
The social and economic costs borne by young people without offices - RickJWagner
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/10/career-costs-working-from-home/615472/
======
supernova87a
WFH has a huge difference in result depending on who you are, when you are (in
your career), and where you are in a company (of organization).

\-- For the budding young developer who can't wait to show ideas to teammates
and demonstrate being a go-getter by asking random questions and finding
unaddressed issues to innovate on, WFH might be terrible. You're going to
schedule time to fortuitously run into the senior person who takes an interest
in your idea?

\-- For the working parent whose productivity has been slashed by 50% and
stress has gone up by 50% due to parenting obligations, WFH might be terrible.

\-- For the middle manager who can coast along and not need to move greatly in
his/her career, WFH might be great.

\-- For the developer who works by tickets on very concrete things and this is
nothing new, WFH might be great.

\-- For the small company CEO who relies on force of personality and everyone
in the same room urgently working to get something done, WFH might be
terrible.

There's a huge variability in what WFH means, depending on what you want from
the situation.

For some people, remote working is really not good.

And that's aside from the point that, when everyone is remote, you're also
competing with the world who is also remote. Jobs and job qualifications (and
competition) may change...

~~~
chadash
> And that's aside from the point that, when everyone is remote, you're also
> competing with the world who is also remote.

Yup... once everyone is remote anyway, won't take too long for some manager to
decide to offshore work to cheaper countries. Even if that doesn't happen to
you, if it happens to enough people elsewhere it'll bring salaries down for
everyone.

~~~
sJ646U9k6c6gME9
Offshoring is not a new concept, and everyone knows it doesn’t work. How come
offshoring hasn’t eaten my lunch yet?

~~~
ThrowawayR2
Because the pandemic is forcing literally _everybody_ to work their tails off
to figure out how to make remote work succeed. Once managers master that (and
they will because they have no choice), it's a tiny, tiny jump to offshoring.

~~~
redisman
Are you talking about hiring professional software engineers full-time from
other countries? I think that is actually plausible and I've seen it work at
multiple companies. Buying services from a "offsourcing" shop on the other
hand - always a complete disaster or literally more time managing them than to
build it yourself.

------
frompdx
_This article appears in the October 2020 print edition with the headline “A
Cubicle Never Looked So Good.”_

To be honest, I've never really had a cubicle. Usually just a desk in a
bullpin type arrangement. No privacy. Distractions galore. The sound of co-
workers flushing the toilets in the restrooms nearby. Nothing to reflect
fondly upon in my opinion.

 _If I had wanted or needed a new job, completely changing careers would
probably have been easier than getting another gig in my field with the
experience I’d accrued at home._

No doubt my experience is different doing technical work, but I have never
relied on my co-workers to line up my next position. I flip the switch on
linkedin to let recruiters know I'm looking and call or email the recruiters I
have worked with in the past. Sometimes an employer might ask for a reference.
I suppose I do have a short list of those.

 _“Outside of immediate family, people’s co-workers become their most
consistent opportunity for social interaction,” Peditto told me. “What happens
when you lose that is one of my greater concerns.”_

My social interactions really do revolve around my family and long time
friends. It's not a large group, but I'm not a social butterfly either. I have
a hard enough time keeping up with those social interactions. Who knows, maybe
I was born for remote work.

Overall this feels like yet another hit piece against remote work with a lot
of anecdotes and not much else. Here I am arguing against it with my own
anecdotes. I really don't understand why these keep cropping up. Are
commercial real-estate conglomerates paying for these?

Personally, I am happier than I have ever been working remotely. I don't
struggle to keep a routine or maintain separation between my work life and my
home life. I don't feel starved for social interaction either. I would hate to
see the sentiments these articles convey ruin something that has been very
positive for myself and my partner (and my dog).

~~~
benrbray
> Overall this feels like yet another hit piece against remote work...I really
> don't understand why these keep cropping up. Are commercial real-estate
> conglomerates paying for these?

I appreciate the perspective you shared in the rest of your comment, but was
this bit really necessary? Just because someone has had a different experience
than you doesn't mean that they're a corporate shill paid to manufacture
dissent.

~~~
frompdx
I do think it is necessary. It's one thing to share your experience about
remote work as the author does. It's something entirely different to
interleave it with with vague concerns of economic hardship for younger people
or stunted career growth for women. What is the purpose of this?

In my mind I imagine a boardroom full of Don Draper types sipping scotch and
smoking cigarettes fretting over the decline in office leasing revenue while
Draper spins a brilliant web of fiction. "We'll tell them that it is bad for
the careers of women and we'll make them miss the smell of their co-worker's
day old spaghetti as it spins on the microwave turntable. We'll even make them
long for the awkward interactions in the hallway while they go down a level to
the inconveniently placed restroom on the floor below. They'll eat it up."

The anti-remote work hit-piece aspect is really my point. To me these articles
feel like some kind of thinly veiled attempt to make people believe they
missed working in the office. Maybe even make people fear for their futures if
they don't work in an office. Maybe this isn't the case and isn't what the
author intended, but that is how it reads to me.

~~~
benrbray
Sure, if there's evidence that the author is not really who they say they are,
by all means go ahead and point it out. However, you just seem to be making
vague accusations about some grand conspiracy by corporate real estate
developers, rather than addressing the article's very legitimate points.

As a young person working remotely, everything the author says reflects my own
experience. It is very much a fact that remote work removes a lot of the
unscheduled office interactions that younger / newer employees use to learn
and advance their careers. I don't know about women specifically, but it is
very plausible that remote work hurts social and economic mobility for young
people, and for people without a stable home life.

Yes, we should certainly collect data to measure the real impact of remote
work, good and bad. But now that remote work is a part of everyone's lives,
whether we like it or not, it's also valuable to listen to these individual
stories, to get an idea of the breadth of possible outcomes when we get rid of
the office.

~~~
frompdx
_Sure, if there 's evidence that the author is not really who they say they
are, by all means go ahead and point it out. However, you just seem to be
making vague accusations about some grand conspiracy by corporate real estate
developers, rather than addressing the article's very legitimate points._

I think all of your points are completely fair so I don't want you to feel
that I am being obtuse or overly pedantic. You're correct that I have not
provided any evidence to indicate the author is not authentic. However, you
made me curious so I decided to open the article in a private browsing session
with no ad blocker enabled.

Maybe everyone sees a different advertisement, but what I saw struck me. The
article is peppered by advertisements from facebook.

"Support Small Business Together." Is the tag line of the facebook
advertisement.

What I say next is facetious of course. This article isn't part of a grand
conspiracy by corporate real estate developers, it is a grand conspiracy by
one of the largest advertising platforms in the world, facebook. Remote work
is hurting facebook's advertising revenue because small business are dying
off.

Again, entirely facetious. Still, The Atlantic is partially supported by
advertising and I found this particular advertisement to be interesting given
the content of the article and the discussion on HN.

Draper's eyes gleamed as he delivered the line that would seal the deal.
"We'll make them nostalgic for their offices and that is how you will sell
more advertisements to small businesses mister Zuckerberg."

~~~
kelnos
> _Remote work is hurting facebook 's advertising revenue because small
> business are dying off._

Do you actually know the breakdown of Facebook's advertising revenue by
company type? I would expect that small business is not their bread and
butter, and with the current status of everything in the world, other
businesses would pick up the slack. And FB's usage stats are probably through
the roof with people unable to socialize in person.

I think it's a bit weird to assume that FB would be attempting to promote "hit
pieces" on remote work. In fact, I bet FB itself stands to save a lot of money
by closing down or reducing in size many of its offices and transitioning a
lot of its employees to permanent or semi-permanent remote work even after the
pandemic has passed.

I feel like you've let your imagination get away from you here.

------
benrbray
As a recent graduate with an overseas job offer who has been left with no
choice but to work remotely until Japan re-opens its borders to foreign
workers, this really hits home.

My student apartment is not equipped for this lifestyle. I do not have a home
office in a sprawling estate in the suburbs on several acres of property where
I can enjoy the sounds of nature. I live in a small apartment on a busy street
surrounded by highways and golf courses who don't let plebs like me wander
around inside.

When I'm at home, I just feel this anxiety about working that just never
subsides. I feel much more relaxed when I'm able to be outside, but the
nearest public green space is campus, which I avoid as much as possible now
that school is in session. The nearest park is a thirty minute drive, but I
have to check the air traffic before leaving due to a nearby airport.

At home, work seems to never end, especially with the 13-hour time difference
that necessitates 10:30pm meetings twice a week. On one hand, I really enjoy
this rare occasion to talk to my co-workers, but on the other hand, I can't
shut off my work brain until after the meeting is over. On these days I end up
going to sleep at 3 or 4am, adding to the cycle of stress and sleep
deprivation.

I figured this would last one, maybe two months at the most. But now it's been
four months since I started remote work and six months since I accepted the
initial offer. There's no word about Japan issuing new work visas any time
soon.

I want my life to begin.

~~~
VLM
If you're a 30 minute drive away from a park it must be extremely urban and
therefore expensive. It might be cheaper to move somewhere suburban or go
completely nomadic. You may not get a chance to see the Grand Canyon or other
national parks anytime soon if you're moving to Japan, so now might be a very
good time.

Google searches for mountain view CA apartment rents as an example of hyper
dense urban life far from green areas seem to indicate $2K to $6K/month is
quite reasonable. Similar google searches for rural Wisconsin cabins indicate
a thousand bucks per week will get a cabin on a lake in the woods with a
pontoon boat, wet bar, and hot tub. You don't have to worry about your
schedule if your closest neighbor is a quarter mile away. Internet might or
might not be a problem.

The problem with spending a couple months at some New Orleans bed and
breakfasts is you'd be close enough to be reminded everything is shut down,
and noise level. Might be easier to stick with rural retreats and adventures.

The united states lighthouse association website lists rentable lighthouses if
you really want to get away from it all. Again, internet via satellite may or
may not be a problem. The entire lighthouse on Charity Island in Michigan can
be rented for not too much more than a Mountain View apartment.

You could do a very small house boat on a lake for $4K to $6K per month off
season. There is no shortage of houseboat rentals and lakes and parks to
visit. Could try the mississippi river...

In all fairness I did spend yesterday in a park shelter at a county park with
excellent wireless working away in 70 degree breezes, but there are many days
when it rains or its 100 or 0.

~~~
MrMorden
An urban location won't be more then ten minutes away from a park by foot. A
30 minute drive means exurbia.

~~~
benrbray
Atlanta!

------
susiecambria
I'm working on a distance learning project at the moment. . . analyzing focus
group results. We're talking with parents, teachers, and adult/alternative
learners.

Just finished a parent transcript today. What came through loud and clear is
that school from home is wicked hard for all kinds of people and that
combining WFH and school from home is even more wicked hard. Parents are
struggling with their kids' academic content (pre-calc? algebra?!). Kids are
struggling with less structure. Everyone is struggling with limited bandwidth
(literally and figuratively) and learning/working styles and the need for
socialization are colliding in an unfortunate, constant way. For many, not
all.

Looking forward to reviewing all the transcripts and compiling the findings.
But if parents are any indication, it's gonna be a rough fall.

*Edit: Yes, I'm from New England. (wicked)

------
hombre_fatal
WFH has some obvious trade-offs. But I'm not particularly sympathetic to all
of them when office work has been the only choice for almost everyone.

Some of the downsides of WFH that the article points out, like how our office
coworkers incidentally become our social life (and now we don't have them),
are also symptoms of larger issues that I don't think work should be tasked to
solve. The social isolation of the youth (before Covid) and the dependency on
an office for many people to make friends were already pretty depressing parts
of our society.

But so was having to go to work to do a job that could be done anywhere. Like
everyone always talks about wanting to retire so they can finally hang out on
the beach year round, but WFH is what lets you do that. It doesn't need to be
a distant dream anymore for when you're old. I get that people were suddenly
tossed into the deep end of WFH due to Covid instead of given a choice, and
that many people aren't cut out for it.

But this kind of coverage also goes too far, I think, in a world where we were
always forced to go to an office. I was looking for a job last year, and I had
to search high and low for a remote job. For example, almost all the job posts
on HN want you to come into an office. I was unsuccessful finding remote work
in my more traditional search and fortunately found a good remote job through
my social circle.

Office jobs have a certain stability and, even more important, familiarity.
But I think that familiarity can be confused with an assumption that it's the
way things should be.

For example, I agree that a future where most jobs are WFH will have to
consider a solution for helping us find a productive way to work (like giving
us a private office in a coworking space or letting us choose a stipend to set
up a home office). But also consider how depressing it is to clutch on to
office work because it gives you an escape from your children—it's really not
a quality of the office work itself that you're after, but somewhat of an
incidental upside that can (and should) be replicated in a culture of WFH.

What I mean to say is that I see a lot of office-work praise for what's
actually incidental advantages of office-work (that should definitely be
replicated outside of office-work), and it would be a damn shame if we as a
society use those incidental benefits to damn WFH and regress back to the more
or less office-work-only society from which we came.

I hope we find a good 50/50 middle ground where people have a choice.

~~~
cableshaft
Yeah, I had been working from home the past two years before the pandemic, and
I was sticking with this job longer than I wanted to because it was near
impossible to find a new remote job.

The only reason my job became remote work in the first place is because the
parent corporation was trying to cut costs everywhere and reducing its real
estate footprint and closed our office.

Most of the offices they closed they just laid everyone off, but we had enough
business that didn't transfer well to other departments that they let us keep
working remotely.

I was willing to go in to work a couple of days a week when I was looking for
a new job, but I was not eager to do it every day again. Between the commute
and the hassle and cost of having to take our dogs to and from doggy daycare
everyday it didn't seem worth it, especially when I knew I could do my job
from home just fine.

I'm glad the pandemic normalized WFH a bit more and I don't want to see
everything revert back to 'you gotta physically be in work, each and every
day' once we're past it. It's fine if being in an office is an option again,
sure, but I don't want it to be the only option.

Also, I feel like I have to speak up about my preferences on HN whenever this
comes up because it seems like the majority of people are pushing for
everything to go back to in-person, and I don't want people to assume everyone
thinks that way.

------
pelasaco
I'm doing home-office since 2013 and I'm doing fine. Have my surf and social
life in my routine. Work focused, produce more and spend less time trying to
get stuff done. Cook daily is hard but sometimes a joy and a must if you want
to leave healthy. I would never come back to a 5 days in the office routine.
Never.

~~~
bluntfang
>Cook daily is hard but sometimes a joy and a must if you want to leave
healthy.

Hit this on the head. Since I've started working remotely, ~1 year before the
pandemic, I've really seen my diet improve. I eat clean. Fresh vegetables and
grains are much cheaper than food truck/restaurants. I do put in hours though,
but I haven't timed it. I usually can pull off cooking during my lunch break
or during the 2-3 monthly all staff meetings I have where I don't do any
talking.

What really baffles me about all of this is how full the fast food drive thrus
are when I go about on errands.

~~~
pelasaco
i eat much more vegetables and and fruits and much less meat than before. Brew
your own coffee (BYOC) instead of the enterprise machine and the option to
seat outside while reading some paper or thinking about your code is
priceless.

------
austincheney
For some people writing software is an inherently social experience:
contributing to a team, learning from colleagues, exchanging ideas in person.
For others software is an experience of research and crafting which requires
minimal feedback and no social interaction to grow and experiment. Like
everything else in life this comes down to personal needs and expectations.

To say working from home results in a lost generation is excessive, almost to
absurd. It is beneficial to some people and harmful to others regardless of
financial or familial situations.

Furthermore that opinion only makes sense in a vacuum, such as for people who
do nothing else and are limited to a single job solely focused upon writing
software. Once your professional experience has broadened a bit absolutes like
this subject become more clear for the limitations that they are.

~~~
scarface74
> For others software is an experience of research and crafting which requires
> minimal feedback and no social interaction to grow and experiment.

If you are young and new in your career, I don’t see how it could not stunt
your career or lead to being an “expert beginner” without getting feedback.

This definitely happened to me for the first decade of my career. Not working
remotely, working either as a sole developer or working with two or three
other self taught developers who had been with the company forever.

~~~
austincheney
> I don’t see how

As a self-taught developer I promise you it never stunted my skills, and most
probably made me a much stronger developer. I have been a professional
developer for 12 years (10 of those as a senior) and during that time I have
spent 4 years on military deployments overseas and another 1 year in a
military school. As a result of intense self-training away from the corporate
world I have learned to become a stronger and more independent developer than
most of my peers.

When you are writing software on a small netbook traveling around Afghanistan
with no internet you have to learn to be self-reliant, portable, efficient,
and cheap with system resources. Given the right set of expectations and
personality you just figure it out. Based on this perspective its my thought
expert beginners are precisely so because they are too reliant on social
reinforcement over original decisions.

~~~
scarface74
How do you know that you areas good as other developers? How do you know that
you haven’t missed something from getting other’s perspectives? In other
words, without interacting with other people, how do you know what you don’t
know? If you don’t have Internet, how do you know where the industry is and
that you are following best practices of the ecosystem you are involved in?

As far as “original decisions”. How do you know that your “original decisions”
are the best ones? How do you know that you are reinventing the wheel by
taking advantage of the experience of the broader community that has already
solved the problem you are trying to solve?

A senior developer could just be someone who outlasted everyone else at a
company - that is the definition of an expert beginner.

I was a “senior developer” in 2008 working at the same company for nine years
with two other “senior developers” who were self taught. I was also spending a
non insignificant amount of time doing VB6 six years after it had been
abandoned by MS, Perl and didn’t use source control.

I also “learned how to be independent”. That was actually a detriment when I
first worked at a large company with a team and didn’t have the social skills
to get my ideas adopted by the rest of the team, didn’t have the lack of ego
to listen to others, and got PIPd for not being a team player.

~~~
austincheney
> How do you know

You know when you are solving a given technical problem. With practice your
solutions become more refined with increased performance.

> A senior developer could just be someone who outlasted everyone else at a
> company - that is the definition of an expert beginner.

I don’t believe those are the preferred or common definitions. Independence is
not related to arrogance.

~~~
scarface74
> You know when you are solving a given technical problem. With practice your
> solutions become more refined with increased performance.

Whether those are common definitions, someone who lasts a company for years
gets to be a “senior developer”.

I knew an “architect” who was the first developer at a startup, who had been
there for over a decade and as the company grew, he got promoted as newer
people cane in. He made every mistake in the book of an “expert beginner”.
Writing bespoke unmaintainable ORMs and logging frameworks, and treating a
database as a queue, etc.

I was optimizing assembly language in middle school by counting clock cycles
in the 80s on my 65C02 (ie the _74_ in my username).

Was I a “senior developer” in 8th grade because I knew how to make my assembly
language programs 33% faster by reading a writing from the 1st page of memory
and using branch instructions instead of JMP instructions?

I was writing inline x86 assembly in the early 2000s when I looked at the
decompiled assembly and I knew I could squeeze some performance out of it.

You know what I didn’t know because I thought I was so smart and didn’t learn
from other people?

I didn’t know the ecosystem of my chosen platform so I would know what I
shouldn’t write at all and just pull down from Nuget or the package manager of
the platform I was using.

I didn’t know when I should build versus outsource because it didn’t add
business value and wasn’t what gave us an “unfair advantage”.

I didn’t know how to mentor junior developers to be a force multiplier.

I didn’t know how to make choices that was best for the team or the business.

I didn’t know how to talk to end users to solve XYProblems.

I didn’t have the social skills to know how to “disagree and commit”.

Writing the wrong thing “optimally” is not the definition of a senior
developer.

------
topkai22
The issue brought up by the author are real, but I think many aren't
necessarily inherent to remote work but are due to society and norms not
having adapted to it yet. I've run a remote team for years and quite
explicitly encourage socialization, develop new hires and thier connections,
and encourage boundaries (mostly by telling people to stop working at 530p).
We have few of the problems that are often claimed to be endemic in remote,
because we have actively worked to build a culture that avoids them.

Even at a wider, multi-group level, we are able to address issues of
innovation and serendipity by creating time and space for them. One of the
best tricks is encouraging lots of small presentations on non-work or semi-
work topics followed by lots of open ended conversation. People show up by
mutual interest outside of their project based work and talk. I run a book
club roughly themed to application development and every session I meet new
people from across the org and exchange ideas. Some of these contacts have
resulted in valuable insights for later projects. Volunteer projects and
hackathons can serve a similar purpose.

These are just examples and we are hardly perfect, but I if the projections of
an massive increase in WFH bear out at all, you'll see culture adapt to it as
well- people will get better at socializing on screen, feel more free to ping
with questions, and will find these alternate avenues to collaborate. I'm less
confident that society outside of work will adapt as well, but I wouldn't be
surprised at all to see a long term increase in young people continue to live
with extended family or social clubs.

------
Mountain_Skies
Best advice I can give is to have a dedicated space from which to work. This
will probably mean you need more space in your home than you did when you went
to an office each day. This might also mean that certain real estate
situations are no longer viable or are at least less desirable than they used
to be. Having roommate or living in a small crowded space can be detrimental
to remote work. Leaving a city center with high cost per sq ft for a less
dense residential area might be the trade off you have to make in order for
remote work to work for you and your employer long term.

For me it meant getting a house and setting aside a specific bedroom to be an
office. I do use it for hobby activities but those uses are easily put away at
the start of the work day. It's not used as a spare bedroom for visitors.

There are also certain security issues that employees and employers are going
to need to come to an understanding on now that remote work is getting more
common. Some discussions should not be able to be overheard by spouses,
roommates, friends, or if your walls are thin enough, neighbors. So far there
seems to be very little discussion around the security side of things, likely
because everyone knows for most of those suddenly thrust into remote work,
there's only a limited amount they can do about it right now.

------
Jedd
Like almost every other behaviour or trait we want to use to characterise (or
worse, categorise) humans -- it's a spectrum.

There's certainly some people near either extreme -- from those whose mood,
productivity, health plummets when away from a social/work environment, to
those who could happily go weeks or months with minimal human interaction, and
whose productivity soars when they set their own schedules and can control &
minimise interactions and interruptions.

Apart from a tacit acknowledgement that people are not _required_ to be in an
office 5 days a week, I am hopeful that this pandemic will lead more
workplaces to embrace and accommodate that spectrum, facilitating environments
and conditions that will better suit - well, ideally everyone, but I'll take
'more people than before'.

------
quxpar
Currently subletting an apartment with an eat-in kitchen and two offices.
Incredibly opulent by Brooklyn standards, but it's utterly essential for both
me and my partner to have isolated space to work in. The kitchen is a nice
bonus, because we can have coffee breaks together.

~~~
barbecue_sauce
No bedrooms?

------
slavapestov
I think people who are opposed to remote work should be honest about what they
really want. They're advocating for all tech jobs to be concentrated in a
handful of cities (SF, NYC, Seattle), all of which suffer from a housing
shortage.

~~~
snazz
You can dislike WFH while also disliking centralization in a few cities with
housing shortages. They’re not mutually exclusive.

------
hevelvarik
I love everything about WFH save for that I get far less exercise not making
my daily MTA

~~~
analog31
I've biked to work every day for more than a decade. When I started WFH, I
read a comment online about doing a "fake commute." So, I put myself on a
schedule for I go for a long brisk walk every morning before my regular work
day.

~~~
cableshaft
This is a good way to think about it. I should start doing this. I keep
meaning to go on morning walks and making excuses on how I can't do it today,
but maybe if I think of it as a commute, it'll work.

------
hkt
It's churlish, but I'd honestly rather the rent money spent on commercial
office space went to me, and that the space itself was redeveloped into nicer,
more spacious homes for the young people without offices.

------
ponker
This pandemic has taught me that I personally detest WFH. I’m glad that going
forward there will be more WFH options for those who prefer it, but I am not
one of those people.

------
dehrmann
Same thing for students. There will be a cohort that's a ~year behind where
they should be in most skills. It'll also be interesting to see what happens
with students who were under-tested; some will advance when they're not ready,
and for things like college admissions, between fewer standardized tests and
noisier grades, I'm not sure how colleges that want quality students will
maintain their standards.

------
mox001
“The stubborn human desire to stare at one’s own face” (on Zoom)

So others do that too?

------
pritovido
As a long term worker from home I feel a sense of victimhood that floods all
the article.

I understand that most people are working for a company so others tell her
what to do after school when they also train you what to do and you are
micromanaged all the time.

The article portrays that you need your boss to create your social circle for
you.

People do not see that as the enormous opportunity that it is.

For example, before I worked remote I used to spend two hours every day
commuting. I risked my life on the road with truck drivers and other carriers
that were always late, stressed and dangerous. That also required my own money
in gas and car repairs, expensive clothing...

Most people at the office were not my friends, they were coworkers, and
because I spent so much time there I had no time for seeing my real friends
and family. I was also exhausted all the time, because I did not sleep enough.

Working remote is amazing for me now(it was tough at first) and it could be
for a lot of people is only they learn to grasp the opportunity.

Take control of your own life, you will have to go against the training of the
school days that is pervasive, school took years of your live. It will take
you years to undo this training. Make your own group of friends, lovers. Sleep
and eat well. Exercise. Invest on your skills.

The article portrays young people as victims, and it is quite the opposite,
they are the ones that can adapt and learn and grow.

I went to Russia and most old people had a hard time working in a capitalist
society because they grew up in a State that did everything for them, so as
young people they did not developed the skills to make things on their own. If
you actually tried , you were strongly punished.

But young people are adaptable. When I was young and started working remotely
very few people did, so I had to learn on the go. Today it is much better and
easier.

Be proactive, refuse being a victim, if you have problems with working remote
create a club, a mail list or whatever for other people in your same
situation. Learn from people that have made it.

But don't be a victim. We will be having covid for at least 5 to 6 months more
in the north Hemisphere. You can spend that time doing something about it,
learning and improving your skills or just complain all the time.

After everything goes back to normal, most people will not do remote work
100%, but odds are they will do 30%, 40, or 50%, and their live will improve
as a result if you have gotten the skills.

~~~
brsg
People are "allowed" to be frustrated with the situation, and I think it's a
little dismissive to accuse them of having "victimhood".

It's perfectly reasonable to miss direct interactions with coworkers, and
there's nothing wrong with being friends with your coworkers. Video chats
really aren't comparable for most people.

It's perfectly reasonable to be frustrated that you're stuck in a crowded
apartment with roommates and no office space. The WFH change happened
virtually overnight for many people.

It's perfectly reasonable to be fearful that a junior contributor's career may
stall during this. Most companies' cultures weren't built around this system,
so it's pretty rational to expect companies to struggle recognizing junior
employees.

Obviously people can and will adjust, but criticizing an imperfect system is
the only way it will improve - it's not a sign of weakness.

