. We are like this because we have been made slaves to our work and everything has been created to get us back to work faster.
Most of England outside London requires a car to buy anything... It's your massive portions of food and how surprisingly cheap it is compared to Europe. And maybe you have more grape drink fake shit than we do
Let's say I have no interest in the job. I'm a for-profit operation; I'm in it for the money.
I work 8 hours a day for $X in pay. And it takes 2 hours in the car to get there, so it's really $X for 10 hours of my time plus some gasoline (unless I drive an electric).
Then Covid happens, and work from home becomes a real possibility. Now the deal is $X for 8 hours, not 10, because I don't have to drive to the office and back. I like that deal better, because I get two hours of my life back every day.
Now you want me to go back to the office every day, losing that two hours, for no more money? And the reason you give me is that I get to hang out with my coworkers? No, I don't like them that much.
> Now you want me to go back to the office every day, losing that two hours, for no more money?
If that's the choice probably not, but fuck me, just move or get a closer job if you hate the commute. Sounds like you live somewhere with no jobs, which is an adjacent issue, not every job is miles away.
I'm not saying it's not better than working in an office.... Clearly not having to smile, have clothes on, be polite to anyone are all benefits but a job isn't meant to fulfill you. If you had skills that were in demand youd be calling the shots, but as like me youre just a peon, you take what you can get. Wage slavery is shit full stop, why would anyone want to work for a living when there's this option called being rich and not having to lift a finger?
Complaining about the fucking commute just gets to me. Your grandparents probably worked twelve hour shifts six days a week and would get the sack for being legitimately ill, our slog doesn't even compare
I want to frame this comment. I could have written this word for word. It's so interesting that there are people disagreeing with you. Is it fair to presume that the HN crowd majorly over-represents the pro-RTO voice or are workers really so divided on this issue?
If you get laid off, it is your personal relationships that will help you land another good job while everyone else is fighting over the scraps that get posted online.
if i have to sit in an office to have job security (which is a big if as we see all the time) then i rather get thrown out. that never happened in the past almost 4 decades though: i leave because i get better offers. and never have been in an office, ever.
I've never been the first to be let go. It turns out if you do valuable work, people notice that and want to keep you around. On the other hand, when I had jobs based on a personal connection, it was almost the opposite. I was treated almost like an imposter. The conventional wisdom on this is just stupid. No one is going to keep you on just because you're a good buddy. Being useful always comes first.
people aren't rational actors. given your work passes a basic functional bar, if you are well liked, your work will be valued. if you are not liked, people will pick your work apart. these mechanisms feed back on one another but your narrative leads me to believe you /have/ forged meaningful relationships and are more well liked than you realize.
They didn’t control for occupation, pay, managerial status etc.. An on-site physical job like nurse, facilities, or technician was compared to predominantly remote administrative jobs.
Thanks. The complete gap to measure at-home living conditions kicks this into a flawed study. It does not control for physical living conditions anywhere. For instance, if your home is just some hot and filthy room in a neighborhood with lots crime, you're RTO just to escape the horrible environment.
Exactly. I support remote work, but purely as a question of science, it may not be a direct causal link between remote work -> happiness. There may be other factors at play.
Besides, the premise seems stupid to me. Employers don't like wfh because of perceived lower performance. 'For years, many employers have worried that work-from-home arrangements leave employees isolated, disconnected from coworkers and more likely to leave their jobs.' this is just stupid PR, no different than netflix saying they're cutting down on shared accounts to give subscribers greater "personalization" and "covenience". employers care about employee health only in so far as it bears on performance. this stupid study is investigating the stupid pretext employers give for demanding rto.
interestingly moving between jobs is more likely to increase workers salaries. Would be interested if one of the reasons stopping wfh is to prevent salaries from increasing. There is a physical barrier to finding new employers that are further away from where you live and less jobs available overall in the area you live compared to the entire country/world. People who wfh can work almost anywhere, do not have a moving barrier and can job hop their way to higher salaries
There are a thousand factors, but one of the biggest and simplest is getting commute time back. Gaining even one hour a day is life-changing. Imagine gaining two hours.
Not having to plan my life around traffic patterns is the biggest advantage for me.
I enjoy working in the office at my current place of employment... nice office space, small company, everyone who works there is great and the office is only 15 minutes away if there is no traffic.
But I live in Southern California, so when there is traffic that 15 minute commute balloons to 45-60 minutes.
So I work from home most of the time. I still go in a couple of times a week (voluntarily, not required) but there are no expectations of a set schedule so it is very easy for me to avoid heavy traffic commute times.
I know of a company where they want anyone within 90m to commute, so that's up to three hours lost in a day, making an 8 hour workday actually 11+ hours
I somewhat frequently get recruiter mail from NYC-based companies. If it's clear the position is in office, I usually include the same bit in every response: I live ~75 minutes away by train. Make the commute free or heavily discounted for me and I'll come in the three days a week. Plus, since I won't be driving, I can do some work on the train.
I’m always confused why the default commute time in these discussions is always 60 or 90 minutes one way. 60+ minute commutes are outliers and I don’t understand why a person would take a job that far away without being aware of the commute or moving closer to the work. Does that make sense? Most American commute 10-30 minutes. That’s the middle of the bell curve.
> 60+ minute commutes are outliers and I don’t understand why a person would take a job that far away without being aware of the commute or moving closer to the work
60+ minute commute times are very common where I live. If you are anywhere outside of the downtown area you either pay for parking (expensive) and have a shorter commute, or you use public transit (cheap) and have a long commute.
When I used to commute to an office it was easily an hour to an hour and a half each way every day. I hated it
When I commuted semi-regularly into a downtown office, it was a good 90 minutes. Latterly, going into a newer company's customer briefing center was more like 2 hours each way. I had access to commuter rail which was more pleasant than driving so long as I didn't have an evening dinner/event. but it took about the same length of time.
One answer to the parent's question is that I owned/own a house which was a pretty manageable 25 minute suburban commute which I wasn't going to sell just because I got a new job. (Which didn't last that long anyway.)
Yes, I get the sense that this varies a lot depending on area and economic strata.
In the poor rural area my hometown is located, 1-3h+ commutes aren't unusual, partially out of necessity (there aren't enough jobs nearby to sustain the population).
You're on a board full of technologists. Many are in SF or Seattle or NYC. A 10minute commute means you live in a 5-20 Million dollar home in SF. Not sure how realistic that is.
I work in NYC. The salary doesnt support having a home in the city. Yes, it can support a 1br apt, perhaps a 2br with roommates. Definitely not accomodations for a family.
i think there is a big diff between 10-30min and 45min
your 45min assessment is probably right for early career. once you have a family, it gets much harder and less common
We’re in a weird period where a lot of jobs went fully remote around COVID, many weren’t prepared for it, and now they’re doing the opposite over-reaction and forcing everyone back.
A lot of the people I know who went remote after COVID took remote jobs at new companies (remember “the great resignation”?) or moved to a new house because they thought they were done with commuting. Then their companies said they wanted everyone back.
Laptop professionals who make enough money to own and buy a nice house in the suburbs but not FU money to buy in the city. I count myself in this category.
If you don't make enough to consider buying, you might as well rent close. If you are super rich, you can buy in the city or don't have to worry about building home equity.
I could see the average commute being 20-30 minutes without traffic. I cannot see that being the average in any area with even a small amount of morning/evening traffic.
I mean, in a lot of these cases people take those jobs because they're able to work remotely initially... and then get hit with an inflexible, top-down RTO mandate once they've settled into the role.
Yes, definitely. Time management is a lot easier when it's all on your own terms apart from the required meetings.
You get to skip the commute and reap the benefits all day long. Even your diet improves. You can cook fresh or have delivered whatever you want. Your hygiene improves since nothing is preventing you from taking another shower or committing to more involved skincare. You clean your home more often. You're more likely to exercise throughout the day for natural stress relief. If you have any minor medical issues that need upkeep, you're already in the privacy of your own home.
This is not just a list of annoyances or frivolous luxuries for highly sensitive people. These are the basic building blocks for a better quality of life. These used to be the forever-deferred items at the bottom of my todo list stressing me out. Now they are integrated with my life and effortless. I'm no longer trapped in a cube and put on display. I can live like a human being and do whatever whenever wherever I want. My life is no longer oriented around running errands or physical presence.
And money spent on a more expensive house closer to the office vs the same home in an affordable place. It's the main reason I can't go back to San Francisco, once you get used to a less than one million four bedroom house in a pleasant neighborhood you can't go back to living in a shoebox for twice the price, even if it's the most beautiful city in the world.
I go into my company's Boston office with an hour and a half commute each way by train about once a month. Even doing that once a month sucks. I couldn't imagine doing that even three times a week. I regularly get LinkedIn messages from recruiters with hybrid offerings in Boston that pay less and will then suck an additional 9 hours a week out of my life. Biggest nope I can think of.
I'd have to get paid a lot more to sacrifice an additional 10 hours a week commuting. You can't just tack an additional ten hours worth of pay on, and even if the pay was excellent, I can't imagine this is something I can do long term. Losing three hours a day for a commute eats into so much social and sleep time.
I didn't have to do it every day and it wasn't for that long a period but I had sort of come to the conclusion that it wasn't sustainable, especially after the novelty of working in the city wore off. I live fairly far out but, even that aside, there's just a lot of traffic. Even coming in for something after work these days still takes me 90 minutes to get in and commuter rail is useless for an evening event.
Last sometimes commute (I traveled a lot) to a suburban office was much more manageable but the office shutdown at some point during COVID because of low use.
>one of the biggest and simplest is getting commute time back
Zoom out. Being full remote means I don't even need a car. I can live in a walkable city with passenger rail in a low cost of living location. I can reduce my living expense to just food and utilities with a paid off house and no automobiles.
It's funny, because talk about a 25% potential productivity improvement saving multiple hours per day per employee in literally any other context and management would be crazy for it. Like AI hype bubble crazy. But culturally they cannot come to terms with the idea of losing power / control / influence over how work is done, so WFH gets treated completely differently.
A theory I've proposed that I would love to get scientific evidence for... I would guess that WFH is effectively bimodal. WFH advocates would largely fall into a high performance bucket, and detractors either believe that average employees are low performers and need monitoring or are low performers. This is not social vs anti-social, its wanting to be productive with your time - whether thats the time you spend working, or with family etc.
- WFH for high performers: fewer distractions because you can control your environment, less time wasted on commute, less time on non-work communication, etc. More flexibility, better control of your time and space.
- WFH for poor performers: No oversight so you choose to work less. You control your environment so you can add distractions - Meetings, TV, social media chores, family, leaving to go do stuff.
- Office for high performers: Constant series of distractions you can't control - social conversations, meetings, etc... keeping you from doing work.
- Office for low performers: Constant series of distractions you can't control letting you avoid work without repercussion. Meetings, Social time with coworkers, etc
I would love any scientific evidence for or against this theory. If anyone has any studies or natural experiments I would love to know about them
There are 100% people who are the reverse. It sounds like you're optimizing for heads-down IC time, which I agree is more productive at home.
But for team building—which, in very early stage companies is huge—and quick identification and resolution, in-person can be much better, in my experience. (Not always! Person, team, role, etc. dependent.)
There's a HUGE difference between in-person meetings and over Zoom. Teams in person—again, my experience—can move much faster because you can process social cues, body language, attention right there. There's zero latency.
This isn't to discount the distractions you're talking about, or the trade-offs of commute and cost-of-living to be near an office, etc. Very real.
But saying that high performers are better WFH and potatos are better in-office is not a universal truth.
Team building is management speak and completely unnecessary. Teams will naturally form bonds as they complete work together. Any worker with a life has zero desire to go drink a couple bad drinks and do an escape room with coworkers they barely like to appease a manager that thinks this is going to somehow increase productivity.
I have been remote working for the past ~5 years or so. I had to RTO briefly for 3-4 weeks, which was about as long as it took me to find a position with a new org. I love the benefits at this stage in my life (young children, etc.) but I'm not sure the networking relationships I developed early on in my career "in the trenches" would be nearly as strong or beneficial as they have been had I started remote. I'm curious to see how that plays out over the long-term for folks that may start remote and attempt to stay that way throughout their entire careers.
So I was part of a very small company (<15 people) that was bought by a mid-sized company that otherwise had no presence in our country.
Leadership left and there was a few years where no one else in the office was in the same teams or reporting chains. The majority of people were in a single office in another company. I found it very difficult to participate and was left out of most decisions. Then covid hit and everything changed. With everyone working from home remote networking opportunities were built, I was an equal part of every discussion. Now I am in a large fortune 500 organization with a mix of working arrangements and I don't have any issues networking. I like to think we do a pretty good job with junior participation as well. The main thing I'm missing is the rumour mill and the pulse on what unrelated roles like sales/finance are saying on the ground.
That's great to hear. I guess what was in the forefront of my mind were how those relationships carry over after your time with that organization is through. There are a group of us that "started together" ~15 years ago that have had each others backs throughout the years in regard to opportunities and plenty of other life events outside of our starting organization. I was also in the military as well and it seems like those early relationships where we were peons (basic training, A-school, first deployment) are the ones that really stick. Maybe there's no correlation and that's just how it worked out for me. I have only worked for 2 organizations completely remotely. The first myself and my group worked very well together and got along great. After leaving, however, the only time I hear from them is when I reach out to see how everyone is doing.
Some people have been working remote for much longer than the past few years. They are doing fine.
Maybe it depends on the nature of your work, but I think remote working revealed to everyone how much office "networking" was always kinda delusional.
For sure, networking is important, but I have never found opportunities talking to the same people in my fishbowl. It was almost impossible to talk to the right people within the organization in person, and cornering them is not a great first impression. Reaching out to them on Teams is a whole different ball game, and one that I think more people are good at. Getting the right attention from the right people is also easier in large group chats.
Apart from that, working remote is not strictly at home. There's a whole wide world out there to meet people and find opportunity.
> how much office "networking" was always kinda delusional.
I think different people benefit from it differently. Most people regardless of remote or in-office, put on their headphones and barely talk to anyone else all day, and being in the office has zero if not negative networking benefit for them.
Then there are a few "social butterflies" who know everyone in every department, and they benefit in various ways internally and externally. Internally maybe they can move a difficult cross-department project because they have friends there, which then comes back as praise and rewards. Externally maybe one of their friends get a better position somewhere else and poach them, etc. etc.
I can't speak beyond my own experiences, but yeah the "social butterfly" phenomena is also a bit of a lie.
It's rare to see someone just walk into a business as a total outsider and charm their way in. See how well they handle unfamiliar people. Most of them will stay in their bubble. When you and your unfamiliar people are all nerds, you're actually in the best position to figure them out. They try to take the easy way out with flattery. Something like: "Oh, you all are so smart I couldn't possibly comment." before running back to their people. Does that really seem like a "social butterfly" to you?
Networking is one thing, but nepotism is another. I don't like working with people who can drag everyone else down. Small businesses are more vulnerable than anywhere else, yet that's where you see it most often.
Remote work is one of the things i would expect every country government to incentivise and promote.
Countryside, villages, islands would revive, less traffic, pollution, less unnecessary company and personal costs, more happy people and families, more opportunities globally, etc.
But no, some property owners in the centre are more important than this and we have to live in overcrowded cities. Kudos
From a nation standpoint, doesn't "incentivizing and promoting" remote work also incentivize off-shoring jobs out of your economy? If your nation's companies perfect remote work, why would they higher your highly paid citizens living in (relatively) high cost of living areas when they could hire massive remote teams in lower cost of living countries to do the same job for less?
I'm a big fan of flexibility, and certainly think companies should do their best to treat their employees as adults and let them do what works best for them and their teams. But it is really weird to me to watch an industry that has spent years trying to convince companies that hiring off-shore remote workers had all sorts of negative externalities on team cohesion and the development process suddenly fall head over heals in love with the idea of all companies going all in on "off-shore remote workers".
Shoreline to downtown Seattle is not even close to 1 hour each way by car, maybe 35 mins, if you stretch it. That been said, I feel you, commuting sucks, consider living closer or finding a new gig.
There is plenty of alternative routes, I-5 is a dumb route to take because everyone thinks the same way, you could take aurora avenue, or cross the bridge from ballard, or even the other one close to UW. Google Maps is also wrong all the time btw.
Have you been doing the commute lately? All the routes are bad, it’s just a question of bad or worse. I have to make the drive sometimes and it typically takes 40 min or so just to north Seattle.
I've been remote for ~6 years. I can't stand being in an office when I don't need to be there and looking busy. On top of that, commute savings are great. I work out of a coworking space a walking distance from where I live. I also had a child recently, and being able to pick him up easily after work is priceless. Forcing most tech talent to be in the same 2-3 cities is one of the worst things in recent history.
I've been working remotely for over 20 years. ProTip: working remote does not mean working from home. Surround yourself everyday with the people you want. Go to coworking spaces, coffee shops, parks. Find fellow remote workers and host coworking sessions and your places.
I can see how this can help get you a change of pace, but as someone who learned during the pandemic they don't like remote working nearly as much as they thought they would, isn't doing this every day just commuting to a worse office with extra steps?
I guess if your office is really awful or your commute is ridiculously long it might be better. But all the talk you see about why working at an office is so bad for people's productivity cite the noise, distractions, unrelated chatter etc. Co-working spaces filled with people who aren't even on your team, coffee shops filled with angry customers and stay at home parents toting their toddlers and parks full of barking dogs and biting insects seem like they would all be their own cacophony of distractions and noises to rival even some of the worst open office plans.
Also at least around where I am, co-working spaces cost between $100-500 / month, and the coffee at the coffee shops while better than what is at the office is also $3-5 a cup. The parks are admittedly free, but the ergonomics of the tree trunk and root system leave a little to be desired. I'm sure it works for some people, but if I'm not spending my day working on my front porch in the sun with my dog, I think I'd rather be in the office instead of in the corner of a local coffee shop.
If there were no previous study available, there would be no argument to enforce a policy to enable this. So I am thankful that someone made a study, now there is more ”data” to back the claim up.
For me personally, life has basically been divided into before and after. I used to spend an extra two hours every day just getting to and from work, taking public transport, which honestly wasn’t exactly inspiring. Now working from home is a real pleasure, and life has become so much more enjoyable.
I went from being fully in-person at a design firm (IDEO), working every day in a project room full of brilliant designers, to fully remote at the same company post-COVID. The remote period was a nonstop marathon of Zoom meetings, and I eventually left.
With that said, I'm grateful to have made the transition to remote working, because I got to be there for my daughter's early years.
Now I still work remote, but on my own terms, as an independent consultant. The difference is night and day.
What I learned is that remote vs hybrid vs in-office doesn't matter nearly as much as feeling engaged and effective in your role. If you feel that, it doesn't matter where you are.
About 10 years here, and I agree. At first I found myself missing the day to day interaction with co-workers, but after about 6 months I completely acclimated and can't imagine ever willingly going back to an office with bad privacy, commutes, coffee, smells and noise unless the need is extreme.
Not the OP but chiming in as someone who has worked remote almost exclusively since 2015.
In my opinion that's the crux of this debate: social needs vs social remedies.
If you have high social needs but don't have a strong personal social network, then an office is a great remedy. It solves the problem for you by default.
Remote only seems to work for the inverse. Lower social needs, or a strong social network outside of work, or some mix of the two.
I'm fairly extroverted (as far as engineers go) and I'm grateful to have a social network I've cultivated personally. So remote has fit well for me. I can get my work done to a high standard without the obligation, then turn around and spend purposeful time with friends and family.
It's perfect for me, but not for everybody, and you can see that in the comments here.
What remote really did was expose how many people were relying on office culture to meet their social needs. That's not a bad thing. It just surfaced something that went under-noticed for a long time.
I like 1-2 days in-office if the team is actually local but the problem is that companies can't decide what they want (in-office vs cheaper LCOL labor) and it ends up being the worst of both worlds where you drive into the office just to sit alone in conference rooms on video calls with people in other offices.
It's not just LCOL options. For even modestly large companies, there are probably teams scattered around the world and you're having teleconferences at many hours of the day and night.
Just the amount of time and life you waste for commute can be staggering. And of course all the other overhead that comes with going to and back from the office.
Being forced to work in an office when you KNOW you can work remotely is the most soul crushing thing I have ever experienced. It feels a tiny little bit like a Serf not allowed to leave the land.
The nature of employment has changed and there is no going back.
"These findings challenge assumptions that remote work undermines connection and retention. Instead, they suggest that remote work can support well-being and that well-being, not proximity, is a key factor in employee retention."
What is interesting to me here is the conflict between well-being and corporate interests. It is high time that well-being is being mentioned and considered as the definitive measure of employee retention.
Those aren't the same workers though. There's a dichotomy of remote workers - some are screwing off during the day and some are working more hours than they should be since it can be hard to unplug from the desk (especially if it's a full remote cmpany with people across four plus timezones).
Like everything, you remember the exceptions. Most people are in the middle, doing their 8. As remote workers they might take an hour to do a Costco run while it's not busy, and work an extra hour after the kids are in bed. Yes during COVID there were a lot of remote workers not doing much, but hopefully most companies with a good remote work culture have weeded those out by now.
yeah, but not extra hours, just putting in the mandatory required. Friends, neighbors that work from home do the same. Heck, our AP clerk that works remote is processing transactions at 2a and is unreachable during normal business hours.
The true workaholics are a small minority, though. Office workers who do this are part of the small minority. OTOH, it's a regular occurrence for those who work remote: not because they're workaholics, but because they're putting in their eight.
I go to work to attend video calls in office and remain quiet and working under supervision the rest of the time. I don't see the people I work with in real life. Unfortunately, as an extrovert, this is still preferable to working from home. I'm not white so I'm not really allowed to exist in public so the benefits of remote work doesn't apply to me.
In the same vein, the office is now high-pressure because of economic anxiety. It's one thing to hear about someone getting fired who was only ever a head on a screen versus someone getting fired that you knew in person. The current US administration has been hostile to the background of many of my respected colleagues and this creates fear in the office. It also creates anti-competitive incentives.
Additionally, The University of Colorado Boulder profits from online degrees and this link was more a marketing tactic than an academic piece. I think fully remote work works for some, and not for others. Even still, an online program may be the best way to find out.
It depends on your personality: If you shine in meetings and love the hallway talk, you will suffer in remote work.
If you already juggle multiple dependencies in your life (small children and/or in school, elder care, other dependents and special situations, dual study), or simply have too many interests, hobbies and love to do more things outside your work, remote work just feels revolutionary, to the point you just resent going to the office.
My F500 employer has on-site requirements. Colleagues and I sad-laugh because we all commute into the office, and spend most of the day on Zoom meetings with colleagues from other locations - you know, exactly the same thing we would do from home.
Workers without 5-10 hours of unpaid commute time in their week are happier. Gee whiz.
That's time to run errands, learn a skill, exercise, sleep, read, do nothing... it's almost as though our time is valuable and we don't like wasting it.
Especially true if you aren't doing a job you enjoy.
The downside of going remote is there can be a lot of project momentum lost in coordination issues. More chat based meetings, and less actual product out the door. =3
> For years, many employers have worried that work-from-home arrangements leave employees isolated, disconnected from coworkers and more likely to leave their jobs.
Aww! All this while, I didn't know RTO came from a place of genuine worry and care about your workers. There I was thinking, that RTO was more about control and domination. Forgive me master, for I knew not.
I suspect the "more likely to leave their jobs" is the part the executives actually care about.
If you're remote and there's an "upgrade" remote job, there's very little friction to switch beyond the usual onboarding. You don't have to find a local job for your spouse, sell your house, switch your kids' schools, etc. You just mail your old laptop in and wait for a new one to arrive. Maybe you have to get up early or work later to match the local time zone if you have many in-office coworkers.
And, if you work at a big company that pays well, it can also let you get off the hamster wheel early and "leave your job" for retirement by moving to a medium- or low cost of living area while continuing to get paid an outsized amount for the area.
This is partly self-selecting, though. For example, it could really be saying that introverts - more likely to select remote work - are also more likely to be happy on their own. Extraverts are more likely to be happy around other people, but also more likely to be unhappy because of the behaviour of other people.
I've worked at a multi-national bank with HQ in London, Operational HQ in Singapore, Shared Services in Malaysia, India and China, Data centres in Hong Kong, Dubai and back in England. Every day was basically remote working with teams across the globe. No video; email, IP phones and audio-only meetings on MS Office Communicator. When the bank downsized office space so that 1/3 of shared services had to work from home, wasn't an issue at all because we were so used to working remotely.
This biggest issue is that new and middle managers are only trained to manage, not to lead. They feel that they must be able to reach out and touch someone to manage, hence RTO.
For a programmer, remote work is the worst. Constant endless notifications from emails, slack messages and calendars. Excessive amounts of meetings to replace what used to be 5 minute chats at someone's desk. Expectations of instantaneous and always on availability since everyone works different hours now and since you're remote and have a VPN they know you can get online. Intrusion into your private space with forced cameras, microphones and mandatory spyware that's now running on a machine on your personal network. Wasted minutes in every meeting dealing with microphone failures or latency induced "I was- oh- sorry- no you go first".
All that to say, like everything in life, remote work is a trade off.
If I need heads down time during WFH, I literally turn on do not disturb mode and flip my teams to "busy". As in the office, I would put headphones on and find a quiet corner.
Meetings depend on the company, my team gets a lot of information transferred quickly whether it's on a call, in person, or async over teams messages.
Spyware - definitely sucks, I luckily have a pretty lax IT group (I'm part of them) but we're not super concerned unless something is malicious.
I think to some, remote work is a trade off. To others, remote work is a gigantic benefit. I would take remote work over a 25% raise, for example. Others might not.
To each their own, but for me - not putting miles on my. vehicles, getting 2+ hours of the day back, and being able to hit laundry / other chores over lunch is amazing for my work/life balance.
Of course. When I went remote, I could work from Miami during the winter, and escape the NYC cold months. Going for a swim to your buildings roof pool after done with the day, was the best feeling ever.
> remote roles tend to be concentrated in administrative or analytic work, whereas onsite roles may involve clinical or operational responsibilities ... may contribute to differences in well-being or turnover beyond location of work alone
So this is comparing jobs that can be remote (IT/clerical etc) with those that can't (janitors, medical staff, night security).
There are probably more differences in well-being between those roles than if they are remote or not.
I have a related question as someone who's been fully remote for about 12 years now, including all of my time in more senior/management roles: how does in person work even work for people who are in meetings all day every day?
My role (eng director) consists basically of 50-60 half hour meetings a week, back to back, with people all over the country/world. It wouldn't be tenable in an open office and it wouldn't even be tenable if I had to physically move across a campus in between meetings. Did people just work/manage across fewer projects and teams?
You are in office and then you hunt for a quite office room for every call, within the same campus you hope everyone gets to the same conference room which in bigger companies is infeasible so you are still remote aka face to face over a call... Haha.
That's how all engineering leaders I have worked with have worked.
Maybe this is just because you can have more meetings being remote. If you were inside an office and had to mive between meetings, you would maybe scale down this (insane) number of meetings per week.
There were a lot less meetings cause you would just walk over and talk with someone. Of course that’s still a meeting but it meant that people generally had more free time to connect and often problems would be resolved in five minutes right away instead of waiting for a scheduled half hour meeting.
Not to mention the number of times that I would end up taking a “meeting” in my boss’s office while he was on a call that he wasn’t listening to
When I was at Google it wasn't uncommon for a particular conference room to be "assigned" to a director or VP. From what I remember their calendars were always crazy full, too.
Many projects, many teams. Eventually it all becomes tens of thousands of unread emails, a lot of "thanks, but I've gotta leave for my next meeting", and lots of multitasking.
A big issue with non-remote is access to opportunities. A lot of organizations don't have offices everywhere, and I having to relocate every time there's a job change is absurd.
For what it’s worth having to relocate for work if the new work isn’t local has been the norm for like 10000+ years. I’m not sure it’s absurd, but it is a trade off.
It may have been the normal before we had the technology to remove that need. Obviously it may be the normal for certain types of work still, but I don't see why it needs to be that way for office work. This ends up greatly affecting housing markets too and making life more expensive for everyone.
From what I saw most people who "like" going to office are those suffering from domestic violence, having young children and wanting "time off" from parenting and in case of managers, the feeling of power over other human beings is not the same over Teams. Then you have narcissists and peeps/pervs who enjoy being in the middle of "action" and finally people who don't have any friends who hope they find them at a workplace. If you feel the need to go to office, book appointment with a therapist. Maybe you have an unresolved issue.
Couldn't one argue that if you think "most" of the people who say they like going to the office are lying, abuse victims, burned out parents, power tripping managers, narcissists, perverts and lonely losers, that it might be *you* that has an unresolved issue? Maybe people really do enjoy being in the office because they enjoy spending time with like minded people engaging in a common activity. If there really was no benefit to gathering in a common space in person with like minded people to engage in a shared activity, conventions wouldn't be nearly as big of a thing as they are, and they certainly wouldn't be big among famously introverted nerd and geek interests and hobbies. And yet when I talk about a "convention" I bet your mind goes first to a nerd event, something like comic-con or a star trek convention, or even CES.
We have a 4-home-1-office policy ("office day" on Tuesdays), I think it captures the best of both worlds for software teams. I go to office to "work" as well but it's different work: building relationships, having conversations, mingling, meeting others. I cannot imagine getting any coding work done in the office.
I wonder if anyone has done the work to adjust for 'net salary per hour working or commuting' for WFH vs. in office work in a high cost of living area;
This can easily translate to a 50-80% higher salary after housing costs, which for sure would translate into better wellbeing for most people anyway. For some EU companies, this can mean not even having to live in the same country, so wildly different cost of living.
Just having to live somewhere you can reasonably commute to an office, even just 2 days a week, is massively limiting in terms of where and how you can afford to live on any salary. For a daily in office work it's even worse.
Then the commute costs; easily 5-10k GBP per year for 'commutable to London' towns in the countryside.
Whether your company is WFH or RTO is a decision, but please dont try to do a hybrid -- where some employees on the same team are remote while others are in office. You end up with team members going to the office, and just staying on a zoom the entire day without actual interaction. Worst of all worlds.
There might be biases I’m not sure the study accounts for:
1. People who work remotely are more likely to have asked for it, and people who are in a situation that asked for are more likely to be happy about it.
2. People working remotely tend to fight for it, which makes them less likely to say bad things about it (such as, that they’re not happy with their work)
3. As another comment mentioned it, there might be a bias due to the fact that some jobs can’t be done remotely (e.g. housekeepers)
The sample is not high quality, but the conclusion is pretty obvious. No thinking person can doubt that improving work/life balance, flexible hours, sleeping more, commuting less and comfy pants is going to lead to any other outcome.
Its not just sleeping more but having more people wake up in their optimal times. People's natural wake up times are in a distribution so when you remove the commute time you including more people in the optimum wake up times.
I wish fully remote was something you could earn once you've spent X amount of years at a company. After 3 years, or 5 years, you know how the company works, you know the culture, you have an internal network etc. I think at that point, depending on your role you're more equipped to effectively manage fully remote work. Fully remote is so helpful for families who have to navigate daycare drop-off/pick-up times that don't align with work + commute hours. Gaining the ability to work fully remote after X amount of years with a company could help retain mid-level seniority in that phase of life.
> I wish fully remote was something you could earn once you've spent X amount of years at a company.
IME this is how it used to be in many companies. You earn trust for a few years then petition to go remote. There was usually a lot of process involved (I remember having my request go up the chain to a VP for approval) but as long as you were a high performer and okay with a mild pay cut, it generally went through.
Then post-COVID many companies had trouble luring people back when being in-office was purely optional. That's when you started seeing the RTO mandates and the refusal to allow anyone to switch to remote regardless of performance.
> Then post-COVID many companies had trouble luring people back when being in-office was purely optional. That's when you started seeing the RTO mandates and the refusal to allow anyone to switch to remote regardless of performance.
This is a bigger thing I think than most people realize. Before the pandemic I worked for a company that had a flexible policy of allowing people to work from home for the sake of work life balance (e.g. contractors, kid's recitals etc), but not an official "hybrid" policy for a fixed number of days remote. When the pandemic first hit, made it very clear when they sent everyone home that they wanted to get us back to the office as soon as it was safe to do so. When things started to open up again, they asked people to start voluntarily coming in to the office 2-3 days a week. And yet, the entire time they had that ask in place, every time I was in the office, I could probably have counted on one hand the number of people in the office on my floor and from everyone else I talked to who came in, it was the same every day. And I fully admit to being a part of that problem. But since people didn't do what was asked of them for a hybrid system, it seems obvious then that the company would insist then that everyone come back to the office full time. I really do believe that we would have ended with a hybrid system had people actually showed up on a fairly regular basis, but without people showing up, it became a negative feedback loop where people would show up less and less because every time they did, it was just remote work, but from the office.
It also probably didn't help that we had so many people all over every social media network (including HN here) bragging about how much they were doing during their work hours that was anything other than the work they were being paid to do. If you start broadcasting to the world how you're only giving your employer 4 hours a day out of the 8 hours they're paying you for when you're working from home, it should be unsurprising that they decide they can't trust people to work from home and insist they come back to the office.
Stop coming to my desk when I am working. The context switching of having 1 visitor an hour can wreck my productivity. I wish I could quantify this in USD$ and then track over the course of a year how much certain individuals are misappropriating company resources for their own pleasure. This should be a fireable offense. Lets turn on these wifi body tracking tools and start measuring metrics and KPIs for these intermittent "desk fault interruptions"! I demand satisfaction and dashboards with leader rankings.
On the other hand, I usually find people are generally observant of your desk space, especially if you look really busy with something. But remotely, you're constantly interrupted by incessant notifications from the slack channels you're in, from people directly messaging you to see if you're available for something and from an increase in 30 minute meetings to replace what should have been a 5 minute chat at someone's desk. And that's not counting having to actually stop what you're doing and literally switch tasks and screens to go read through all the slack messages and emails you've missed. And that doesn't account for the extra time you have to spend going and correcting a conversation that went off the rails that you could have helped solve faster if only you'd known it was happening, but since it happened in another window while you were heads down, and not at the desk 5 feet away where you could hear it, you missed everything before the folks in question went way down a rabbit hole.
Since full remote I can spend 8 hours a day on work instead of 10 (an hour commute each way). Putting aside other benefits like easy and cheap lunches, way better desk ergonomics and equipment, and all the sundry other benefits, working remote allows me to have a life that I never could when I worked in an office because of those 2 hours a day.
It's nice to be face-to-face with people, but I don't need that every day (and frankly don't want it neither), but all the benefits in quality of life overwhelming favor remote work for me to the point I will put up with way more shenanigans just to keep this benefit.
It depends. For someone who’s not disciplined, WFH may not be as productive. I have been using an app to track how focused I have been. I find that when I work at home, my focused score is usually lower.
Study certainly is biased since primary data comes from single unnamed organisation - likely MD Anderson. With 3 out of 4 authors of the paper from same institute makes more objective title "An employer's internal Leadership Institute analyzes its own employee-engagement and HR data and concludes that its remote employees have better well-being."
HNs just like: now that I have the most highly sort after perk that almost no other job has I feel lonely :( wahhhh, wahhhh. Declares "remote work isn't what it's cracked up to be" while they sit on their golden thrones. Poor HNers.
I find remote work makes it harder to draw boundaries. I don’t really have work hours anymore. Co workers are all over the world. Sub 7am meetings. Post 6pm meetings. I wonder if in the old days pre remote if you could just close that laptop and go home?
Absolutely. When I started working at Amazon in 2014 it had a reputation as a company with a very bad work life balance. On the other hand, all communication was done through email and conference call (no cameras). Most people who worked late also stayed late, so it was obvious if someone was being overloaded. We had physical pagers still, which were a kind of physical totem of on-call work that made it very obvious if you were expected to do work outside of business hours.
Compared to the situation today with Slack, AI, and remote culture, almost every company IMO has a much worse work life balance than Amazon did 15 years ago.
I find it easier. In the office a boss can stop me and ask to stay late, a coworker might ask question at 4:59pm, etc. When wfh, literally no one can stop me from closing the work laptop.
It's fascinating how well the system recovers. If it works, companies that do remote work will outperform those that don't. And the reverse. If many companies all opt-in to remote work and output declines inflation will correct that.
I'm four days a week in the office and almost all my meetings are on Zoom.
It's noisy, lunch is rarely below 20 dollars (no, I don't have time nor will I cook a big pot of 4 meals Sunday night), the lights are too bright, the commute is crowded and causes anxiety, and my housing costs are very high so the commute is less than 45m.
I hate RTO - and I'm in leadership. Anyone who's working from home and whining about it should be ashamed of the privilege. You're incredibly lucky.
Not everyone works at Initech though. My office is quiet, filed with sound deadening cubical furniture (a conversation at normal speaking volumes 10 feet away is almost inaudible) and ample private meeting rooms. Lunch is rarely above $12 and is on par with or better than most of the quick serve restaurants in the area both in terms of price and quality of food. The lights are at a reasonable level and most of the lighting is natural sunlight coming in from the huge floor to ceiling windows. The commute is bearable depending on where you live and while the housing costs are definitely high closest to the office, you can still easily find large single family homes on good sized pieces of land well within budget and inside a 30 minute commute. I am indeed incredibly lucky that I work for a company that took employee comfort and experience seriously when they built this office.
I wonder how much dislike around working in offices is less because working in an office is such a terrible experience vs working in a specific office for a company that doesn't care about their employee work environment is a terrible experience. I worked at a place for a brief window that made Initech look like a 5 star hotel, and if I had to work there every day, I might hate RTO too even though I found during the pandemic I didn't like WFH nearly as much as I thought I would.
So maybe "Anyone who's in leadership and wanting their employees to RTO should be ashamed of the fact that anyone could produce a list of grievances that long about working in their office"
After 6 years of full remote I am seriously considering how much of a pay cut I would accept to get work in person in an office and get to speak the local language daily.
Let me just summarize what the LLMs comment on this thread:
- home office is bad and this link only has one sample so its automatically invalid and does not take any type of combination and occupation under the sun into account
- home office is a prison because you dont talk to people
and now the humans:
- saving commute time is good (less traffic, pollution, less unnecessary company and personal costs)
- having more time for children
- remote work != home office, you can work anywhere btw
- don't have to pretend to look busy
You know these were just the first 10 comments I read, you make up your mind now
This seems obvious and predictable. of course people with flexibility, comfort, privacy, and convenience are better off than people forced into a grueling commute, a sick office, an exposed cubicle and toxic office politics
The only circumstance where an office is actually fun is when a company is small (pre-HR), there are nerf guns, beer and a vibe of "we are fucking doing this!"
Once all that stops and things get sterile it is annoying. Open offices, less privacy in the bathroom, constant distractions and smells so some buffoon in leadership can feel lordly while watching the peasants work.
I mean yes, if I can work in my sweatpants (or no pants), not have to pack myself a lunch, and more easily goof off when I feel it is acceptable to do so, I too would report a higher 'well-being'. You wouldn't have to ask me twice to work remote again - unfortunately I work in manufacturing which can't really be done from one's home, usually.
This is a funny thing to study though, I'm really curious what they hope to gain from this 'knowledge'.
Remote only if done right, otherwise nope. i have seen many “remote” but in reality they dictate other measures rendering it worse than in person, like 6hrs a day of xyz time zone to be present, others even want to have an open camera in these hours, others have other means of surveillance to track your location or time spent on the device. If the remote job isn’t asynchronous, minimal meetings, and only the outcome is required from you, it’s not remote and would rather go to the office so this scum employer pay hefty rent instead.
I have also noticed some are trying to portray remote as “woke”, I don’t even know the relationship between both
I'm also curious. I work remote about 95% of the time and my time spent in the office is by far my least productive. Way more ad hoc chats and longer lunches (both work related and not). I do enjoy the social aspect a lot, but man I get so much less actual work done. On occasion though, those chats lead to a really great idea for the product, so there's also that.
Clearly easier for you, me, or anyone else to delude ourselves into thinking our tech or jobs are harmless. God knows I prefer and feel happier at a WFH job, but how is this different or better for us than filter bubbles, aside from the obvious perks that are nice? How comfortable should work be?
Remote employees are also in demand enough to negotiate / find a role with remote work. They probably then are experienced, senior, and better compensated than their peers.
It could be that the underlying cause is being more in-demand in a position to negotiate remote work, not remote work by itself.
…of a single company
> Researchers analyzed survey data from 7,704 employees at a large healthcare organization.
I’ve been remote and worked for remote companies for a long time. In my observation, the well-being is bimodal. The people who adapt well to remote thrive. There are a lot of people who think they’re going to love remote who ultimately flame out from the loneliness, isolation, lack of visual boundaries between work and home life, and lack of externally enforced routine.
It’s really sad when the latter happens because it’s almost always someone who was hired for their great work and abilities. Then over time they get drained and you can see that the remote work wasn’t what they expected.
It’s basically impossible to predict who will fall into each category at the interview stage, or at least I can’t do it. Prior remote work success (not just experience) is the best indicator but it’s hard to evaluate, too. Some of the most difficult remote hires I’ve worked with had past remote work experience, but it’s only after being hired that you learn they struggled at those companies too.
Another factor beyond individual suitability to remote work (which certainly varies person to person and even within a person’s lifetime due to lifestyle changes), is the work situation itself.
One thing I don’t see mentioned in these discussions much is that someone might be perfectly content WFH when given clear goals and autonomy to execute in a neutral political environment, but do a few unexplained mass layoffs, give muddy direction or tighten the leash with stricter policies or new monitoring software and watch paranoia and depression take root (this is true in-office as well but I think gets amplified over Slack due to a stronger prisoner’s dilemma effect).
Unfortunately due to the power differential, any disruption to output caused by these situations will still be blamed on the individual contributor.
> amplified over Slack
Slack and Zoom are a massive parts of the problem. Because "my boss can read it" sure does curtail a lot of conversations.
You are left in a situation where you miss out on all sorts of hints that people just aren't putting out. A string of tepid yes's on the way to get coffee is a much different signal than a string of yes's with no context in Slack. Things may be different again on zoom because of equipment quality and connectivity and peoples willingness to be a certain way on camera (and when looking at themselves).
I have seen at least half a dozen work place kerfuffles in the last 5 years that would have been avoided entirely if people were regularly co-located.
Unless you're small enough to get away with a very open and free culture (both business and personal) then there is a lot being left on the table that requires work to be re-gained. Many organizations are still bad at this.
Agreed, the loss of some opportunities for signal like is definitely one of the downsides.
One thing that helps a lot is occasionally mixing in (non-recorded) video or phone calls, and having a lightweight way to initiate one.
Text chat: "quick call this afternoon?" "3pm ET?" ":thumb-up:" <call added to calendars>
For that matter, making 1-on-1 text chats mostly private reduces the chilling effect of perceived boss panopticon. The company might retain logs for various reasons, but the only access is through Legal, and only for exceptional events.
(Though, there may soon be an additional chilling effect on communication within a company: people will realize it's an individual problem if the company's third-party team communication SaaS is profiling them individually in company chats "for AI training", and using/selling that various ways. There's already a lot of SOP performative and gaming behavior in our field, especially when it comes to obtaining jobs and getting good performance evaluations and promotions, so we can extrapolate what will happen.)
I love my remote company for being mostly cameras off. We’re not even a small company at all. It’s so much less stressful than constantly being on Zoom on camera.
I load the dishwasher and do other small chores while I have 1:1s and other non-hands on keyboard meetings. It’s amazing for my home life. Thank goodness for modern noise canceling headphones.
I don’t feel like these small social cues or in-person signals are actually that valuable when it comes to completing tasks to make the company money. It’s really easy to avoid kerfuffles: hire the right people who exude the right values and don’t care for drama. Don’t hire people who are vindictive assholes.
From what I have seen, layoffs tend to go hand in hand with pushing for more work from the office (which companies hope will help them get rid of some employees without severance), so if being in the office helps combat layoff paranoia and depression, there's that.
I personally don't have less paranoia now I am in the office 3 days a week (and probably won't have less when I will soon be forced to come in 5 days a week either), but I only talk to "my" team via Teams no matter if I'm at home or in the office, because they're spread over several locations (and no, it doesn't make sense to do RTO in these conditions, but that just reinforces my certainty that all the talk about "increasing efficiency" is just BS and they simply hope to get rid of people, no matter how competent they are). In the meantime, I don't really care one way or the other, but if they want to get rid of me, they should at least offer me some money for it, I won't do them the favor of just leaving voluntarily (especially not in this economy).
You say your team is remote "anyway", but RTO precisely is about connecting with other people OUTSIDE your team, working on internal politics, and you act as an interconnection point between the remote team and the local network.
I think the two of you are thinking/talking about two different things.
In most workplaces before ~2020 individual teams had designated desks/islands - all team members were sitting next to each other, actually every individual had their own permanent desk.
And you could have a quick chat, pair program, and even adhoc whole team meeting by just removing your noise-cancelling headphones and talking to each other.
Though of course bigger/longer meetings would still be better in a meeting room because of big screen, not being nuisance to other people ...etc.
Most workplaces now do some variant of flexi-desks. At best a group of teams is allocated some specific area/desks, at worst it's completely random which desk you get.
And to have a chat/meeting you often need to still do it via conference call, or get into a meeting room.
Between that, and usually having some people from the team still WFH on that day (many workplaces don't even have enough work desks or cafeteria - for everyone to come into office on the same day) - you now need more meeting rooms than before.
And for some reason they didn't add more meeting rooms, even when redesigning office buildings.
Actually, you both misunderstood what I wrote: the team is spread across multiple locations in three countries. They all work from their respective offices, but for meetings we still have to use Teams. That's especially galling: my company is more than ready to embrace remote working tools when it's to its advantage, reassigning people as it sees fit, but it now completely denies the advantages of remote working/home office to its employees. Actually, because of budget restrictions, I have never seen any of the team members (except the one I'm in the same office with) in person. My company is one of those typical multinationals that grew through mergers and acquisitions and now has offices all over the world - but I'd bet it's not one of those that come to your mind, somehow it managed to fail to build any sort of brand recognition, mostly because it's a B2B company.
Vent ahead:
I was brought on to a team as WFH - there was an office, but most of the team I worked with were in different states. But a lot of folks had left 6-12 months previous. I was stepping in to a void, and just had some jira tickets.
Manager above me wasn't technical, didn't know my project, just said "get done what you can". I worked and filled out timesheet. I was pinging the ticket owner, no response. Tickets were for an external client. Asked manager to arrange meeting. Took 2 weeks. Got a meeting with the external client using the system who had put these tickets in. "That was Jeremy, he doesn't work here any more... I think he was talking to Glen". Well.. Glen left our team 6 months earlier.
Emily at the client I was talking to had no idea what this was for, cause she only started 2 months earlier. Another week later she said "I don't think we need any of this - whoever asked for it is gone, and I have no info".
I had recorded... probably 130 hours on a few of these tickets mostly just trying to get stuff to build. Emily couldn't update tickets because it was tied to Jeremy who had left.
2 weeks later I had some department head at our company about 4 levels above me call me on my personal phone and start yelling at me telling me I'd put the project way over budget, I was 6 months behind schedule, and was jeopardizing the entire client relationship, and she was threatening to fire me. Apparently the whole budget for the project was 60 hours - I'd more than doubled that plus whatever people before me had done, etc. But... the client contacts I had had no idea what it was for, or really even who wanted it in the first place. I remember this woman saying "the budget was only 60 hours - you blew it up!" I said "I never gave those estimates in the first place, and there's no one here who even knows what this code is to even ask". "None of that matters, we may lose this client because of your incompetence...."
That was pure insanity. I left shortly after - already had something else lined up, but was on the fence about leaving (devil you know vs devil you don't). At that point, I knew I'd had enough of this devil. I left for another remote/WFH position.
This was also ... towards the end of 2020 - depths of covid, lockdowns, etc. Crazy times indeed.
Next time go to your manager and say "I'm seriously considering axing this project and I want your approval to do so. x, y, and z are no longer applicable and the landscape of the client relationship has changed in the interim as well."
That's kafkaesque and reads totally surreal ... but I have seen enough to know it is possible.
re: department head at our company about 4 levels above me... -- what could be going through this person's mind when they continue yelling at someone after the situation has been explained? A friend got screamed at by some upper level person for being three months behind on a project. They contined screaming even after my friend explained it was his first day at the company.
This is when you find a new WFH position. Imagine how bad it would be working in an office with sociopaths that want all of those things?
I used to have a hybrid job. The company culture was oriented for 100% remote, because it was 100% remote until RTO happened. The office space felt like a coworking space where everybody was a remote worker who just happened to work on the same project in the same company. Nobody ever approached anybody, everything was over Slack. We did have meeting rooms but everybody preferred calling in from their desks. Even for the daily standup! Most miserable workplace experience of my life.
I interpret the study findings not as remote workers being happier, but on-site workers being less happy in remote-oriented companies than on-site workers in on-site-oriented companies.
I will say I dislike remote work in terms of how much I enjoy work or how effective I am at my job. But having a 100% remote job has made me far more able to maintain my house and be present for my children when they’re still very young. So if we were weighting overall life satisfaction that outweighs the extent to which it alienates me from my job.
Now maybe my employer has reason to dislike that I’m probably like 80% of the worker I would have been if we were in office, but the 80% has been enough to exceed expectations on my performance reviews so there doesn’t seem to be a problem. He has the equivalent of an F-150 that he only ever uses to commute to the office. People seem to be into that.
Commuting wears you out. The energy and stress saved from not having to drive in bumper to bumper traffic or ride public transportation can add a good deal of productivity.
I feel the opposite. Before the pandemic, I would have said I'd 100% want a fully remote job if I could have it. I even looked at applying to Gitlab because of that. And then the pandemic hit and I spent 2 years working from home all the time. One of the surprising things I learned in that was that I need a commute. I need a physical separation of work and the rest of my life that lets me mentally shift gears from thinking about work things to thinking about home things. I needed some time to just listen to music or a podcast or audio book without any other demands on my time.
And I found that going for a walk or something like that to replace the commute didn't have the same effect, for a number of reasons. There was the mental hurdle of forcing myself to try taking the walk instead of going straight from A to B since I was already there. There was the fact that while I could try to flush home concerns from my mind on the walk, coming back to my home where all those home concerns are right there for me to notice when I walk through the door meant that all that mental flushing was for naught.
Now I admit that I am fortunate enough to have a commute where I'm rarely in bumper to bumper traffic, and it's less than a 30 minute drive. But at least for me, a commute is a vital part of my work routine.
My best situation was a commute to work that was about 45 minutes door to door and involved a 30 minute bus ride. I mostly got to read novels on the bus. It was nice.
I was childless and petless then though. The thought of squeezing everything in between school drop-offs, pick-ups, after-school scheduled activities, and dog walks is when things get really annoying.
I'm the same way. I absolutely need a commute and a hard bifurcation of my work and personal environments. I've been paying for coworking services of some kind since COVID. That and having a separate work phone has helped a lot.
100% agree. I'm the exact opposite of the grandparent - I get much better work done on my wfh days because I'm not drained by the commute.
I'd probably feel different if I had a 5-10 minute walk to an urban office but I never had. (Did have a very short suburban commute for a while, but people I knew were always pulling dangerous stunts when they saw me walking to pick me up so I pretty much gave it up.)
I used to live 15 min walk, 5 min bike ride from an office i was required to go to twice a month. It was a nice commute.
Then I moved and now its a 30 min drive. Not a nice commute.
I didn't hate the 25-30 minute driving commute I had at one point but I had to go in pretty much every day even in the snow which wasn't great. This was a time when you were pretty much expected to go into the office other than a rare state of emergency.
Latterly I had about a 30 minute driving commute again but I was doing so much travel that I wasn't consistently in the office that much.
In the last twelve months ive had electricians, plumbers, kitchen renovators all work in my home while I was wfh. In an age gone by I would burn annual leave to deal with this. I dont know how I could handle the logistics of full in office again.
It makes me wonder what people did before WFH was prevalent!
Stay-at-home moms/housewives were the load bearing pillar for that whole lifestyle.
Not sure if you intended to sound like Claude. If so, well played :)
They didn’t sound like Claude; Claude sounds like them.
It really depends on the company culture. Where I work (in the bay area) people come to the office two days a week, but those days are when everybody schedule the important in person meetings. Focused work happens rest of the weekdays at home.
it says a large healthcare org but does not say if that's a care provider where on-site jobs will be completely different from remote-compatible ones, or an insurer where most jobs could be done mostly on a PC.
I get this. What we are missing out on now is being able to read the room and environment PROPERLY. Hybrid jobs won't do this well. WFH won't, above a certain percentage of people working from home, in general, usually.
> lack of visual boundaries between work and home life,
This was the major one for me, in addition to the other stuff you mentioned. The "always at work" feeling was reinforced by the management style of remote work being like, we expect you to be generally available to respond at any time in a 12 hour window, sometimes more (because everyone works their own schedules across multiple timezones). In an office this separation is clean, and if I'm responding to messages or working at home, it's generally accepted this is outside the norm and I'm perfectly free to just shut the laptop off until the next morning 99% of the time unless I am on-call. It's nice.
The first thing I did when I went back fully in-office was tear down my home office and turn it into a game room. I generally do not even use a computer in my home. Sometimes we have enforced WFH days due to various things or events, but I established the understanding with management that generally I will not be expected to work full days from home outside of emergencies and I take those days off.
I understand some people love it, and I have a good office environment which helps, but the downsides (general office annoyances, commuting, lunch expenses, clothing expenses, etc) way outweigh the downsides of working remote for me. I got severely depressed and burnt out very quickly.
I have my desktop computer where I do my own stuff like games in the same desk where I put my work laptop, and yeah sometimes it feels like I'm never really done as the transition is just closing the laptop and switch the monitor input, one thing I like though is that we do mob programming so when it's over it's truly over as we share responsibility rather than me having to finish something on my own before a deadline. But yeah I'm thinking of putting a second desk in another room for work, I don't want my own house to feel like an office.
I find that what I usually do it just leave the house for a bit too, eithe for a walk, to the gym, or to the grocery store. Having a some moments away from the "bad screen" before the "good screen" is wildly helpful for me.
> The "always at work" feeling was reinforced by the management style of remote work being like, we expect you to be generally available to respond at any time in a 12 hour window
That's not a management style, it's a 12 hour on call which needs to be compensated without appropriately higher pay and comply with work time regulations.
I am doing well with remote because I'm pathologically introverted and find that being around people is exhausting. I can imagine things being the other way around for extroverts and that is saddening.
Yeah this is the primary disconnect because management is more extroverted and so they hated remote / don't see why some want it.
I think the introvert / extrovert thing is oversimplifying things too much. I'm a very introverted person, and my favorite thing to be working on is stuff that's in the background quietly making things better in invisible ways. But that's the whole reason I want to be in an office with other people. Because I'm aware that I need people to know what it is that I do, and it's easier for me to make that happen when I can interact with someone one on one instead of having to blast stuff into a chat with 30 other people reading, or having to carefully pick my words because all the side bands of human communication that I've put so much effort into learning to read and use are gone in the sterile text of the screen.
We all know networking is an important part of your career. As an introvert, networking is a lot easier when I'm in a space where people already are and I can be seen, even if I'm not always being heard. And when I am heard in the office, it's usually among small groups of people, maybe 10 or less. Having to network by being actively visible and speaking in big open channels with 2-3 different teams and a few layers of management all watching, that's terrifying as an introvert but that's also how most companies run their chat systems because otherwise everyone has hundreds of channels that they have to keep track of and remember whose in what places and copy discussions around. Since it's easier just to have massive groups of people in one channel and have everyone use the larger channels most of the time, being remote and on slack is actually far more draining to me as an introvert. I also do best keeping tabs with what's going on when I can keep one ear on the other things going on around me instead of having to stop what I'm doing and intentionally scroll through pages and pages of slack messages.
And yes, because I'm introverted, being in person with a team of people that includes extroverts means I get human social connections that I need and would otherwise not seek out because, again I'm an introvert.
Honestly the lack of empathy about this topic from top management is extremely disturbing.
Nothing else in my career has ever changed my opinion about a CEO as quickly and drastically as hearing them completely dismiss it as noise, when hundreds of employees explain how negatively forced RTO affects their well-being and productivity.
I saw some management being hesitant about enforcing back to office at least part-time. But the way a lot of companies did hiring during COVID it was going to be pretty hard to put the genie back in the bottle unless they wanted to lose a lot of people. I'm familiar with one company that really hesitated to shove a lot of people into an official (as opposed to remote) category but they eventually gave up after closing some offices.
My "first-order costs only" spreadsheet put RTO at like twenty grand a year. I had no idea.
I started playing around with the idea of how much it costs to have a job based on location and it was interesting to see how different variables changed the final wage and how that played out against a map of the city.
$20k for the company to facilitate your workspace or $20k of net cost to you the employee to comply with RTO? If the latter and assuming a reasonable commute (15-35 minutes) one way how did you arrive at that number?
The first step is nailing down the numbers that everyone understands and agrees with.
I start with the stated wage on a job description and attempt to calculate the value of any additional benefits to arrive at the hourly rate a potential employer thinks my time is worth. Vehicle cost is similarly straightforward since wear and mileage calculators are standardized and you're already budgeting for parking if you need to.
However. Once you collect a handful of data points the rest of the process is entirely personal. For example, a one-hour commute each way sounds terrible unless that's the only time in the day you have to yourself, but if the traffic is never smooth or you need to switch trains three times it might be a wash.
The key point is to determine if a specific activity is solely work-related and if I get anything else out of it, and then apply the dollar value this potential employer sets on my time as above.
Now take a look at your food situation. Do you and your partner meal prep every Sunday without fail? Do you start your day at the Starbucks drive thru? Now take a look at your responsibilities. Do you have children? Do you have pets? Now take a look at your wardrobe. The list goes on and it's all situational.
The interesting part of the project was seeing how much home location + commute options + work location affect net pay by just dragging a few markers around a map of the city. I was adding average residential rent by location last time I touched this and felt like the project was turning into a map of the de facto minimum wage in my area.
To answer your question this was $20k net to me, mainly from maintaining a vehicle, eating out of the house, and keeping up my in-office appearance.
Well on the employee side it’s more complicated than you think. You have gas, yes, and then mileage on your car. And then working in an office means you have to take more time off to deal with mundane things like “the plumber is coming today”. And then 30 minutes of commute is 1 hour a day, which lowers your effective wage. And then of course there’s various other costs like food being more difficult and expensive, higher risk of serious bodily harm or death due to automobile use, and the biggest one: COL. living close to work can easily double your COL for no real gain.
Depending on the city, you could easily be looking at a 100% cost rise in rent, a few thousand on car maintenance and gasoline depending on your car a year, a few thousand on food, about ~12% reduction in wage, and a few days of lost PTO.
> biggest one: COL. living close to work can easily double your COL for no real gain
This is I think where hybrid (with weekly attendance) really makes more sense in theory than in practice, ending up as worst of both worlds depending.
With in-office you pay a premium for location that is good for commuting.
With remote you can choose a cheaper location without the commute constraint (maybe 50% off), somewhat offset by needing more space to setup a proper home office (add back 10-20%).
With hybrid you still need to be close enough that 2 days/week of commuting is tolerable and ALSO need space for a home office.
I guess if you consider your commute as purely work time then it starts making more sense. Maybe I’m unusual in that I don’t loathe my commute and see the time as 100% personal time.
The way I view it is that personal time means time id spend if work didn’t exist. If work didn’t exist, I wouldn’t commute. So, to me, it’s work time.
Yes it’s “easier” (sometimes) than working, but it’s still time I dedicate to work. Its entire purpose exists because work exists.
I used to have a really gnarly commute (1.5 hours one way, so 3 hours total, 3.5-4 if there was an accident). The level to which it affected my finances is one thing, but it absolutely demolished my quality of life. I couldn’t socialize, sleep, or even cook for myself due to the exhaustion. And spending minimum of 12 hours a day sitting destroyed my body and mental health. Not to mention traffic is not peaceful, it’s stressful. You have to constantly be “on” and paying attention. Even a single second of distraction can be an accident.
I generally agree that commute should count as work time more often than not but its complicated when you can take advantage of the commute to get other things done near your work site or along the route. E.g. if you commonly stop to get groceries half way from work to your home then perhaps you would have needed to spend time for that trip anyway. But that's more of an excuse for a 30 minute or less commute, not for over an hour.
I absolutely think employee's would try to game it if companies paid out commute time. Some companies do pay out travel time, which is a similar concept. I think you just have to accept some amount of gaming, that's life.
On the employee side, the solution is to ALWAYS factor in your commute time. A job that pays 20,000 dollars more a year can easily not be worth it if the commute is insane. If you have to double your rent to make it work, it's probably not worth it.
I factor in commute like I factor in other benefits, like health insurance and PTO. My salary can't necessarily replace those, so they implicitly have a higher value than money alone. It would take a really nice salary to override them. And I think that's why we see absurd salaries in places like Seattle. They know employee's are doing this calculus, they can't afford to pay 100,000 like you can in, say, Texas.
For me, the biggest thing was simply my ability to work in a quiet environment with little distraction. We went from an open office floor plan that was so loud I wore noise canceling head phones and a baseball hat to block the buzzy lighting to my own desk, in my own home, feet away from a bathroom and kitchen cleaned and stocked to my standards.
I will never go back.
>Prior remote work success (not just experience) is the best indicator but it’s hard to evaluate, too. Some of the most difficult remote hires I’ve worked with had past remote work experience, but it’s only after being hired that you learn they struggled at those companies too.
I often tell people that I'm unusually well suited to remote work because I've had a lot of practice. Starting in high school I was out more days than I was in owing to health problems, yet I still managed to knock out 11 AP classes because I got really serious about reading the textbook and actually studying on my own time. This was even before I discovered spaced repetition systems.
By the time I actually got to college I realized these techniques were not only more effective and enjoyable for me than sitting down in lectures, but that the vast majority of students never actually had to build these muscles to begin with. They really struggle when the courses get too big to cram into a class session, but it's not because they're dumb or anything - it's literally just an endurance sport they've never played.
I feel those same muscles are the ones I've been using in remote work, which I've had the good fortune to do my entire career in at least a 60% capacity and more often a 100% capacity. Remote work likely feels deeply unnatural at first, to people who aren't used to putting in focused sweat at a desk in their own room far beyond what traditional education typically requires.
I hope my own children develop this ability too, although I'm not really sure how to get them there.
>By the time I actually got to college I realized these techniques were not only more effective and enjoyable for me than sitting down in lectures, but that the vast majority of students never actually had to build these muscles to begin with.
This reminds me of a CS class I had in college with a bad professor. I knew the guy by reputation. We had like 4 tests that class, and the only time I stepped foot in the class room was to take his tests. I didn't bother with his lectures. I simply read the book and read the supplemental materials. The looks of outrage I got when it was revealed I got the highest grade in the class were priceless.
How do you know they're flaming out/struggling/etc because of remote work issues rather than other issues like company culture etc?
The most undeniable examples were when we worked at a company that had offices, but allowed people to work remote at their discretion.
The people who were burning out at home would become revived and re-energized when they came into the office for something and would stay that way for a week or two.
Then they would slide back into burnout and social problems (assuming benign interactions were hostile in Slack or that people were backstabbing the. was common) the longer they were away from the office.
Some people had the self-awareness to start bringing themselves back to the office for a few days each week and would directly admit they struggled to work from home.
It’s really not uncommon and readily acknowledged in every offline remote work environment I’ve been in. It’s only on social media where you run into claims that remote works well for everyone.
Likewise online you run into claims that full remote or hybrid can't and doesn't work for anyone, and we all interpret observed dynamics at work to construct theories supportive of whichever configuration is our favorite (WFH/Hybrid/In Office) or as evidence the one we dislike is worse. In reality the situation is messy and complicated and heavily circumstantial, depending on team/company culture and dynamics and working styles.
For instance, I've observed dynamics like what you describe at various orgs, and what they had in common was a lack of psychological safety. If people are responding defensively to benign messages then it tends to mean they have a reason to expect hostile messages. Hostile messages are not a given.
One common way this arises: a company ostensibly offers flexible remote work, but in practice strongly prefers in-office work, and enforces this via social pressure. Remote work has a small social cost that accumulates each full day that one works remotely. These remote-oriented workers then have to periodically show up at the office primarily to ingratiate themselves to management and their peers. This is incredibly common, and might even be the default configuration for an org that permits flexible WFH.
I don't think this is intentionally malicious, BTW. It's simply what happens when you make a policy shift without considering your team culture as well so that both working styles are supported as first-class citizens.
Thank you. This. The backstabbing and passive aggression are so much more trenchant.
It strikes me how broad the range in work experiences are. I have never had coworkers who cared about anything besides getting the work done. The idea of politics in the workplace is foreign to me, but I know it is common.
I had a lot more of that experience before the first dotcom bubble burst. Harder and harder to not know your coworkers political beliefs even if they do not talk about them at work now.
I’ve talked with colleagues that have confirmed exactly what the parent comment is saying. They benefit from the external structure, routine, and separation of work/home life.
Some people just don’t want to work next to their gaming PC, completely unsupervised. Others live alone and don’t live near their friends and family. Both these groups (can) suffer from a fully remote environment.
I fully support coworking spaces for folks who need the in person socialization (especially in the context of entry level and juniors), but I will leave the labor force entirely before I ever go back into an office (~12 years remote, ~25 years in tech). I have a partner and kids, coworkers are not my friends (we simply share a paycheck provider and a body of shared work), but I understand other lives and the needs of others differs. Your social needs are not my needs. I get to eat lunch with my partner every day, see my kids more, no commute, etc.
You also share a professional social network which is something you own separately from any company and I have found to be very valuable and strengthened by in-person work.
Either at the company or at home (though I mean working at a coffee shop sometimes isn't so bad). Coworking spaces might help with socialization and some people need it but I am not sure how that benefits who you work for.
> Coworking spaces might help with socialization and some people need it but I am not sure how that benefits who you work for.
because, as someone else i replied to in the thread points out, miserable employees perform worse.
I get that. I said as much. Though suggesting employers should have no say in where their employees work on generally work protected by intellectual property law is tricky. If they have an office, usually that is where they want you to work if the goal is an office setting. Some companies do not and rent out coworking space. Different.
Very anecdotally, it seems to go both ways. If there is a relatively local office, people are generally expected to go in. If there isn't, the employee often pays (but not always).
I believe some tax accountants say it can be used as a write-off (just like a certain number of square feet of where you live, if it is only and demonstrably for that). But as far as preference, I would be surprised if a company with an office somewhere near would be pleased with you working in a coworking space. Maybe some but big companies, probably legal issues (VPN or not).
My accountant always told me maybe but there are conditions and it's a red flag.
I am curious, do believe that a company or an employee is responsible for paying for a ersatz "coworking space" (ersatz, in that the employer did not choose that as a place for their employees to work)?
Every remote company I’ve worked for has offered a ~$500/month stipend for coworking, and I’ve never been told no when negotiating with a non remote company for it. With that said, I could see companies that don’t value talent refusing such a request. Vote with your feet until labor rights improve over the next several decades due to politics and structural demographic working age cohort compression.
me personally? the company up to a reasonable point. it’s the company’s responsibility to ensure they provide a suitable working space.
then again i live in the UK where we actually have workers rights.
I've worked remote most of my career. Starting in the late 90's if you squint hard enough.
I built my first little company as remote-first before we knew what to call it. I had to be very careful who I would hire, since only a relatively small percentage of folks (around a third, by my estimate) were ready and able to be self-motivated and disciplined enough to work remotely.
And my company was built with remote work in mind from the ground up. Asynchronous comms, everything written down, very well established information systems and work process, etc.
I then worked for a company that became remote by accident. They were obviously an in-person company that never once sat down to figure out a remote-first work culture. It was the most exhausting and unproductive work of my life. Constant meetings, almost no concept of async comms, etc. That company would have worked 1,000% better as an in-person traditional company and the lack of mature process or strict guidelines could have been papered over.
My rule of thumb now is that any company that expects you to be on more than a very small handful of Zoom calls a week is not worth working for. If you need meetings to sync up work like that, you likely have horrible remote work infrastructure, tools, processes, and culture.
It seems a number of companies somehow combine the absolutely worst aspects of in-person work with the worst aspects of remote work and expect to see good results.
Now - my absolute favorite way to work - was when my little company got acquired by a larger company and I effectively ran a small division where we worked remotely, but came into the office if/when we felt like it. That worked because everyone else had to be in the office though, so it wasn't exactly fair. But man, being able to take a 15 minute train ride downtown to spend a day or two in the office each week if I felt like it after I woke up each morning was by far the best of both worlds for me. I could do different types of work in each location to sort of break up my week, and get the benefits of the in-person socialization and relationship building with the lack of scheduling stress and deep focus time remote working gives you.
Still though. I cannot stress enough how shitty Zoom calls are. Anything to do with video calls will be completely banned from any org I run should I ever get the startup itch again. At least on the engineering side of things. Either in person meetings if you must, or phone calls so people don't need to be uselessly staring at a screen for hours each day.
I've found that following an Open Source model of collaboration works well for remote companies. And it gave me a hiring pool of talent with demonstrable abilities to get shit done without needing to be in an office. No open source project is running daily standup video calls.
Exactly the same thing happens with in-office work. I've certainly had that experience! But it's hard to talk about because in-person work is the "default", and it feels like if you have problems with that it's a sign of problems with you.
(Not to mention that, in both contexts, it's very hard to pull apart being remote vs in-office from other aspects of the work and culture.)
I've always thought that the same discipline needed to work remotely, is the same to start your own company. When you start a company, you have the same isolation, lack of coworkers for socialization, and no boundaries between work and home.
It also requires you to be a self-starter.
I've been working remotely since 2007. Thew few times I've had client visits reminds me all over again why I hated working in an office.
It’s also circumstantial.
Working remote during COVID sucked and felt unmoored.
Once I had a robust IRL social life and could go see some live music again, it was great.
It also depends if you live in tiny apartment or if you have a house with a dedicated space.
The same person can take to it depending on the circumstances.
For me it's always been the opposite: Stuck with so many people around, always talking, always things going on and draining me. No way to focus.
Remote work was a godsend. I started working remote in 2015 and never looked back.
I'm right in the middle.
By the end of the COVID lockdowns, I was ready to RTO, at least as least hybrid. Just to get out of the house and see people other than my wife and dog during the work week.
But, half of my team (plus my direct boss) is remote and couldn't come in even if they wanted. So, all meetings are still on Zoom. But, at least for the half who are here, I can get some water-cooler gossip and face-to-face 1-on-1s.
Some struggle regardless of remote or onsite because office job culture has become fucking stupid FOMO fueled social animal farm, not a meaningful economic contributor in real terms.
That never comes up though as the dogma must survive.
Are you saying me telling Claude to improve a process by 1% to increase shareholder value isn't meaningful and contributing to society? How dare you!
But wait; there's more; the code written a decade ago manually was also just to increase shareholder value!
Loved remote working from 2019 to early 2026. No doubt it was the best type of job for my health as there was little stress and I was never lonely. I made sure I found new friends (like in 2024 I found a happy hour group via Bumble for Friends of 6 other dudes in which we gather every Tuesday. Also, one of them is my European travel buddy as his kid now lives in Europe) and strengthened other friendships.
I am now one of the millions out of work techies yet Im starting a new job and career in healthcare soon. Definitely am missing remote work but i need to pay my bills. Further, IT especially web design and development is a dying field especially with the upcoming voice Internet paradigm shift I see and in which Open AI is working on now (wrote about such here https://ryanspahn.substack.com/p/openais-rumored-speaker-bel...)
Also Zoom.
I know a number of folks that work remote, and they are on Zoom, all day.
That would drive me nuts! [actually, it's not really a drive; more of a short putt -Ed.]
I use Zoom frequently, but always find it to be exhausting. I guess that's just me, though.
But I'm also retired, and really leaning into not ever going back into the office again.
>I guess that's just me, though.
It's definitely not just you. It's the "camera on" portion that exhausts me. I do frequent Teams audio calls throughout the day as my team is across a very large area. When I interview candidates, it's generally camera on and I can only do 1-2 day.
Turn the selfie viewport off if possible. It’s the only reason that camera on meetings feel worse than in person meetings.
Could agree with this more. I've worked 100% remote for the last 6 years and had quite a few years of hybrid remote work before that.
Not everyone is as well suited to it because you have to implement your own boundaries and discipline. I used to get a majority of my social interaction at work, now I have to make sure I get out with friends, or even just to the store, to make sure I'm not just in my house all day toggling between work and personal life.
But any downside I have to manage like that is more than offset by being at home, with the temperature how I like it (I always froze in offices), with my dogs, able to go pick up my kids from school, and with an ideal desk setup (43" monitor, quiet uninterrupted space, able to use voice mode on Codex without disrupting others) that I couldn't have in an office.
I absolutely detest this framing of remote vs onsite. What it really is is accommodated vs not-accommodated.
Accommodated employees perform better. Non-accommodated employees perform worse.
For some people, an office is an accommodation - they need that not-home space with other people in it. For others, a home office is an accommodation - a very convenient/local space with very few distractions.
It should come as absolutely no surprise that putting someone somewhere they do not feel accommodated is going to reduce performance.
I also really reject this boomer-esque idea that in-office helps underperformers underperform less. Instead I find it helps under-performers _appear_ to underperform less because they can chat up the boss and more visibly do performative stuff like showing up early or leaving late.
In my situation above we were accommodating people. They got to choose where they worked.
The problem I was talking about was with people who asked to work from home but struggled with it.
Some of them did start coming in to the office more when they realized what was happening. Many did not, believing that work from home was best for them.
> In my situation above we were accommodating people. They got to choose where they worked.
this sounds like the WFH people might be treated the same way as the in-office people. as in you're retaining an in-office culture but people can choose to WFH. that is not the same thing as being a remote working company. the culture is completely different in an org that successfully does remote working.
as a functional example on the social side, people booking in time to just hang out and chat. even if it's work chat but just more relaxed chat. build in some social element beyond just treating it as cogs in a 9-5 machine. add an extra 30 minutes to a team update call to just have a chat with everyone -- including folks in the office.
edit -- to be clear, managers need to be doing that ^
I think I like where you're going with the "accommodated" or not framing. I feel that most companies' offices, especially tech companies, have lately just taken to straight-up not accommodating people. The company crams nothing but minimal, 4ft desks in, edge to edge, with zero partitions whatsoever (… let alone an actual wall to form … an … office …) but want to pretend as-if that's somehow accommodating. Add in crappy chairs, bad keyboards¹, 3 hour commutes, etc. and it's just so "wtf?" that, yeah, remote work — for what flaws it does have — ranks higher. I have a better equipment, a better desk, more space, more quiet / room to concentrate — I can build an office that exceeds what my employer will provide — and I can do so in spite of today's ludicriously priced real estate market where I haven't even really got the room to do so.
And with RTO, it seems that wasn't even rock bottom, now that employers are straight-facedly suggesting things like "hot desking".
> It should come as absolutely no surprise that putting someone somewhere they do not feel accommodated is going to reduce performance.
I agree, but this required corporations to admit they're the problem in not properly accommodating employees. That is the problem: corporations would far rather blame performance on the employee than any sort of self-reflection.
(¹as accommodated by the employer. Even when I worked in an office, I did have a custom keyboard, but it's something I paid for.)
What is "hot desking"? Is it as horrifying as it sounds?
It's where you're in a pen with rows of desks and you just have to use whichever desk is free, you don't have your own desk. If you have any stuff you need to work beyond what's on the desk (say, accessibility equipment), you might get a locker (these are often underprovisioned) and you have to cart your stuff to and from the locker every day. It is awful.
That...sounds horrific. Oh my goodness.
>you have to cart your stuff to and from the locker every day
Yeah, you might. I assume you're a principled person.
In my experience, the less principled simply leave their shit all over the place for us to deal with.
Why blame them? They didn't create the shitty environment.
I blame them because they're the ones taking advantage
I’ve found the discourse around commute times to be incredibly hyperbolic. 90 minute one-way commutes are an extreme outlier for professionals (USA). Genuinely like two standard deviations from normal.
100% agreed. i flamed out while remote working at $LAST_JOB. it was a combination of a changing cultural dynamic, changing expectations of my role (which i wasn't comfortable with) and a lack of necessary staffing.
remote work was a blessing for me. but turned out the ceo didn't want us remote working.
i tried repeatedly to communicate what i needed to do my best with my boss and the ceo. but the ceo fought me on all of it.
>There are a lot of people who think they’re going to love remote who ultimately flame out from the loneliness, isolation, lack of visual boundaries between work and home life
This used to be me but pair programming / in-call collaborative working solved 100% of all of those problems.
Even the work/life boundary was solved because as soon as I dropped off the call at the end of the day my brain immediately switched off work mode.
These days the first thing I do in a new team is try to suss out who else is a bit like this and try to work out a collaborative working pattern that works for all of us.
It's not just more fun it's almost unreasonably effective. People who work non collaboratively tend to make more mistakes, bugs and worse decisions.
Too bad so many companies insist on top-down management practices that actively make this harder: planning and tracking work in individually owned tickets, individual stack-ranked performance evaluations, "productivity" metrics that don't account for collaboration or shared learning...
(This is something I've repeatedly noticed in discussions about getting people in-office, and about open office plans vs individual offices: the same managers who push these changes through in the name of "collaboration" create a bunch of other management processes that strongly disincentivize collaborative work.)
But in environments where I've been able to do this effectively, it's always been great, far better than going of totally on my own!
oh for sure.
this is enormously self destructive as well. when employees are stack ranked, pitted against each other, discouraged from collaborating the quality of work drops off a cliff, customers get unhappy and profits suffer.
executives are perfectly rational about this though. more profit usually doesn't matter to them anywhere near as much as having more power over their reports does.
Would love to hear more tips. This is me too, and I suspect some of my team members. I've been trying to build in more collaboration into tickets (e.g., an acceptance criteria that is "talk to the rest of the team about the decision you make on X aspect of implementation"), and I'm looking for more.
Those collaborative conversations are so often fruitful in ways I don't expect.
I mostly just focus on trying to find one or two people who like pairing and always suggest to do it with them. I always aim to be positive, anti judgemental, understanding, curious, etc. so theyll feel comfortable.
One of my coworkers in an old company set up a "slack" watercooler channel he would always pair in with an explicit invitation that anybody who wanted to drop in could at any time, even if it was just for a chat. That was cool.
"office hours". a dedicated afternoon where anyone from the company could drop in to a running call and just ask me anything about engineering. bug reports; features; questions; feedback; anything.
building in an extra 30 minutes on team catchup calls just to hang out at the end. usually end up talking about some work stuff, but in a more relaxed/social way.
demo/learning sessions. how to use databricks, how to do X, how X works, this cool thing we built.
There is no mention of how many of the surveyed workers are even able to work remotely. A large healthcare organization is likely to employ many people who must be on-site in a hospital or clinic to even do their jobs, from doctors and nurses to orderlies, food service, and cleaning staff.
It is easy to imagine that the ER staff might report lower well-being than someone on the admin staff who works from home on their laptop all day.
Don’t coworking spaces solve some of the issues? I am one of these people that hates working from home and loves going to the office - the chat with colleagues, the exercise of bicycling to the office and back, the context switching between work and not work - otherwise I loose myself in the work. All of that is awesome for me.
When I was playing around with remote work, (before the pandemic and before it was cool) - I figured most of this can be offset by just going to a coworking place - and even better - friendships you form from there seem stronger, because people are less anchored to the company and more to the “place” - more open to friendships. Plus you can pick and switch your “office” as desired for your mode of travel and preferences (or even switch cities, travel around)
I worked remote my entire life, I have never worked in the office (I did occasionally go for socialization purposes at one company), that's 20 years working remote. Would that be sufficient of a proof?
I am not looking for a job, just trying to figure out what would be sufficient to convince you of good remote work skills. I am happy where I am at (a full remote company, yes)
> here are a lot of people who think they’re going to love remote who ultimately flame out
I'm the opposite. I avoided remote work, figuring I'd hate it. Then COVID forced it upon me. And now I won't even consider a job unless it's remote-first. I'd allow for remote-friendly definitions of hybrid though.
All this equally applies to working in the office.
The best is remote with an option to come into the office.
This way you are maximizing flexibility and allowing workers to self select into their preferred way of working.
Anything else is suboptimal.
Yeah it is not a remote good / office bad thing.
I work remote when and how I want, it's great.
But there's days and even weeks where "I just want to go in" and that's helpful with meetings, work, socialization.
Different people like different modes and even at different times.
I just flamed out exactly as you describe. It's my second time also. If anyone has any tips for some kind of counseling or coaching or anything else, would be much appreciated.
Get a few responsibilities in the outside world, or someone who'll make demands of you. Get a dog.
Half of group therapy is just being in a group. Groups that require you to be rested and fit and provide a local social network orthogonal to everything else in your life include intramural sports, hiking clubs, radio repeating, crafts and markets... and they're all comfortable with nervous individuals showing up.
It's worth being very honest with yourself about what you're feeling. If going into the office fills a void, you should realize that you are now handing a load bearing portion of your life and psyche to your employer. If you are laid off, you will be devastated. Doing the work to get your personal life to a place where you want to work from home because you enjoy your own company, friends, family, pets, environment... is very much well worth it in the long run.
Being able to work remotely is like being sentenced to prison and then finding a get-out-of-jail-free card.
I always strive to do my best at work and make a good impression. But I have absolutely 0 interest in the product, the mission, the culture, the personal or collective aspirations of owners, shareholders, leaders or "leadership", or who they are as people. I generally like my coworkers and we get along, but that's not worth a 2 hour round trip in the car, or using a public washroom, or eating in a cafeteria, or sitting uncomfortably at a desk all day, or listening to everyone's boring stories.
The best part though, is no team building nonsense, no company BBQs or pizza days, no casual Fridays, no boss dropping in for a one on one, no psychos trying to get the energy level up with a "LETS GOOOO TEAM!!"
Just doing a good job for good pay and being treated like an adult. I didn't know working could be like this when I was starting out.
I'm glad you work remote because to be candid you sound like a miserable person to be stuck in an office with.
This right here is the crux of the argument.
WFH people want to do work, take meetings, and just overall get things done. Sure they also want to be at home so they can use a 15 min break between meetings to start laundry.
RTO people want to do work, take meetings, and overall get things done while there are others around them working. RTO people need other people around them constantly.
This is the conflict. WFHers are happy without forcing RTOers to work in the same manner. RTOers are only happy when they force WFHers into the office.
WFHers want to be left alone to do their jobs. RTOers need others to be around them to do their job.
I prefer working from an office and I also work on the subway and at home. I actually prefer people _do not_ watch me work. I am introverted, but there are benefits to working in person that aren't replaceable over Zoom. (There are also trade-offs!)
Separately, why do some commenters think that their personal experience is representative of Everyone? It's so mysterious to me. Not everyone who wants to WFH or RTO have the same needs, perspectives, trade-offs, living situations, working styles, etc. The world has nuance.
> Separately, why do some commenters think that their personal experience is representative of Everyone
Without unsolicited personal opinions, there wouldn't be much conversation. And what then, have only people state verifiable truths? Only permit the exchange of pure fact?
Not speaking in hard generalities.
> WFHers want to be left alone to do their jobs. RTOers need others to be around them to do their job.
This is just not true. It makes a sweeping statement about two groups of people with certain preferences, then assertions about how they work / what they want.
People can express opinions, while investigating (or at least leaving room for) nuance.
My company just had an RTO announcement and I kid you not the head of HR said “well I like working from the office” as if that’s a reason why we should as well.
> WFHers are happy without forcing RTOers to work in the same manner. RTOers are only happy when they force WFHers into the office.
You're completely leaving out that WFHers are forcing the RTOers to work in a completely different (and in my opinion worse) way to accommodate the WFHers.
> WFHers want to be left alone to do their jobs. RTOers need others to be around them to do their job.
Or RTOers want to be able to collaborate with their co-workers while WFHers want to sneak away to do laundry and make it impossible to communicate with them in an efficient manner? I don't need them around just to work, I need them around so that I can have a dialogue with them, instead of sending a message that may or may not be answered this week because I have no idea if they are even "at work". I'm exaggerating, but I hope you were too.
First, RTOers can work with other RTOers, right? Or are you suggesting RTOers can’t do their job unless everyone is in the office? Because that is the exact problem I’m describing.
Second, if WFHers aren’t available and responsive, they should be put on a PIP and then let go if they don’t improve. WFH is not an excuse to not work. With my team, everyone responds quickly. If they don’t, they don’t last very long.
> This is the conflict. WFHers are happy without forcing RTOers to work in the same manner. RTOers are only happy when they force WFHers into the office.
If you work from home and I work from the office, you're forcing me to collaborate with you using remote tools, which is just remote work with a longer commute. In this sense, (some) WFHers are only happy when they force RTOers into Microsoft Teams.
Of course, there's a much better compromise available to us. I could be on an in-office team with others like me, you could be on a WFH team with others like you, and we'd all be happy.
Many workplaces are global. Even when I’m in the office, I’m still on Teams meetings all day long.
Your conclusion is exactly my point. People should work on teams that fit their work habits. Where that falls down is when management hires for WFH but then asks those workers to RTO.
> WFH people want to do work
Debatable. They take issue with getting dressed and acting appropriately in an office, I can't imagine they're particularly hard working people given a commute is a hard no for them. You'll complain you haven't got time to do the work next
And if you're job can be done without anyone needing to speak to you, or you to them, it's probably not that important and ripe for AI to take off your hands, so enjoy it while you can autist
I’ve witnessed it first hand, WAY more work gets done when people WFH than in the office. The constant stop bus, or coffee breaks, or “let’s walk over to the other building for this meeting” taking 10 minutes rather than just opening teams and joining the meeting in time.
The WFH team I manage is one of the most capable and hardest working teams I’ve ever been on. You can take that outdated attitude elsewhere, thank you.
We collaborate all day long on teams. Various work focused and non work focused chats are constantly happening.
Ive also witnessed this first hand and had the opposite experience. A significant number of WFH employees were not doing the work expected of them. Yes this is a management issue, but many companies have crappy management.
> taking 10 minutes rather than just opening teams and joining the meeting in time.
I love how you couldn't think of an example of work other than a teams meeting lol is that all you do WFH then?
What are you doing exactly? Building railroads? Tech is meetings and coding.
The water cooler hero over here, when's the next pizza lunch boss?
I like both. What do we do now?
You stop purposefully ignoring the scenario just to pick a fight.
You do what you want without forcing others to do what you want.
It’s pretty simple, in my opinion.
Easier said than done if doing what I have want is only hiring office workers, then suddenly the wfh people aren't happy.
They want both the specific job and the ability to work from home.
There is a zero sum element to it.
The best solution is for workplaces to be up front and consistent in their policies and let people select in or out.
I'm not convinced that people who want to work from home are magically motivated differently by work and to do work than others... They're human, better and worse, like everyone else.
its not magic its just some nature and nurture. i like wfh bc most of my relationships growing up were distracting troublemakers and slackers. when i had time to myself i noticed i actually accomplished things and then when i worked with others i ended up doing their work too
other people grew up with healthy, cooperative relationships
That's how I know that all the people who like RTO are just lying to force everyone back to office. Since the lack of loud noises, interruptions, distractions etc. make me much more productive in HO, the same must be true for everyone else.
I think your comment is an example of why lots of people prefer to work remotely: the 'enforced fun' of it all.
Why is it a problem for you that they don't enjoy eating in canteens? Why does working with you mean signing up to be your best friend?
It's like being taken hostage with people who are pretending to like it. Meanwhile some of them have personal lives so bad or they're so afraid of being alone that they genuinely do like it.
Why so cynical? Some of my best friends and favorite people are people who I initially met as random coworkers.
You just don’t require 40 weeks in an office to make friends. You can, and should, go to social gatherings outside of work. Including ones where you’re exclusively surrounded by complete strangers.
Friendships often form out of shared experiences. Work is one kind of shared experience. So is joining a club, or going to a concert.
I think a lot of people don’t do those things, because they’re so tired from work. Which is understandable, but then you have to make friends at work. And that’s really not ideal.
I'm sure there are great friendships among slaves and prisoners too, that doesn't mean you should be thankful to be one.
Maybe being freed from the slave mindset is the reason you haven't had the same. Maybe.
You can schlep to the office every day and contort yourself into a freedom mindset and I'll work remote with my natural mindset. We can both be happy.
I have a remote job. I get to have this one because I made contacts at a previous job. Good luck in the job market correction.
me too, but its the vast minority of all companies i have been in the past 35 years. i don't want to sit in a room or even building with the rest of the drones of whom i have no clue what they are doing there expect burning money and wasting time of others.
but sure there are enough exceptions to turn up once in a blue moon to have drinks with the new peeps who seem nice on slack.
Whats cynical about it? You work with people who you have befriended, probably because you have the sort of personality where that works.
Not everyone is like that. It's not cynicism but a fact of life that some people do not get on with people you find in tech companies, IT departments, offices, etc or do not enjoy the environment.
You should examine your own narrow view of this and realize that there are many types of people out there other than people like you. That someone else experiences life in a different way isn't a personal failing.
My view is narrow, yet you're siding with OP who is categorically defining team building activities, company BBQs, pizza days, etc as nonsense? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
> Meanwhile some of them have personal lives so bad or they're so afraid of being alone that they genuinely do like it.
One of the definitions of cynical is "bitterly or sneeringly distrustful, contemptuous, or pessimistic". I'm not trying to argue that my way is the only way, I'm just pointing out that some people (me) have fulfilling personal lives AND enjoy chit-chatting with coworkers in-person sometimes.
I think we can all agree that remote work is great for some people. And we should be able to agree that some people genuinely enjoy things about working in an office too.
you sound like a miserable person to be stuck in an office with
How much extra do you get paid to drink the corporate koolaid? I ask this because some of the most miserable people I know were the kind of people that were all-in on serving the corporation at all costs only for it to burn through everything else in their life, especially when they get laid off.
Do miserable people not deserve to make a living? Companies should be able to accommodate their disabilities by making sure they are not around others who may be affected by their presence.
Unreasonable accommodation. Fire them.
Being miserable is now a disability? Seriously?
That reminds me of a sign I saw in a handicapped parking spot: "Being an asshole is not a disability".
Misery is a symptom of depression, which is classified as a disability.
Coughing is a symptom of many things, yet you cannot conclude I have cancer from a cough.
I should know better than to make statements in dumb topics like this. It's like dipping a net into a pool and just filtering out weird takes like this one.
Honestly I framed this poorly, sorry. I wasn't arguing for accommodating all miserable people but my comment implied an extreme position I don't believe.
Thanks, I also took it in the least charitable way - which also wasn't fair. Thanks for being cool.
Why is it a weird take?
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Nothing they said suggested they'd be disruptive.
If someone does their work properly, and you're upset at their lack of sociability, you're the problem.
People who feel they need to enjoy the company of their co-workers in any way are the insufferable ones. Do you need something work related from me? Great! I can probably help. Otherwise leave me the fuck alone. Why? Because dealing with the weird, annoying reactions of the 99.999999999% of the population I do not get on with becomes very tiresome very quickly.
Pitching yourself as a machine that takes in requirements and spits out work is a daring proposition in today's technological environment.
Wow, it's a good thing you work from home. We don't want you roaming around in polite society!
Miserable because we don’t enjoy fake company bullshit like team building lunches and dumbass nontechnical managers that know less than we do but get paid more? Have fun drinking that company koolaid.
What a leap of judgement
I agree 100%, you get paid to do your job, anything above this is charity to the shareholders/executives/managers. I work as a contractor so get paid for days I work, I've watched permanent staff who were perfect corporate bots get the boot while I stayed as I focused on the work.
Everyone always seems to assume everyone else is a corporate bot and they are the only true mercenary just working for the money.
I’ve seen so many contractors who think they’re so smart for being contractors and not loyal to any kind of company… turns out they do the same shit an employee does just gets paid 5x less, and when they’re booted no one really gives gives a shit about them. Okay…
I get paid 3x more, also employees also get booted and no one cares after about 2 hours.
I don't know why country you live in, but in mine contractors get paid about 2x more than employees. They get less security and benefits of course.
Our contractors are cheap laborers.
I was a contractor for 14 years, and I kept running into people like you that didn't realize I got paid a lot MORE to come in and fix the problems that the full timers couldn't.
Reminds me of the folks I tell I work in "IT", and they think I fix printers all day.
> Reminds me of the folks I tell I work in "IT", and they think I fix printers all day.
Nah you also come on comment sections to brag about a wage you got decades ago. Times have changed old man
The point is that some people didn't realize contracting was a step up, not a step down.
But sure, take offence and presume I'm bragging. I imagine you're a lot of fun to be around.
> I generally like my coworkers and we get along, but that's not worth a 2 hour round trip in the car
How can you be fine with having 0 interest in a job but commuting is some kind of deal breaker? You managed to man up about the rest of the stuff but not the commute?
No wonder America is fucked. My friend visited an office over there once and EVERY SINGLE PERSON in there was morbidly obese, single finger typing. I'm not surprised they complain about having to drive, next they'll be complaining about the actual work and how it doesn't fulfill them the peasants
Your first point makes sense, but the second part? The reason American health is so bad is that we are required to own and operate a vehicle in 99% of this country. That's what makes us obese - not having walkable environments other than in the largest cities. Having to drive to the nearest food which is almost always fast food. We are like this because we have been made slaves to our work and everything has been created to get us back to work faster.
Most of England outside London requires a car to buy anything... It's your massive portions of food and how surprisingly cheap it is compared to Europe. And maybe you have more grape drink fake shit than we do
Let's say I have no interest in the job. I'm a for-profit operation; I'm in it for the money.
I work 8 hours a day for $X in pay. And it takes 2 hours in the car to get there, so it's really $X for 10 hours of my time plus some gasoline (unless I drive an electric).
Then Covid happens, and work from home becomes a real possibility. Now the deal is $X for 8 hours, not 10, because I don't have to drive to the office and back. I like that deal better, because I get two hours of my life back every day.
Now you want me to go back to the office every day, losing that two hours, for no more money? And the reason you give me is that I get to hang out with my coworkers? No, I don't like them that much.
> Now you want me to go back to the office every day, losing that two hours, for no more money?
If that's the choice probably not, but fuck me, just move or get a closer job if you hate the commute. Sounds like you live somewhere with no jobs, which is an adjacent issue, not every job is miles away.
I'm not saying it's not better than working in an office.... Clearly not having to smile, have clothes on, be polite to anyone are all benefits but a job isn't meant to fulfill you. If you had skills that were in demand youd be calling the shots, but as like me youre just a peon, you take what you can get. Wage slavery is shit full stop, why would anyone want to work for a living when there's this option called being rich and not having to lift a finger?
Complaining about the fucking commute just gets to me. Your grandparents probably worked twelve hour shifts six days a week and would get the sack for being legitimately ill, our slog doesn't even compare
I didn't say I have 0 interest in the job. I like the job. I said I don't care about the product, you seem to be conflating the two.
What kind of office did your friend visit? I don't think I've seen someone point and peck type for years.
Virginia, TBF it was years ago maybe they've all slimmed down
I'm honestly confused by your comment, I have no idea what you are trying to say. (Is it sarcasm? Couldn't tell).
I want to frame this comment. I could have written this word for word. It's so interesting that there are people disagreeing with you. Is it fair to presume that the HN crowd majorly over-represents the pro-RTO voice or are workers really so divided on this issue?
and this is exactly why you will be seen as disposable and the first to go when layoffs happen.
personal relationships are very important, arguably more important that your raw performance.
Unless you get caught up in a big layoff where the people you have relationships with have zero input.
If you get laid off, it is your personal relationships that will help you land another good job while everyone else is fighting over the scraps that get posted online.
if i have to sit in an office to have job security (which is a big if as we see all the time) then i rather get thrown out. that never happened in the past almost 4 decades though: i leave because i get better offers. and never have been in an office, ever.
I've never been the first to be let go. It turns out if you do valuable work, people notice that and want to keep you around. On the other hand, when I had jobs based on a personal connection, it was almost the opposite. I was treated almost like an imposter. The conventional wisdom on this is just stupid. No one is going to keep you on just because you're a good buddy. Being useful always comes first.
people aren't rational actors. given your work passes a basic functional bar, if you are well liked, your work will be valued. if you are not liked, people will pick your work apart. these mechanisms feed back on one another but your narrative leads me to believe you /have/ forged meaningful relationships and are more well liked than you realize.
Hardly helpful when your company's headcount exceeds Dunbar's Number by 100x
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number
Lol, no.
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Here is the actual study: https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10....
They didn’t control for occupation, pay, managerial status etc.. An on-site physical job like nurse, facilities, or technician was compared to predominantly remote administrative jobs.
Not even attempting to control for these factors makes this seem more like a push poll than an actual study
Thanks. The complete gap to measure at-home living conditions kicks this into a flawed study. It does not control for physical living conditions anywhere. For instance, if your home is just some hot and filthy room in a neighborhood with lots crime, you're RTO just to escape the horrible environment.
Exactly. I support remote work, but purely as a question of science, it may not be a direct causal link between remote work -> happiness. There may be other factors at play.
They also completely fail to ask for the reasons of better well-being and then the article just starts guessing.
Besides, the premise seems stupid to me. Employers don't like wfh because of perceived lower performance. 'For years, many employers have worried that work-from-home arrangements leave employees isolated, disconnected from coworkers and more likely to leave their jobs.' this is just stupid PR, no different than netflix saying they're cutting down on shared accounts to give subscribers greater "personalization" and "covenience". employers care about employee health only in so far as it bears on performance. this stupid study is investigating the stupid pretext employers give for demanding rto.
interestingly moving between jobs is more likely to increase workers salaries. Would be interested if one of the reasons stopping wfh is to prevent salaries from increasing. There is a physical barrier to finding new employers that are further away from where you live and less jobs available overall in the area you live compared to the entire country/world. People who wfh can work almost anywhere, do not have a moving barrier and can job hop their way to higher salaries
There are a thousand factors, but one of the biggest and simplest is getting commute time back. Gaining even one hour a day is life-changing. Imagine gaining two hours.
Not having to plan my life around traffic patterns is the biggest advantage for me.
I enjoy working in the office at my current place of employment... nice office space, small company, everyone who works there is great and the office is only 15 minutes away if there is no traffic.
But I live in Southern California, so when there is traffic that 15 minute commute balloons to 45-60 minutes.
So I work from home most of the time. I still go in a couple of times a week (voluntarily, not required) but there are no expectations of a set schedule so it is very easy for me to avoid heavy traffic commute times.
I know of a company where they want anyone within 90m to commute, so that's up to three hours lost in a day, making an 8 hour workday actually 11+ hours
I somewhat frequently get recruiter mail from NYC-based companies. If it's clear the position is in office, I usually include the same bit in every response: I live ~75 minutes away by train. Make the commute free or heavily discounted for me and I'll come in the three days a week. Plus, since I won't be driving, I can do some work on the train.
And possibly commute to an office their team isn't even at, because the point isn't colocation, it's to keep people working during work hours.
I’m always confused why the default commute time in these discussions is always 60 or 90 minutes one way. 60+ minute commutes are outliers and I don’t understand why a person would take a job that far away without being aware of the commute or moving closer to the work. Does that make sense? Most American commute 10-30 minutes. That’s the middle of the bell curve.
> 60+ minute commutes are outliers and I don’t understand why a person would take a job that far away without being aware of the commute or moving closer to the work
60+ minute commute times are very common where I live. If you are anywhere outside of the downtown area you either pay for parking (expensive) and have a shorter commute, or you use public transit (cheap) and have a long commute.
When I used to commute to an office it was easily an hour to an hour and a half each way every day. I hated it
When I commuted semi-regularly into a downtown office, it was a good 90 minutes. Latterly, going into a newer company's customer briefing center was more like 2 hours each way. I had access to commuter rail which was more pleasant than driving so long as I didn't have an evening dinner/event. but it took about the same length of time.
One answer to the parent's question is that I owned/own a house which was a pretty manageable 25 minute suburban commute which I wasn't going to sell just because I got a new job. (Which didn't last that long anyway.)
Yes, I get the sense that this varies a lot depending on area and economic strata.
In the poor rural area my hometown is located, 1-3h+ commutes aren't unusual, partially out of necessity (there aren't enough jobs nearby to sustain the population).
>> Most American commute 10-30 minutes.
You're on a board full of technologists. Many are in SF or Seattle or NYC. A 10minute commute means you live in a 5-20 Million dollar home in SF. Not sure how realistic that is.
I work in NYC. The salary doesnt support having a home in the city. Yes, it can support a 1br apt, perhaps a 2br with roommates. Definitely not accomodations for a family.
In NYC commute times are still under 45 minutes for most tech professionals door to door.
i think there is a big diff between 10-30min and 45min your 45min assessment is probably right for early career. once you have a family, it gets much harder and less common
We’re in a weird period where a lot of jobs went fully remote around COVID, many weren’t prepared for it, and now they’re doing the opposite over-reaction and forcing everyone back.
A lot of the people I know who went remote after COVID took remote jobs at new companies (remember “the great resignation”?) or moved to a new house because they thought they were done with commuting. Then their companies said they wanted everyone back.
It's also a corresponding economic window:
Laptop professionals who make enough money to own and buy a nice house in the suburbs but not FU money to buy in the city. I count myself in this category.
If you don't make enough to consider buying, you might as well rent close. If you are super rich, you can buy in the city or don't have to worry about building home equity.
Do you have a citation for that?
I could see the average commute being 20-30 minutes without traffic. I cannot see that being the average in any area with even a small amount of morning/evening traffic.
I mean, in a lot of these cases people take those jobs because they're able to work remotely initially... and then get hit with an inflexible, top-down RTO mandate once they've settled into the role.
Most of the 60 minute travel time radius around a San Francisco or Silicon Valley tech HQ is water and nature preserve.
Its not just the time, its the energy expended.
Yes, definitely. Time management is a lot easier when it's all on your own terms apart from the required meetings.
You get to skip the commute and reap the benefits all day long. Even your diet improves. You can cook fresh or have delivered whatever you want. Your hygiene improves since nothing is preventing you from taking another shower or committing to more involved skincare. You clean your home more often. You're more likely to exercise throughout the day for natural stress relief. If you have any minor medical issues that need upkeep, you're already in the privacy of your own home.
This is not just a list of annoyances or frivolous luxuries for highly sensitive people. These are the basic building blocks for a better quality of life. These used to be the forever-deferred items at the bottom of my todo list stressing me out. Now they are integrated with my life and effortless. I'm no longer trapped in a cube and put on display. I can live like a human being and do whatever whenever wherever I want. My life is no longer oriented around running errands or physical presence.
The biggest for me is diet by far, I cook every meal. If I have a stretch of going into the office, I end up eating slop, which kills my energy levels
And money spent on a more expensive house closer to the office vs the same home in an affordable place. It's the main reason I can't go back to San Francisco, once you get used to a less than one million four bedroom house in a pleasant neighborhood you can't go back to living in a shoebox for twice the price, even if it's the most beautiful city in the world.
energy / time / money / environment / office space reclaimed
I go into my company's Boston office with an hour and a half commute each way by train about once a month. Even doing that once a month sucks. I couldn't imagine doing that even three times a week. I regularly get LinkedIn messages from recruiters with hybrid offerings in Boston that pay less and will then suck an additional 9 hours a week out of my life. Biggest nope I can think of.
I'd have to get paid a lot more to sacrifice an additional 10 hours a week commuting. You can't just tack an additional ten hours worth of pay on, and even if the pay was excellent, I can't imagine this is something I can do long term. Losing three hours a day for a commute eats into so much social and sleep time.
I didn't have to do it every day and it wasn't for that long a period but I had sort of come to the conclusion that it wasn't sustainable, especially after the novelty of working in the city wore off. I live fairly far out but, even that aside, there's just a lot of traffic. Even coming in for something after work these days still takes me 90 minutes to get in and commuter rail is useless for an evening event.
Last sometimes commute (I traveled a lot) to a suburban office was much more manageable but the office shutdown at some point during COVID because of low use.
>one of the biggest and simplest is getting commute time back
Zoom out. Being full remote means I don't even need a car. I can live in a walkable city with passenger rail in a low cost of living location. I can reduce my living expense to just food and utilities with a paid off house and no automobiles.
It's funny, because talk about a 25% potential productivity improvement saving multiple hours per day per employee in literally any other context and management would be crazy for it. Like AI hype bubble crazy. But culturally they cannot come to terms with the idea of losing power / control / influence over how work is done, so WFH gets treated completely differently.
Commuting to work for people who don't absolutely need to commute to work may be the biggest cargo cult of them all.
Wait, are you saying that human contact has no bearing on one's psychological well-being? Or are you saying that I'm being deliberately obtuse?
A theory I've proposed that I would love to get scientific evidence for... I would guess that WFH is effectively bimodal. WFH advocates would largely fall into a high performance bucket, and detractors either believe that average employees are low performers and need monitoring or are low performers. This is not social vs anti-social, its wanting to be productive with your time - whether thats the time you spend working, or with family etc.
I would love any scientific evidence for or against this theory. If anyone has any studies or natural experiments I would love to know about themThere are 100% people who are the reverse. It sounds like you're optimizing for heads-down IC time, which I agree is more productive at home.
But for team building—which, in very early stage companies is huge—and quick identification and resolution, in-person can be much better, in my experience. (Not always! Person, team, role, etc. dependent.)
There's a HUGE difference between in-person meetings and over Zoom. Teams in person—again, my experience—can move much faster because you can process social cues, body language, attention right there. There's zero latency.
This isn't to discount the distractions you're talking about, or the trade-offs of commute and cost-of-living to be near an office, etc. Very real.
But saying that high performers are better WFH and potatos are better in-office is not a universal truth.
Team building is management speak and completely unnecessary. Teams will naturally form bonds as they complete work together. Any worker with a life has zero desire to go drink a couple bad drinks and do an escape room with coworkers they barely like to appease a manager that thinks this is going to somehow increase productivity.
you think low performers are advocating against WFH?
I have been remote working for the past ~5 years or so. I had to RTO briefly for 3-4 weeks, which was about as long as it took me to find a position with a new org. I love the benefits at this stage in my life (young children, etc.) but I'm not sure the networking relationships I developed early on in my career "in the trenches" would be nearly as strong or beneficial as they have been had I started remote. I'm curious to see how that plays out over the long-term for folks that may start remote and attempt to stay that way throughout their entire careers.
So I was part of a very small company (<15 people) that was bought by a mid-sized company that otherwise had no presence in our country.
Leadership left and there was a few years where no one else in the office was in the same teams or reporting chains. The majority of people were in a single office in another company. I found it very difficult to participate and was left out of most decisions. Then covid hit and everything changed. With everyone working from home remote networking opportunities were built, I was an equal part of every discussion. Now I am in a large fortune 500 organization with a mix of working arrangements and I don't have any issues networking. I like to think we do a pretty good job with junior participation as well. The main thing I'm missing is the rumour mill and the pulse on what unrelated roles like sales/finance are saying on the ground.
That's great to hear. I guess what was in the forefront of my mind were how those relationships carry over after your time with that organization is through. There are a group of us that "started together" ~15 years ago that have had each others backs throughout the years in regard to opportunities and plenty of other life events outside of our starting organization. I was also in the military as well and it seems like those early relationships where we were peons (basic training, A-school, first deployment) are the ones that really stick. Maybe there's no correlation and that's just how it worked out for me. I have only worked for 2 organizations completely remotely. The first myself and my group worked very well together and got along great. After leaving, however, the only time I hear from them is when I reach out to see how everyone is doing.
Some people have been working remote for much longer than the past few years. They are doing fine.
Maybe it depends on the nature of your work, but I think remote working revealed to everyone how much office "networking" was always kinda delusional.
For sure, networking is important, but I have never found opportunities talking to the same people in my fishbowl. It was almost impossible to talk to the right people within the organization in person, and cornering them is not a great first impression. Reaching out to them on Teams is a whole different ball game, and one that I think more people are good at. Getting the right attention from the right people is also easier in large group chats.
Apart from that, working remote is not strictly at home. There's a whole wide world out there to meet people and find opportunity.
> how much office "networking" was always kinda delusional.
I think different people benefit from it differently. Most people regardless of remote or in-office, put on their headphones and barely talk to anyone else all day, and being in the office has zero if not negative networking benefit for them.
Then there are a few "social butterflies" who know everyone in every department, and they benefit in various ways internally and externally. Internally maybe they can move a difficult cross-department project because they have friends there, which then comes back as praise and rewards. Externally maybe one of their friends get a better position somewhere else and poach them, etc. etc.
I can't speak beyond my own experiences, but yeah the "social butterfly" phenomena is also a bit of a lie.
It's rare to see someone just walk into a business as a total outsider and charm their way in. See how well they handle unfamiliar people. Most of them will stay in their bubble. When you and your unfamiliar people are all nerds, you're actually in the best position to figure them out. They try to take the easy way out with flattery. Something like: "Oh, you all are so smart I couldn't possibly comment." before running back to their people. Does that really seem like a "social butterfly" to you?
Networking is one thing, but nepotism is another. I don't like working with people who can drag everyone else down. Small businesses are more vulnerable than anywhere else, yet that's where you see it most often.
Remote work is one of the things i would expect every country government to incentivise and promote.
Countryside, villages, islands would revive, less traffic, pollution, less unnecessary company and personal costs, more happy people and families, more opportunities globally, etc.
But no, some property owners in the centre are more important than this and we have to live in overcrowded cities. Kudos
From a nation standpoint, doesn't "incentivizing and promoting" remote work also incentivize off-shoring jobs out of your economy? If your nation's companies perfect remote work, why would they higher your highly paid citizens living in (relatively) high cost of living areas when they could hire massive remote teams in lower cost of living countries to do the same job for less?
I'm a big fan of flexibility, and certainly think companies should do their best to treat their employees as adults and let them do what works best for them and their teams. But it is really weird to me to watch an industry that has spent years trying to convince companies that hiring off-shore remote workers had all sorts of negative externalities on team cohesion and the development process suddenly fall head over heals in love with the idea of all companies going all in on "off-shore remote workers".
No longer commuting from Shoreline to downtown Seattle and spending 2+ hours in a car each day certainly helped my sense of well-being.
Shoreline to downtown Seattle is not even close to 1 hour each way by car, maybe 35 mins, if you stretch it. That been said, I feel you, commuting sucks, consider living closer or finding a new gig.
With the I-5 construction an hour is 100% believable.
Just did a quick check and the Shoreline Costco to Pike Place at 9 on a Tuesday morning is 35m-65m according to Google Maps.
There is plenty of alternative routes, I-5 is a dumb route to take because everyone thinks the same way, you could take aurora avenue, or cross the bridge from ballard, or even the other one close to UW. Google Maps is also wrong all the time btw.
Have you been doing the commute lately? All the routes are bad, it’s just a question of bad or worse. I have to make the drive sometimes and it typically takes 40 min or so just to north Seattle.
You really do not know what you're talking about.
Did you ever consider downsizing or renting to be closer to work? I can’t imagine choosing to commute that far every day.
By downsizing, you mean cramming my family into a crappy, small apartment in a terrible school district?
Most people don't "choose" to commute. They are forced to because of life constraints.
That just shifts the personal cost from commute time to reduced quality of life at home.
Of course? It wasn't really a choice, just making the best of bad and worse options.
I've been remote for ~6 years. I can't stand being in an office when I don't need to be there and looking busy. On top of that, commute savings are great. I work out of a coworking space a walking distance from where I live. I also had a child recently, and being able to pick him up easily after work is priceless. Forcing most tech talent to be in the same 2-3 cities is one of the worst things in recent history.
I've been working remotely for over 20 years. ProTip: working remote does not mean working from home. Surround yourself everyday with the people you want. Go to coworking spaces, coffee shops, parks. Find fellow remote workers and host coworking sessions and your places.
There's a mall near my house that has a food hall that has become an informal co-working space. At one point, the coffee shop had a coffee day pass.
Before my team got a back to office order we had weekly meetings there.
Considering how malls are suffering I don't understand why they are not offering more options like this.
I can see how this can help get you a change of pace, but as someone who learned during the pandemic they don't like remote working nearly as much as they thought they would, isn't doing this every day just commuting to a worse office with extra steps?
I guess if your office is really awful or your commute is ridiculously long it might be better. But all the talk you see about why working at an office is so bad for people's productivity cite the noise, distractions, unrelated chatter etc. Co-working spaces filled with people who aren't even on your team, coffee shops filled with angry customers and stay at home parents toting their toddlers and parks full of barking dogs and biting insects seem like they would all be their own cacophony of distractions and noises to rival even some of the worst open office plans.
Also at least around where I am, co-working spaces cost between $100-500 / month, and the coffee at the coffee shops while better than what is at the office is also $3-5 a cup. The parks are admittedly free, but the ergonomics of the tree trunk and root system leave a little to be desired. I'm sure it works for some people, but if I'm not spending my day working on my front porch in the sun with my dog, I think I'd rather be in the office instead of in the corner of a local coffee shop.
Interesting! Thanks for sharing
>> "This suggests you let people work remotely if they want to work remotely,"
I can't believe people need studies to see that. All you need is some common sense.
If there were no previous study available, there would be no argument to enforce a policy to enable this. So I am thankful that someone made a study, now there is more ”data” to back the claim up.
Unfortunately a lot of RTO advocates need to learn this.
For me personally, life has basically been divided into before and after. I used to spend an extra two hours every day just getting to and from work, taking public transport, which honestly wasn’t exactly inspiring. Now working from home is a real pleasure, and life has become so much more enjoyable.
I went from being fully in-person at a design firm (IDEO), working every day in a project room full of brilliant designers, to fully remote at the same company post-COVID. The remote period was a nonstop marathon of Zoom meetings, and I eventually left.
With that said, I'm grateful to have made the transition to remote working, because I got to be there for my daughter's early years.
Now I still work remote, but on my own terms, as an independent consultant. The difference is night and day.
What I learned is that remote vs hybrid vs in-office doesn't matter nearly as much as feeling engaged and effective in your role. If you feel that, it doesn't matter where you are.
Been working remote for over 15 years. It is the best.
About 10 years here, and I agree. At first I found myself missing the day to day interaction with co-workers, but after about 6 months I completely acclimated and can't imagine ever willingly going back to an office with bad privacy, commutes, coffee, smells and noise unless the need is extreme.
Do you never get lonely? How do you deal with it?
Not the OP but chiming in as someone who has worked remote almost exclusively since 2015.
In my opinion that's the crux of this debate: social needs vs social remedies.
If you have high social needs but don't have a strong personal social network, then an office is a great remedy. It solves the problem for you by default.
Remote only seems to work for the inverse. Lower social needs, or a strong social network outside of work, or some mix of the two.
I'm fairly extroverted (as far as engineers go) and I'm grateful to have a social network I've cultivated personally. So remote has fit well for me. I can get my work done to a high standard without the obligation, then turn around and spend purposeful time with friends and family.
It's perfect for me, but not for everybody, and you can see that in the comments here.
What remote really did was expose how many people were relying on office culture to meet their social needs. That's not a bad thing. It just surfaced something that went under-noticed for a long time.
I like 1-2 days in-office if the team is actually local but the problem is that companies can't decide what they want (in-office vs cheaper LCOL labor) and it ends up being the worst of both worlds where you drive into the office just to sit alone in conference rooms on video calls with people in other offices.
It's not just LCOL options. For even modestly large companies, there are probably teams scattered around the world and you're having teleconferences at many hours of the day and night.
Just the amount of time and life you waste for commute can be staggering. And of course all the other overhead that comes with going to and back from the office.
Being forced to work in an office when you KNOW you can work remotely is the most soul crushing thing I have ever experienced. It feels a tiny little bit like a Serf not allowed to leave the land.
The nature of employment has changed and there is no going back.
"These findings challenge assumptions that remote work undermines connection and retention. Instead, they suggest that remote work can support well-being and that well-being, not proximity, is a key factor in employee retention."
What is interesting to me here is the conflict between well-being and corporate interests. It is high time that well-being is being mentioned and considered as the definitive measure of employee retention.
Per HN Guideline "Please submit the original source. If a post reports on something found on another site, submit the latter.", this should be pointed at the original source: https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10....
Also worth noting: Frontiers in Psychology is a low-impact journal.
Oh, I'm sure! And the highest concentration of weekday Costco shoppers.
And also likely the highest concentration of workers working after 9PM or before 6AM.
Those aren't the same workers though. There's a dichotomy of remote workers - some are screwing off during the day and some are working more hours than they should be since it can be hard to unplug from the desk (especially if it's a full remote cmpany with people across four plus timezones).
Like everything, you remember the exceptions. Most people are in the middle, doing their 8. As remote workers they might take an hour to do a Costco run while it's not busy, and work an extra hour after the kids are in bed. Yes during COVID there were a lot of remote workers not doing much, but hopefully most companies with a good remote work culture have weeded those out by now.
yeah, but not extra hours, just putting in the mandatory required. Friends, neighbors that work from home do the same. Heck, our AP clerk that works remote is processing transactions at 2a and is unreachable during normal business hours.
The true workaholics are brining their laptops home to do this either way.
The true workaholics are a small minority, though. Office workers who do this are part of the small minority. OTOH, it's a regular occurrence for those who work remote: not because they're workaholics, but because they're putting in their eight.
I'd argue that that's a minority as well.
I go to work to attend video calls in office and remain quiet and working under supervision the rest of the time. I don't see the people I work with in real life. Unfortunately, as an extrovert, this is still preferable to working from home. I'm not white so I'm not really allowed to exist in public so the benefits of remote work doesn't apply to me.
In the same vein, the office is now high-pressure because of economic anxiety. It's one thing to hear about someone getting fired who was only ever a head on a screen versus someone getting fired that you knew in person. The current US administration has been hostile to the background of many of my respected colleagues and this creates fear in the office. It also creates anti-competitive incentives.
Additionally, The University of Colorado Boulder profits from online degrees and this link was more a marketing tactic than an academic piece. I think fully remote work works for some, and not for others. Even still, an online program may be the best way to find out.
It depends on your personality: If you shine in meetings and love the hallway talk, you will suffer in remote work.
If you already juggle multiple dependencies in your life (small children and/or in school, elder care, other dependents and special situations, dual study), or simply have too many interests, hobbies and love to do more things outside your work, remote work just feels revolutionary, to the point you just resent going to the office.
My F500 employer has on-site requirements. Colleagues and I sad-laugh because we all commute into the office, and spend most of the day on Zoom meetings with colleagues from other locations - you know, exactly the same thing we would do from home.
Workers without 5-10 hours of unpaid commute time in their week are happier. Gee whiz.
That's time to run errands, learn a skill, exercise, sleep, read, do nothing... it's almost as though our time is valuable and we don't like wasting it.
Especially true if you aren't doing a job you enjoy.
The downside of going remote is there can be a lot of project momentum lost in coordination issues. More chat based meetings, and less actual product out the door. =3
Ikigai:
https://myzenpath.com/purpose-meaning/ikigai-reason-for-bein...
> For years, many employers have worried that work-from-home arrangements leave employees isolated, disconnected from coworkers and more likely to leave their jobs.
Aww! All this while, I didn't know RTO came from a place of genuine worry and care about your workers. There I was thinking, that RTO was more about control and domination. Forgive me master, for I knew not.
I suspect the "more likely to leave their jobs" is the part the executives actually care about.
If you're remote and there's an "upgrade" remote job, there's very little friction to switch beyond the usual onboarding. You don't have to find a local job for your spouse, sell your house, switch your kids' schools, etc. You just mail your old laptop in and wait for a new one to arrive. Maybe you have to get up early or work later to match the local time zone if you have many in-office coworkers.
And, if you work at a big company that pays well, it can also let you get off the hamster wheel early and "leave your job" for retirement by moving to a medium- or low cost of living area while continuing to get paid an outsized amount for the area.
This is partly self-selecting, though. For example, it could really be saying that introverts - more likely to select remote work - are also more likely to be happy on their own. Extraverts are more likely to be happy around other people, but also more likely to be unhappy because of the behaviour of other people.
I've worked at a multi-national bank with HQ in London, Operational HQ in Singapore, Shared Services in Malaysia, India and China, Data centres in Hong Kong, Dubai and back in England. Every day was basically remote working with teams across the globe. No video; email, IP phones and audio-only meetings on MS Office Communicator. When the bank downsized office space so that 1/3 of shared services had to work from home, wasn't an issue at all because we were so used to working remotely.
This biggest issue is that new and middle managers are only trained to manage, not to lead. They feel that they must be able to reach out and touch someone to manage, hence RTO.
Related:
Remote work benefits are much bigger than a paycheck
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49346149
For a programmer remote work is the best, solitude, calmness, isolation, zero interruptions, flow, flexible hours, less soul sucking meetings, etc
For a programmer, remote work is the worst. Constant endless notifications from emails, slack messages and calendars. Excessive amounts of meetings to replace what used to be 5 minute chats at someone's desk. Expectations of instantaneous and always on availability since everyone works different hours now and since you're remote and have a VPN they know you can get online. Intrusion into your private space with forced cameras, microphones and mandatory spyware that's now running on a machine on your personal network. Wasted minutes in every meeting dealing with microphone failures or latency induced "I was- oh- sorry- no you go first".
All that to say, like everything in life, remote work is a trade off.
If I need heads down time during WFH, I literally turn on do not disturb mode and flip my teams to "busy". As in the office, I would put headphones on and find a quiet corner.
Meetings depend on the company, my team gets a lot of information transferred quickly whether it's on a call, in person, or async over teams messages.
Spyware - definitely sucks, I luckily have a pretty lax IT group (I'm part of them) but we're not super concerned unless something is malicious.
I think to some, remote work is a trade off. To others, remote work is a gigantic benefit. I would take remote work over a 25% raise, for example. Others might not.
To each their own, but for me - not putting miles on my. vehicles, getting 2+ hours of the day back, and being able to hit laundry / other chores over lunch is amazing for my work/life balance.
Of course. When I went remote, I could work from Miami during the winter, and escape the NYC cold months. Going for a swim to your buildings roof pool after done with the day, was the best feeling ever.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/HFZpJ9mWwAEfdhv?format=jpg&name=...
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/HIjqR2aWMAErm9E?format=jpg&name=...
Of course I am going to score higher in the well being department. :)
> remote roles tend to be concentrated in administrative or analytic work, whereas onsite roles may involve clinical or operational responsibilities ... may contribute to differences in well-being or turnover beyond location of work alone
So this is comparing jobs that can be remote (IT/clerical etc) with those that can't (janitors, medical staff, night security).
There are probably more differences in well-being between those roles than if they are remote or not.
I'm working remote since 2014. I built my whole life on that premise, traveling through the country on a weekly basis.
I love the freedom.
Van life?
Do often think about working out of our camper but it never really happens. Cheaper and warmer to sit in the home made office I put up in 2017...
But I do envy a good van setup.
I have a related question as someone who's been fully remote for about 12 years now, including all of my time in more senior/management roles: how does in person work even work for people who are in meetings all day every day?
My role (eng director) consists basically of 50-60 half hour meetings a week, back to back, with people all over the country/world. It wouldn't be tenable in an open office and it wouldn't even be tenable if I had to physically move across a campus in between meetings. Did people just work/manage across fewer projects and teams?
You are in office and then you hunt for a quite office room for every call, within the same campus you hope everyone gets to the same conference room which in bigger companies is infeasible so you are still remote aka face to face over a call... Haha.
That's how all engineering leaders I have worked with have worked.
Maybe this is just because you can have more meetings being remote. If you were inside an office and had to mive between meetings, you would maybe scale down this (insane) number of meetings per week.
There were a lot less meetings cause you would just walk over and talk with someone. Of course that’s still a meeting but it meant that people generally had more free time to connect and often problems would be resolved in five minutes right away instead of waiting for a scheduled half hour meeting.
Not to mention the number of times that I would end up taking a “meeting” in my boss’s office while he was on a call that he wasn’t listening to
When I was at Google it wasn't uncommon for a particular conference room to be "assigned" to a director or VP. From what I remember their calendars were always crazy full, too.
Many projects, many teams. Eventually it all becomes tens of thousands of unread emails, a lot of "thanks, but I've gotta leave for my next meeting", and lots of multitasking.
A big issue with non-remote is access to opportunities. A lot of organizations don't have offices everywhere, and I having to relocate every time there's a job change is absurd.
For what it’s worth having to relocate for work if the new work isn’t local has been the norm for like 10000+ years. I’m not sure it’s absurd, but it is a trade off.
It may have been the normal before we had the technology to remove that need. Obviously it may be the normal for certain types of work still, but I don't see why it needs to be that way for office work. This ends up greatly affecting housing markets too and making life more expensive for everyone.
From what I saw most people who "like" going to office are those suffering from domestic violence, having young children and wanting "time off" from parenting and in case of managers, the feeling of power over other human beings is not the same over Teams. Then you have narcissists and peeps/pervs who enjoy being in the middle of "action" and finally people who don't have any friends who hope they find them at a workplace. If you feel the need to go to office, book appointment with a therapist. Maybe you have an unresolved issue.
Couldn't one argue that if you think "most" of the people who say they like going to the office are lying, abuse victims, burned out parents, power tripping managers, narcissists, perverts and lonely losers, that it might be *you* that has an unresolved issue? Maybe people really do enjoy being in the office because they enjoy spending time with like minded people engaging in a common activity. If there really was no benefit to gathering in a common space in person with like minded people to engage in a shared activity, conventions wouldn't be nearly as big of a thing as they are, and they certainly wouldn't be big among famously introverted nerd and geek interests and hobbies. And yet when I talk about a "convention" I bet your mind goes first to a nerd event, something like comic-con or a star trek convention, or even CES.
> at a large healthcare organization
Isn't there kind of an inherit bias here where on-site healthcare workers would have vastly different job requirements than remote workers?
Also, isn't the healthcare industry thriving? Layoffs might be less of a worry.
We have a 4-home-1-office policy ("office day" on Tuesdays), I think it captures the best of both worlds for software teams. I go to office to "work" as well but it's different work: building relationships, having conversations, mingling, meeting others. I cannot imagine getting any coding work done in the office.
I wonder if anyone has done the work to adjust for 'net salary per hour working or commuting' for WFH vs. in office work in a high cost of living area;
This can easily translate to a 50-80% higher salary after housing costs, which for sure would translate into better wellbeing for most people anyway. For some EU companies, this can mean not even having to live in the same country, so wildly different cost of living.
Just having to live somewhere you can reasonably commute to an office, even just 2 days a week, is massively limiting in terms of where and how you can afford to live on any salary. For a daily in office work it's even worse.
Then the commute costs; easily 5-10k GBP per year for 'commutable to London' towns in the countryside.
Whether your company is WFH or RTO is a decision, but please dont try to do a hybrid -- where some employees on the same team are remote while others are in office. You end up with team members going to the office, and just staying on a zoom the entire day without actual interaction. Worst of all worlds.
There might be biases I’m not sure the study accounts for:
1. People who work remotely are more likely to have asked for it, and people who are in a situation that asked for are more likely to be happy about it.
2. People working remotely tend to fight for it, which makes them less likely to say bad things about it (such as, that they’re not happy with their work)
3. As another comment mentioned it, there might be a bias due to the fact that some jobs can’t be done remotely (e.g. housekeepers)
yeah that's why the trend is now to call all back to the office so that you don't feel too well.
Here is the full study.
https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10....
The sample is not high quality, but the conclusion is pretty obvious. No thinking person can doubt that improving work/life balance, flexible hours, sleeping more, commuting less and comfy pants is going to lead to any other outcome.
Its not just sleeping more but having more people wake up in their optimal times. People's natural wake up times are in a distribution so when you remove the commute time you including more people in the optimum wake up times.
I wish fully remote was something you could earn once you've spent X amount of years at a company. After 3 years, or 5 years, you know how the company works, you know the culture, you have an internal network etc. I think at that point, depending on your role you're more equipped to effectively manage fully remote work. Fully remote is so helpful for families who have to navigate daycare drop-off/pick-up times that don't align with work + commute hours. Gaining the ability to work fully remote after X amount of years with a company could help retain mid-level seniority in that phase of life.
> I wish fully remote was something you could earn once you've spent X amount of years at a company.
IME this is how it used to be in many companies. You earn trust for a few years then petition to go remote. There was usually a lot of process involved (I remember having my request go up the chain to a VP for approval) but as long as you were a high performer and okay with a mild pay cut, it generally went through.
Then post-COVID many companies had trouble luring people back when being in-office was purely optional. That's when you started seeing the RTO mandates and the refusal to allow anyone to switch to remote regardless of performance.
> Then post-COVID many companies had trouble luring people back when being in-office was purely optional. That's when you started seeing the RTO mandates and the refusal to allow anyone to switch to remote regardless of performance.
This is a bigger thing I think than most people realize. Before the pandemic I worked for a company that had a flexible policy of allowing people to work from home for the sake of work life balance (e.g. contractors, kid's recitals etc), but not an official "hybrid" policy for a fixed number of days remote. When the pandemic first hit, made it very clear when they sent everyone home that they wanted to get us back to the office as soon as it was safe to do so. When things started to open up again, they asked people to start voluntarily coming in to the office 2-3 days a week. And yet, the entire time they had that ask in place, every time I was in the office, I could probably have counted on one hand the number of people in the office on my floor and from everyone else I talked to who came in, it was the same every day. And I fully admit to being a part of that problem. But since people didn't do what was asked of them for a hybrid system, it seems obvious then that the company would insist then that everyone come back to the office full time. I really do believe that we would have ended with a hybrid system had people actually showed up on a fairly regular basis, but without people showing up, it became a negative feedback loop where people would show up less and less because every time they did, it was just remote work, but from the office.
It also probably didn't help that we had so many people all over every social media network (including HN here) bragging about how much they were doing during their work hours that was anything other than the work they were being paid to do. If you start broadcasting to the world how you're only giving your employer 4 hours a day out of the 8 hours they're paying you for when you're working from home, it should be unsurprising that they decide they can't trust people to work from home and insist they come back to the office.
Stop coming to my desk when I am working. The context switching of having 1 visitor an hour can wreck my productivity. I wish I could quantify this in USD$ and then track over the course of a year how much certain individuals are misappropriating company resources for their own pleasure. This should be a fireable offense. Lets turn on these wifi body tracking tools and start measuring metrics and KPIs for these intermittent "desk fault interruptions"! I demand satisfaction and dashboards with leader rankings.
On the other hand, I usually find people are generally observant of your desk space, especially if you look really busy with something. But remotely, you're constantly interrupted by incessant notifications from the slack channels you're in, from people directly messaging you to see if you're available for something and from an increase in 30 minute meetings to replace what should have been a 5 minute chat at someone's desk. And that's not counting having to actually stop what you're doing and literally switch tasks and screens to go read through all the slack messages and emails you've missed. And that doesn't account for the extra time you have to spend going and correcting a conversation that went off the rails that you could have helped solve faster if only you'd known it was happening, but since it happened in another window while you were heads down, and not at the desk 5 feet away where you could hear it, you missed everything before the folks in question went way down a rabbit hole.
Since full remote I can spend 8 hours a day on work instead of 10 (an hour commute each way). Putting aside other benefits like easy and cheap lunches, way better desk ergonomics and equipment, and all the sundry other benefits, working remote allows me to have a life that I never could when I worked in an office because of those 2 hours a day.
It's nice to be face-to-face with people, but I don't need that every day (and frankly don't want it neither), but all the benefits in quality of life overwhelming favor remote work for me to the point I will put up with way more shenanigans just to keep this benefit.
Here for comments from remote workers defending our way of life and comments from office workers attacking it(because they are jealous)
It depends. For someone who’s not disciplined, WFH may not be as productive. I have been using an app to track how focused I have been. I find that when I work at home, my focused score is usually lower.
Here’s the app: micro-time.com
Study certainly is biased since primary data comes from single unnamed organisation - likely MD Anderson. With 3 out of 4 authors of the paper from same institute makes more objective title "An employer's internal Leadership Institute analyzes its own employee-engagement and HR data and concludes that its remote employees have better well-being."
This is the kind of study that knows its audience - employees who want to keep remote working. The headline is self congratulatory.
HNs just like: now that I have the most highly sort after perk that almost no other job has I feel lonely :( wahhhh, wahhhh. Declares "remote work isn't what it's cracked up to be" while they sit on their golden thrones. Poor HNers.
I find remote work makes it harder to draw boundaries. I don’t really have work hours anymore. Co workers are all over the world. Sub 7am meetings. Post 6pm meetings. I wonder if in the old days pre remote if you could just close that laptop and go home?
Absolutely. When I started working at Amazon in 2014 it had a reputation as a company with a very bad work life balance. On the other hand, all communication was done through email and conference call (no cameras). Most people who worked late also stayed late, so it was obvious if someone was being overloaded. We had physical pagers still, which were a kind of physical totem of on-call work that made it very obvious if you were expected to do work outside of business hours.
Compared to the situation today with Slack, AI, and remote culture, almost every company IMO has a much worse work life balance than Amazon did 15 years ago.
I find it easier. In the office a boss can stop me and ask to stay late, a coworker might ask question at 4:59pm, etc. When wfh, literally no one can stop me from closing the work laptop.
It's fascinating how well the system recovers. If it works, companies that do remote work will outperform those that don't. And the reverse. If many companies all opt-in to remote work and output declines inflation will correct that.
I'm four days a week in the office and almost all my meetings are on Zoom.
It's noisy, lunch is rarely below 20 dollars (no, I don't have time nor will I cook a big pot of 4 meals Sunday night), the lights are too bright, the commute is crowded and causes anxiety, and my housing costs are very high so the commute is less than 45m.
I hate RTO - and I'm in leadership. Anyone who's working from home and whining about it should be ashamed of the privilege. You're incredibly lucky.
Now maybe not so much if you're underpaid.
Not everyone works at Initech though. My office is quiet, filed with sound deadening cubical furniture (a conversation at normal speaking volumes 10 feet away is almost inaudible) and ample private meeting rooms. Lunch is rarely above $12 and is on par with or better than most of the quick serve restaurants in the area both in terms of price and quality of food. The lights are at a reasonable level and most of the lighting is natural sunlight coming in from the huge floor to ceiling windows. The commute is bearable depending on where you live and while the housing costs are definitely high closest to the office, you can still easily find large single family homes on good sized pieces of land well within budget and inside a 30 minute commute. I am indeed incredibly lucky that I work for a company that took employee comfort and experience seriously when they built this office.
I wonder how much dislike around working in offices is less because working in an office is such a terrible experience vs working in a specific office for a company that doesn't care about their employee work environment is a terrible experience. I worked at a place for a brief window that made Initech look like a 5 star hotel, and if I had to work there every day, I might hate RTO too even though I found during the pandemic I didn't like WFH nearly as much as I thought I would.
So maybe "Anyone who's in leadership and wanting their employees to RTO should be ashamed of the fact that anyone could produce a list of grievances that long about working in their office"
After 6 years of full remote I am seriously considering how much of a pay cut I would accept to get work in person in an office and get to speak the local language daily.
Let me just summarize what the LLMs comment on this thread:
- home office is bad and this link only has one sample so its automatically invalid and does not take any type of combination and occupation under the sun into account
- home office is a prison because you dont talk to people
and now the humans:
- saving commute time is good (less traffic, pollution, less unnecessary company and personal costs)
- having more time for children
- remote work != home office, you can work anywhere btw
- don't have to pretend to look busy
You know these were just the first 10 comments I read, you make up your mind now
Seems like a good case for unions if workers prefer remote, but can't get it through typical one on one negotiation.
This seems obvious and predictable. of course people with flexibility, comfort, privacy, and convenience are better off than people forced into a grueling commute, a sick office, an exposed cubicle and toxic office politics
Done both.
The only circumstance where an office is actually fun is when a company is small (pre-HR), there are nerf guns, beer and a vibe of "we are fucking doing this!"
Once all that stops and things get sterile it is annoying. Open offices, less privacy in the bathroom, constant distractions and smells so some buffoon in leadership can feel lordly while watching the peasants work.
Biggest problem in working at home: neighbors giant barking rodent!
I mean yes, if I can work in my sweatpants (or no pants), not have to pack myself a lunch, and more easily goof off when I feel it is acceptable to do so, I too would report a higher 'well-being'. You wouldn't have to ask me twice to work remote again - unfortunately I work in manufacturing which can't really be done from one's home, usually.
This is a funny thing to study though, I'm really curious what they hope to gain from this 'knowledge'.
i remote work for 3e different companies that dont know im working 3 employers
i feel an immense sense of security
Remote only if done right, otherwise nope. i have seen many “remote” but in reality they dictate other measures rendering it worse than in person, like 6hrs a day of xyz time zone to be present, others even want to have an open camera in these hours, others have other means of surveillance to track your location or time spent on the device. If the remote job isn’t asynchronous, minimal meetings, and only the outcome is required from you, it’s not remote and would rather go to the office so this scum employer pay hefty rent instead.
I have also noticed some are trying to portray remote as “woke”, I don’t even know the relationship between both
loving my hybrid life; 2 days a week in office, working outdoors, 3 days at home.
been remote for quite a while. and i love it. but i've got some friends who absolutely hate it, and really struggled with remote working during covid.
so. works for many people, but not for others
would love to see productivity side of things
I'm also curious. I work remote about 95% of the time and my time spent in the office is by far my least productive. Way more ad hoc chats and longer lunches (both work related and not). I do enjoy the social aspect a lot, but man I get so much less actual work done. On occasion though, those chats lead to a really great idea for the product, so there's also that.
Clearly easier for you, me, or anyone else to delude ourselves into thinking our tech or jobs are harmless. God knows I prefer and feel happier at a WFH job, but how is this different or better for us than filter bubbles, aside from the obvious perks that are nice? How comfortable should work be?
Good work environment >> Remote work >>>> bad work environment.
However most companies who insist on full RTO are often the latter but claim they are the former.
This seems hard to prove a direct causal link.
Remote employees are also in demand enough to negotiate / find a role with remote work. They probably then are experienced, senior, and better compensated than their peers.
It could be that the underlying cause is being more in-demand in a position to negotiate remote work, not remote work by itself.
Where am I wrong?
Many companies that are offering remote work knowingly provide lower salaries. And many people agree because added flexibility has a price too.
Proving a causal link between being remote not having to commute is easy.
This is a survey of 20,000 health care workers in one organization. I doubt that that many of them are senior.