
Working from home was the dream but is it turning into a nightmare? - edward
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/aug/15/working-from-home-was-the-dream-but-is-it-turning-into-a-nightmare
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legerdemain
Is this surprising? This entire pandemic has been a parade of seemingly
obvious realities being presented as novel and surprising by various gadflies.

At least with regard to working conditions, I think I'm representative of a
sizable population of workers, and some realities about WFH struck me as
obvious immediately and have continued to be obvious since March.

I live in a small, one-bedroom apartment. I don't want to allot space to a
dedicated work area. It takes away from my already limited living space. If I
had rented this apartment with an eye toward setting up a home office, I might
feel differently, but I don't.

I was skeptical that office culture would reconfigure itself to become more
asynchronous and more supportive of WFH. I think my skepticism has been
vindicated. Meetings are longer, more frequent, and less effective. Written
documentation, written project planning, and code reviews are still
undisciplined and haphazard. Tasks fall through the cracks and hand-offs are
an afterthought. Slack continues to be a source of constant distraction.

One aspect of WFH that I didn't estimate well is the level of ambient noise in
my apartment during the workday, compared to the noise level in an office
building. Office buildings I've worked in have some constant level of HVAC hum
and background people chatter. My apartment in the suburbs, by comparison, is
constantly bathed in noise from lawn care teams (at my complex and adjacent
ones, several days each week), rumbling delivery trucks, ice cream trucks,
service vehicles (there always seems to be a Roto-Rooter van in the
neighborhood), and miscellaneous neighbor activity (an outdoor punching bag, a
car idling under my window, a metal zipper banging in the building's clothes
dryer).

For me and people in situations similar to mine, WFH has offered few
improvements over working in an office building, but added many distracting
indignities.

