I can't wait to go back to the office. Everything about my job is harder from home. Harder for me to focus on work, harder for me to separate work and life, so so so much harder to forge the actual human connections that make tech work feel at all worth doing.
ETA: Interesting that the above has resulted in high controversy in both up/down votes and replies. I can tell this is a very emotional issue for people. To be clear I'm not interested in forcing people to do anything, just trying to share my experiences. I would be disappointed if my job went permanently remote, and would probably start looking for a new one.
Fair, but the original comment was setup as a scenario in which workers would have to return to the office, presumably against their will (they felt that their health would be threatened).
Right? Like I don't understand how the comment said "no demand is being made here". Like, so just one person will return to the office and everyone else can stay home?
Sure. Why not? We're doing it. If you want to stay home, stay home. If you want to come to the office, we'll make a space for you. I didn't infer any demands from OP's comment.
Conversely, there are others who feel the opposite and love working from home (no shared workspace with coworkers, the freedom to work in their home environment how they want) and don’t have the need for human connection (because they get that from their family and friends) from their job, only a paycheck.
Lots more remote work now for remote folks (with businesses required to have a go at it, and learning it’s easier than expected), and I’m sure office folks will still find businesses that will offer that model.
> [T]here are others who ... don’t have the need for human connection (because they get that from their family and friends) from their job, only a paycheck.
I don't have a problem with people who feel that way, but for myself I would find that very bleak given the substantial fraction of my life I am expected to spend working. Different strokes for different folks I guess.
I agree with your general contention that others may love the idea of indefinite work-from-home, but I don't think the poster was claiming work as the source of your life's human connections.
I read it as work without those connections lost meaning (for them). I can see that point - many of my best experiences doing difficult technical work have been with very tight knit teams that are difficult to maintain working remotely, let alone create.
Which isn't to say its-just-a-paycheck jobs are wrong in any sense, just that it's not enough for everyone.
I’ve worked remote for the last ~10 years and have had such moments with a team, so I’m skeptical that this requires in person collaboration to achieve these shared flow states (for lack of a better description).
Please forgive the bluntness of my opinion. First the business world made excuses that remote work just wasn’t as productive as in person work, and then a pandemic forced an experiment that proved that assertion to be untrue. Now the excuse is, “well, remote just isn’t as good as in person for building team bonds and collaboration” even when teams at billion dollar orgs (both young and old) are able to do so.
Everyone is entitled to their opinion, but facts and data are not negotiable, and this is important distinction when large scale presence decisions are being made for workforces.
For what it's worth, I've a experienced a fair range of what is possible. I've worked on local, mixed, and remote teams in both IC and lead roles.
This experience has led me to believe that: (a) it is possible to have good cohesion in a remote group (b) it is harder to do and (c) it is especially hard to do with a new group & company. Perhaps less universally (d) it's really hard with mixed hardware/software groups.
It's undoubtedly true that lots of large organizations do it, with varying levels of success but generally pretty well (there are exceptions). It's also true that they invest a fair amount into making this work, in my experience, and the infrastructure matters.
I've experienced very well functioning remote groups, less so mixed remote/local - but I certainly believe it's possible. It's always required more effort and intention, and they've never quite reached the same level of cohesion as some small local teams.
As you note though, YMMV.
Also I didn't mean to suggest "remote work == just a paycheck" though I can see how that might be ambiguous.
> "First the business world made excuses that remote work just wasn’t as productive as in person work, and then a pandemic forced an experiment that proved that assertion to be untrue."
Got anything to back that up? After being forced to switch to all remote, my organization is reporting various levels of productivity loss across all departments.
The tightest professional relationships I've made in many moons were made entirely remote during some Covid-19 relief work. I still haven't met any of them in person, but there was as much humanity in that project as we ever get working-from-work.
What "facts and data" have "proved that assertion to be untrue"? You aren't seriously suggesting that 6 months of remote work where all companies have the exact same handicap/advantage of being fully remote has proven anything, are you?
The effects of remote work in areas like mentorship, culture, employee attrition, information flow, knowledge sharing, talent identification, strategic decision making, bottom-up idea generation, etc. will take years to become clearer. And it won't be until we have a sizable number of fully remote companies competing against non-remote companies for years that we will be able to make a real judgement of how they compare in productivity.
Offices are going to make it. The day will come when they're close to full occupancy again in my opinion.
Until then, the demand for square feet paradoxically won't be any less. If you're rotating in half the workforce at a time, but require them to space 2x apart, you end up needing the same amount of floor space.
I know I shouldn't find that funny, but I actually wondered why you see demand for "square feet", like literally, feet with a square shape (I am German, used to the metric system).
On top of that: In German there is the expression "Quadratlatschen" ("square shoes") for shoes of very large size. I guess these are for humans with square feet. I guess such shoes are soon in demand, then.
> I know I shouldn't find that funny, but I actually wondered why you see demand for "square feet", like literally, feet with a square shape (I am German, used to the metric system).
Because that’s what it is in imperial system? Metric has square meters, imperial uses square feet (sq ft). Maybe the poster could have used square yards. What’s so funny about it?
Well, the person had explained that they juxtaposed a different image based upon a more literal / different interpretation of the phrase, perhaps triggered by the similar phrase in their native German. That is basically the root of all humor.
As an aside, I would think the phrase "demand for square footage" more appropriate and common. "Square feet" isn't often used in the more generalized context, but rather for specific measurements (i.e. 1900 square feet), at least in my neck of the woods.
A square person's foot is a funnier image than a square yard, taken literally. Though if you don't think it's funny explaining it probably isn't going to help.
I used to have three "spaces": work, home, and a non-work place (exercise club in my case). Now I have one, home. It was fine for awhile, but I'm finding I really need the three spaces back.
Being a "third space" was a core component of Starbucks' strategy. Now their locales have most, if not all, of the chairs removed and it will be interesting to see if people will migrate back.
I will confess that I set aside a particular afternoon a week to read in a corner of my local Starbucks, just as a way to get out of the house.
I find it very interesting how different people deal with this aspect of life. I've been WFH for 5 years now and mostly work out at home, and I'm fine with it. The exception is when the kids are home all day, which makes WFH a lot harder, but that is not a "space" issue, its a personnel issue :)
What do you think drives your need for separate spaces? I'm lucky enough to have a SFH in the suburbs, so I can move around within my house a lot, so maybe that is part of why I find it fine (although my wife hates working from home still.)
Do you ever feel a need to leave the house? Prior to the pandemic, what would typically get you out of the house and did you enjoy it?
I ask because while I am perfectly comfortable at home, there is an underlying drive to get outside and engage with the world that doesn't go away. I'm curious if some people have it and some people don't, hence why some are more comfortable with certain parts of working from home.
I have been working from home for two years now, and off and on prior to that, it's always been a goal of mine, and I knew I would need to build in tools to cater for that part of me when I did go full time.
I'm less driven to leave the house that many, including my wife. That being said, I have small and smallish children and they drag me out a fair amount, I do enjoy hiking/walking/running at least once a week, and I'm engaged with various communities around town. Perhaps I just have many 2nd spaces to pop into.
I do wonder if clear delineations helps- when my kids are home (or during distance learning, when they know I'm SUPPOSED to be done with work), I'm done with work, pretty much whether I like it or not, and for a long time I had dedicated home office space; that has been taken over by said distance learning children.
As a homeless former professional, I feel that getting back to work is vanishingly far away. 11 year old laptop, broken smart phone, no libraries or cafes or gym showers left... I just had a pretty profoundly failed onboarding for a minimum wage job due to lack of personal IT and the minimum wage pay + catching up on way-past-due urgent+important bills. And that's sober and barely homeless-looking except the 2 year old well maintained clothes (worn and washed weekly once, all bought while I had a good income and of good quality). My last in-person interview in November was rough enough to coordinate with a working but intermittently disconnected phone and old laptop. One must start to believe in a higher power at some point of destitution. I know that ended up on a pretty wild tangent, but this is real.
I’m surprised Ronald Coase is not brought up in these discussions. His work (for which he won a Nobel focused on why firms exist at all (as opposed to a workforce of 160 million independent contractors). It comes down do efficiencies of various sorts (the same reason we aren’t merely unicellular organisms).
I think this pandemic will be an opportunity and driver of a reshuffling: mostly back the way it was before but with some visible structural changes. For example perhaps increased use of management consultants as proposed in this article). Maybe hiring more people than before due to a more efficient model that can take advantage of having more people.
The companies that make these changes the soonest, and make the changes that turn out to be the good ones (hard to tell except in retrospect) will of course be by definition the winners.
I used to think open plan offices were full of noisy distractions. Now I yearn for the relative peace of a child-free zone. I'll miss the 4pm beers and sneaky trips to the beach though.
Childcare (and other “cares”) are being conflated with remote work. Remote work is still work - when you are forced to also handle childcare, you are basically working two jobs, at the same time. No wonder that’s at very least suboptimal.
Long term, I really hope we arrive at a scenario where people can focus on one job at a time and choose the most productive environment for them/their team.
The narrative that remote work == work + childcare is just false though. Current pandemic situation is not normal in any sense and the loss of general services is very painful for everyone.
That’s just it, it doesn’t. To compare apples to apples between office and wfh, there has to be child care arranged and it can’t be the same person as the one working. You usually don’t take kids into the office. Work is still work, regardless of location.
The current situation with child care effectively closed has created the situation where you have to do both work and care for the kids. If you move that same situation into the office, it’s not going to be pretty.
Fwiw, this isn't that tied to remote work IME: I've had 4PM beers occasionally at every tech job I've ever had. I'd usually do it while working, but at one it would always sparked a casual impromptu happy hour, which was also pretty fun.
You are projecting a lot, friend. Take a breath, step away, and relax before re-engaging.
No-one in this thread appears (to me) to be discussing forcing anyone back into the office. They're saying that they are looking forward to the time when it is safe for them, personally, to return to the office - and look forward to others joining them when they feel safe.
ETA: Interesting that the above has resulted in high controversy in both up/down votes and replies. I can tell this is a very emotional issue for people. To be clear I'm not interested in forcing people to do anything, just trying to share my experiences. I would be disappointed if my job went permanently remote, and would probably start looking for a new one.