Working from home isn't going away, even if some CEOs wish it would

Personally it&#x27;s also because the office has become such a horrible place to work since the pandemic.<p>We&#x27;ve gone from fixed desks and floors divided by department to stupid flex desks where you have to drag your stuff from a locker and are sitting mixed with people you have nothing to do with whatsoever. Often noisy sales people besides ones that need to concentrate.<p>I used to enjoy going to the office 3 times a week. Now I officially should go 2 days but I hate it so much I rarely actually do. It&#x27;s really a fancy place for management to see butts in the seats and the needs of the employees are a total afterthought.

It&#x27;s all about saving time. Musk got a private jet to save time travelling around. Employees WFH to save time too. That&#x27;s the hack they found to avoid commuting to work. In such they improve the quality of their lives.<p>Musk, Jasys and Benioff should treat their employees like they do their customers. Adapt to their needs. Asking people to come back to the office is just like selling something a customer no longer wants.<p>As for Musk saying &quot;it ain&#x27;t fair for service employees&quot; I reply those are different jobs. Poor excuse.

Wasn’t that clear? The goal of, time and again, is always to increase the workers rights. Workers 100 years ago didn’t have the rights we have now, and in 100 years workers then will have more rights than us now. In that regard, working from home (and thus avoiding a long list of time consuming activities that have no positive outcome at all: commute time, traffic jams, etc.) is a step forward into that direction.

Having WFH for the past 3 years, Im not sure I would start my own WFH company. Maybe Im in a company that doesnt have the culture to support it very well, but the amount of inefficiency I see on the engineering level would make me prefer a hybrid solution for my own company.<p>As an employee though, Im happy with WFH :)

At this point, there’s literally nothing useful &#x2F; new that can be said on this. This is very clearly well into the territory of being a culture war issue. Both sides are entirely talking past each other, misrepresenting each other’s POVs, and there’s little if any room for nuanced discussion. As made evident by any HN thread on this topic, tech nerds are among those buying into this BS hook, line, and sinker.

I&#x27;ve worked 100% remotely for over 20 years, and plan to continue. There are tradeoffs to everything, but most of the problems I&#x27;ve encountered came from people who aren&#x27;t suited to working remotely at all, or people&#x2F;companies operating as if they were a single-location in-office company&#x2F;team&#x2F;etc when they aren&#x27;t.

What I keep repeating on this issue: for a lot of people it’s not about not going to an office. It’s about breaking real estate and escaping high cost of living cities that refuse to build housing.<p>At this point it’s clear that the Bay Area in particular and much of the West Coast in general refuses to build enough housing to meet demand because it’s controlled by owner and real estate speculator cartels. The only economically rational move is to leave.<p>CEOs who insist on locating there with no remote work option should skip the middleman and pay property speculators directly.

I&#x27;ve had this conversation with quite a few people recently. As I say to them, once the genie is out of the bottle it&#x27;s hard to put it back in again. People will simply go to companies who allow them to be remote or more flexible.

My company did a hilariously stupid thing where, towards the beginning of the pandemic, corporate decided that hybrid work was the future and ordered everybody to change to open offices. We are a small company and have few enough people that there is room for everybody to have a cubicle. Our management sometimes fights stupid pointless orders but not this one -- so they began a lengthy process of tearing out all the cubes and replacing with a bunch of open spaces, including more conference rooms and labs for some reason (that I guarantee will never be used because again -- very small company). They went so far as to change where walls were -- when I visited recently and took a tour back there, it felt super claustrophobic.<p>When corporate changed their minds and said everybody needs to start coming into work again, our management realized that, because of the way they did the conversion to open offices, <i>they no longer have enough room for everybody in the company to be there physically!</i><p>I still can&#x27;t decide whether I&#x27;m bitter about the pointless change to open office, or if I&#x27;m thankful they did because otherwise they would have pressured us harder to start coming in again.

I recall the first manifestations of work-from-home showed up in Academe where, in the late 80&#x27;s, grad students as well as post docs were involved with both students and faculty, both of which worked to teach and supervise their multi-year student bodies (from year 1 to grad school and post docs). This meant you had teachers as well as levels of students with a wide scatter of study places as well as learn spaces. Initially large main frames were coupled with various campus wide networks (token-ring and later ethernet - which ultimately triumphed). These were called TSO, (time sharing option) with a complex time of use&#x2F;department where each processor-second(often less) were tracked and debited to each department&#x2F;prof&#x2F;student = sucked increments from each associated grant. It was soon found that a department could buy an Apple II or 8088&#x2F;186&#x2F;286&#x2F;386&#x2F;486 and use widely spread free programs to do much of the data processing. These boxes cost on the order of $3000-10,000 and could be coupled with low cost dot matrix printers with the result of doing tasks locally, and more importantly at very low cost to a grant than the TSO = huge IBM filled rooms with huge costs on an hourly basis, with the TSO accounting scheme aggregating these CPU milliseconds to each project. This TSO was in fact a data empire, with Kings&#x2F;Princes&#x2F;Vassals. Turf wars developed, departments were forbidden to use grant $$ to buy IBM&#x2F;Apple&#x2F;Clones as the data Kings were greedy. So the profs bought them with their own personal $$, then they would not allow personals in the labs - ultimately, the Apple&#x2F;IBM Queens said &quot;Off with their heads&quot; and logic prevailed. Early data shares by FTP or sneaker net and then email = the start of what we have today. Drawing a parallel with work from home, I know how this will end, heads are even now rolling. Working from home will win in most cases - the places that demand presence will fade as old manglers (managers) are pensioned off, and things that demand presence will endure - we would hardly see The Boat Race worked from home - but with modern robotic rowers, it could be done, but that is another empire&#x2F;war yet to come.

WFH won&#x27;t go away. It&#x27;s not suitable for every company and not good for everyone, but it&#x27;s ideal for many of us.<p>I&#x27;m a heavy proponent of WFH, but I have the experience to understand that it&#x27;s not suitable for all occasions (and especially for middle management ;-) )

I’m pretty sure the government should just make it law that employers have to pay employees for their time commuting and this whole fight would be over.

Having worked 30+ years in various office environments (some good, some bad) I believe that hybrid is the sensible option for everyone. And that should be optional as well. I had a great job working for a company that was one day a fortnight in the office. Pretty much everyone who could make it in did and they came from 50-60 miles (some more) but the expectation when you got there was &#x27;hello let&#x27;s do a bit of work together, chat, have a nice long&#x27;ish lunch and leave before the trains get too busy&#x27;.

If CEOs want to push people out and do silently layoffs, it doesn&#x27;t matter WFH is good or not, they are going to find all kinds of reasons to make you want to quit.<p>We might find out what CEOs <i>really</i> think about WFH if the job market looks like 2021-2022 again and forces companies to compete on perks to attract workers. Although I doubt it will happen anytime soon (or ever)

Alex Pentland wrote a book about a decade ago, <i>Social Physics</i>[1], where he empirically studied how ideas spread in firms. Comparing remote and office workers was one part of it, and he found a strong advantage for in-office work. The reason is pretty straight forward, there is virtually no spontaneous social interaction (&quot;watercooler conversations&quot;) in remote work, and teams who worked in person were significantly more dynamic, ideas are generated more often and spread more easily.<p>Other than routine labor like doing paperwork for the municipal office aside, in person companies are going to have an extreme edge, Musk is right on this point, it&#x27;s also an explanation for the geographic concentration of say, the tech sector, people don&#x27;t pay those horrendous SF rents for nothing.<p>[1]<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.mit.edu&#x2F;2014&#x2F;social-physics-0304" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.mit.edu&#x2F;2014&#x2F;social-physics-0304</a>

Once again, my position is - if you want people to want to work from an office, you have to make the office an appealing place to work. Open office environments with temporary desks and tons of noise pollution is just not going to cut it.

Yeah, I&#x27;m not going back either. Worked remotely for a few years. Got impacted by lay-offs and joined a hybrid company. Would still have been able to work 4 days from home, and 1 from the office. Went to the office 4 times, and spent 90% of my time either alone at my desk, or in an office room in a meeting that should have been an e-mail. Sure, in person collabs might (!) be easier for ideation and greenfield work, but in all honestly, don&#x27;t get to do that all to often anymore.<p>Needless to say, I&#x27;m back at a fully remote place now. I&#x27;m fine if they offer hybrid, not everyone has the room&#x2F;situation to work from home. I can imagine that for some, having a desk at an office is a net benefit, but don&#x27;t make me come over and waste my time because you have control issues.

I had interview recently. Company allows dogs in the office. I had very bad experience with dog owners in past (a few weeks in hospital) . I asked some questions about self defense, insurance, sick leave... Interview went downhill pretty fast.<p>In past I would deal with that, and just pay cost from my own pocket. But pandemic changed that. Now I demand fair compensation for work in hazardous environment.

Let&#x27;s be honest: where do we make friends if we work from home? To make friends, we need to be in a sort of co-living environment. It&#x27;s hard to make friends if all we do is passively set up appointments with someone.