A friend and I who have known each other for decades say we manage to stay friends because we only see each other a couple of times a year.<p>Why burden business relationships with forced several hours /week physical presence and face time when nobody would impose that on a customer or a vendor, and lockdowns have shown that even (especially) marriages aren't designed for people to be stuck together that long.<p>The only other situation you spend that amount of time with someone is a cellmate in prison, and the inevitable and necessary conseqeunce is micro-power struggles over the least significant things because in spending that much time together, you literally exhaust every other way to relate.<p>Show me someone who loves office life and being around people who are forced to be together, and I will show you someone with a perverse addiction to confict. When extroversion becomes immoderate, they become masochists who crave attention and interpersonal intensity. As a result, whenever someone tells me they are a "people person," I give them a wide berth because I remember the advice I was given as a young boy which was, "you are what you eat."<p>I can't imagine re-adapting to something so insane as an office ever again.
I actually liked working in the office. But maybe I was lucky having nice colleagues. During the COVID-19 home office year I initially hated working from home. I kind of got used to it over time and it is working better than expected.<p>However:<p>1) I am definitely feel less productive and I find myself getting stressed out easily when something unexpected happens at work (live bugs for example).<p>2) I hate teams meetings. I mean the whole microphone/camera not working mess got much better. But I find these meetings less focused and less communicative. Nobody feels obliged to bring a meeting to a productive end (less than ordinarily).<p>3) I definitely experience a lack of communication across teams. I have no idea really what my colleagues are doing outside my team. Four to five people quit during the year and, personally, I have no idea what happened making them so dissatisfied.<p>4) I gained some weight due to the lack of commute and decreased mobility. During the warmer months I enjoyed my bicycle ride to/fro the office.<p>5) The commute also helped me to shut off my thoughts about work issues. Now, I carry them with me all the time and sometimes I return to work at night because I feel the need to finish something. I try to add breaks during the day to distance myself from working at home.<p>All in all, I don’t see why techies are so eager to isolate themselves at home. While my colleagues are certainly not good friends (which I don’t have much) but I always enjoyed lunch time with them, chatting with them over a cup of coffee or enjoyed a team event outside the office. Living with and loving my family for many years it feels good from time to time to be a separate person with a separate realm from home.
> And not every s/w engineer works in the way described, eg pair programming is hard if one of you is at home.<p>For me the pair programming experience has only improved with remote working. It's so much easier to share a screen in a remote call than to awkwardly huddle together around a small desk and look at a single 22" monitor or 15" laptop screen. Also it's easier for teammates to chime in into a call or ignore all together which is harder to do in an (open) office space without requiring headphones. Even onboarding new team members went better than I expected.
Coding by yourself can obviously done anywhere. Working with other people is much faster and easier in person, and arguably the more important part of the job for high level engineers. This is why I think hybrid office/remote is a pretty solid approach.
I think there are two main reasons cited by companies. First, protection of IP - they see it as easier to protect Intellectual Property if work is done on site (this is 10x for government contracts). Second, there is a fear that employees are goofing off. I've found I generally work harder remote, to ensure I am visibly being productive. The belief in many managers though is that if you're not 'butt in seat' at the office then they can't look over what you are doing.<p>I don't think either of these arguments hold water, for the reasons below.<p>First, with a VPN and modern controls on means of exfiltration you are able to maximize your protection against IP theft as well as to monitor your developers (see second point below though). That said, if a smart thief is going to steal your data, if they have physical access, if they are willing to accept the risk (this places doubt on smarts), and if they put the time and effort in, then they will likely manage to steal something.<p>Next, trust your people, but verify. Hire the best you can, pay them well so they are happy, and treat them like valued people. When hiring use background investigations, etc. to vet. The more you monitor, the more you say you don't trust them. The more they don't feel trusted, the less happy they'll be. The less happy they are, the more likely they are to leave or worse, commit the theft.<p>Last, a riff off the previous point. If you get good people, treat them well (incl. help when they have issues), and trust them to do their jobs - most people will perform at their best in a reliable and consistent manner.
Companies pay you for your output. The notion that they own your attention from 9-5 is ludicrous, right? Even in the office, we won't harass our employees if they close their eyes and meditate or they practice pen-spinning or reciting digits of pi, provided they're getting their job done.<p>And yet if they're at home, and they want to take breaks to improve their quality of living, this is suddenly a massive trust issue? In the past, commuting, we forced them to take two huge anti-breaks just so we can stare at them and so they can chit-chat with others? I just never agreed with the butts-in-the-cubicle-chair and the value of water-cooler gab.
I think all of this stuff is still valid, given the context, and I say that as someone who has been working 100% remote years before COVID.<p>Jobs are more than just a collection of people working independently. You really need buy-in at all levels of the organization to enable remote work to work optimally. Partially-remote or half-baked remote policies (or rushed, during COVID) often leads to organizational and cultural problems, unrelated to the individual work performance of individuals.<p>I think if you ask anyone who already worked at a 100% remote organization before COVID, they'll tell you: being already 100% remote was a competitive advantage during COVID.
I've been working from home almost completely since 2009 and worked about half time from home since 2005. It's definitely not for everyone, but the only way I'll ever go back to an office is if it's literally the only option left. For me the biggest reason is the staggering amount of wasted time associated with going into the office generally, but specifically for software dev work it's an environment that is stacked against you.
One question, two answers, top one with 7 votes and four comments.<p>It would be interesting to see how predictions about work from home from pre-pandemic played out, but this isn't a great sample.
There is definitely a lack of trust going on in a lot of places. There is also the question of building relationships. Ask any sales person if he/she thinks warming up a relationship is easier face-to-face or from a distance.<p>Then there is the fact that not everyone is efficient with WFH.<p>Finally, if one manages to split his tasks in batches WFH/office hybrid could definitely become an option for many, e.g. work with team in office one week / work on long form client emails remotely. But that's a very big IF.
I think “wanting our own personal space” is something that we all thrive for during our lives: buying a house and living in it with our family & close ones; riding a car with people we know; etc.<p>The problem is that it’s one of those things that we want because it just sounds better, like chocolate or a fast car, but then when our monkey brains slowly lives it through we realise it’s not really the most sustainable solution for our well being.<p>We evolved in tribes and social circles that are not in line with “what we want NOW because it feels safe and/or society prescribes it”. I do think that work offices were one of the few things in our highly individualistic society that allowed us to somehow subconsciously socialise and activate those primitive brain cells that we have become so detached from.<p>What I’m trying to say is that obligating people to come to office is horrible and it’s great pandemic is changing that, but humans need society to sponsor more ways to get us to live and interact more with one another.<p>And with offices being out of the equation I fear this will make it even harder for us to create subconscious tribes (ones that exist without even wanting them at first).
I would be interested to hear the opinions of anyone who was at Yahoo when they went to remote-friendly, and then went back again (all pre-pandemic). The story heard on the outside was that remote work was not working out, but I never heard the inside story.<p>I am a contract programmer, and I have worked both in office, remotely, and also hybrid (3/2). I have no strong opinion on the matter. But, I always know I'm temporary, by choice, so the fact that I'm not really making strong connections doesn't bother me, and my loyalty to the company isn't an issue because I'm a "hired gun". Yahoo apparently encountered something they found to be a problem with too many people working remotely, and I'd like to know how it all looked from "ground level".
Because we're the modern equivalent of a slave. Slaves are always at their masters dwellings. They don't have 'home'. Obviously modern slaves do the same for the most part.<p>We should count our lucky stars were not required to sleep at work.
"I've recently quit a job that required a 2 hour+ commute (4-5 hour total)."<p>The job did not require that. This individual chose to live in an exurb.