To be clear (if you only read the headline :)), not entirely remote. Solo work at home, collaborative work in "studios", basically reimagining the offices into collaborative/convening spaces that you go into from ~once/week to once a quarter depending on team/role.
Remote-only cuts out the in-person experience entirely, which is problematic for building teams and culture; and ad hoc "WFH whenever you feel like it" gets a sort of worst-of-both-worlds situation where you neither get the same kind of flexibility nor the sense of community you typically get from an office (since a large percentage of the team isn't there on any given day, and folks that come in the office less tend to be at a disadvantage in terms of visibility & recognition).
> collaborative work in "studios", basically reimagining the offices into collaborative/convening spaces that you go into from ~once/week to once a quarter depending on team/role.
I’m forgetting their name for them, but IBM has been doing this for decades now. They buy up office space in every major city, and then, rather than permanently stationing any teams there, essentially make all such spaces into private-access coworking spaces.
In these IBM offices, there’s cubicles, hot desks, and meeting rooms, all set up with runs of Intranet-accessible Ethernet + wi-fi + softphones; and you can either just drop in to work, or freely reserve any amount of these from the office’s concierge for days/weeks/months at a time — for yourself, or for your entire team, if you’ve brought your whole team with you to another city/country to do a high-touch customer deployment or something.
At least in the office I went to (Burnaby BC), it was almost entirely empty most of the time. So there was plenty of spare “capacity” in this network for any random need a team or individual might have.
It’s a very nice model. Slap an API on it and you could call it “elastic office-space IaaS.” :)
>They buy up office space in every major city, and then, rather than permanently stationing any teams there, essentially make all such spaces into private-access coworking spaces.
Well, this makes sense, since IBM is effectively a consulting firm now. This is how all consulting firms operate -- there are tons of these all over the place in DC.
I’d like to see a solution like the Smart Card-based Sun Ray become standard in offices. Pull up to any client terminal, swipe a card and get access to your desktop as you left it. Get a cheap laptop for remote access.
I'm not sure you really need that anymore. I can do 95% of my work from a Chromebook. Even if you need to do more locally a laptop works for most people without a Sun Ray type system (which can also be done through some cloud offerings).
The advantage of working primarily on a thin client is that turning off the client doesn’t stop the computation. Also, the worst part of modern IT tech is messing with projectors/keyboards/etc. for presentations and meetings. I’d much rather swipe my card at the projector and have my current desktop automagically broadcast to the projector. (AirPlay is pretty close to this, I guess).
Anyways, the killer feature is a remote-first workflow that treats your client device as ephemeral: you can cobble something like this together, but I’d think that the integration of an end-to-end solution built and maintained by one company
You can buy this precise thing from Citrix/VMware (I used it with a password, other people used it with smart cards). It’s extremely common in healthcare.
Or from Amazon — their offering is called Amazon WorkSpaces. (I say this to point out that “cloud workstations” aren’t just a legacy offering for legacy companies; the vertical is healthy and growing.)
The issue is, these solutions are frequently retrofits of a local-first graphical environment: whatever you think about the actual X protocol, I think a display-server model that can be distributed across a corporate network in arbitary ways would make an amazing difference: You want to show something to a coworker? Send them a "window invitation" and, when they accept, an arbitrary window is mirrored to their display. Pairing? Everyone has a common "virtual desktop", and you just have two people's desktops temporarily merge. Instead we have nonsense like Wayland that is retreating from the mantra that "the network is the computer" (Amazon WorkSpaces is particularly disappointing here: there is no way, afaict, to have two screens logged into the same desktop: something that's trivial with tmux+ssh. My ideal is "tmux, but for GUIs")
To actually answer your question — these coworking spaces do have IT staff. They’re mostly responsible for maintaining the shared infrastructure, but they’ll help you out with your needs as well, if you ask. If you reserve a cube for months at a time, you can certainly bring in a full workstation setup, and they’ll help you to wire it up. (Not that you’d need much help; both power and Ethernet drops are right there for the taking.)
It’s really the socialism to WeWork’s capitalism: because everyone there is, in the end, working for the same employer, enabling the people who come to work there to succeed at their jobs is part of the job-description of the stationed office staff. They aren’t just exchanging money for doing the letter-of-the-law of your SLA contract with them, with your job as an opaque thing that takes up a room. Office staff are more like a college librarian is to a college student: a resource paid to help however they can.
I'm a bit ignorant of IBMs business model given how many times they've changed businesses. What you're saying is that IBM has a business that generates revenue, but that business continues to exist (and generate revenue) despite people not actively being at a desk, not that IBM has somehow managed to find a way to make money from empty desks, right?
WeWork makes more money from an oversubscription model, and thus could also make money from desks being unused. (Have 10 desks, rent out "13", and hope that all 13 people don't need desks at the same time).
What I don't understand is the multiples at which WeWork was trading.
I could definitely understand the business model (it's cloud computing for real-estate!) and especially cool for remote/business travelers since from what I understand it was rather easy for a WeWork user to use any of their facilities.
It's more that they bill by the capacity used and it's possible to cancel at any time.
Same way a WeWork is more expensive than renting your own real estate but it's probably simpler than getting into a long term lease. Plus if your startup has to scale up WeWork can accommodate, unlike your typical office rental.
I have done this for years. I have seen that some people don't like it for the following reasons.
1. They prefer a predictable schedule.
2. They don't like being at home ( family or workspace issues)
3. They are good at or enjoy office politics.
4. They are incompetent managers and they don't know how to manage engineers other than looking over shoulders and taking attendence.
As a counterpoint, we had a mix of remote department and in-office departments at my last company. Transitioning to fully remote made marked an increase in politics every time.
It sounds counterintuitive at first, but fully remote moves even more conversations to side channels. At the office it’s hard to have secret exclusionary meetings without other people noticing eventually. Online, you can create a private Slack channel or even a separate off-Slack group for the in-crowd where you exclude others, and no one can see it.
The politicians also developed a habit of meeting up in person (lunch, shared work days, etc) in ways that strengthened their political power. Ironically, having everyone go remote was a catalyst for giving the politicians a leg up on relationship building.
We still saw upsides of remote work, but I’ve lost all illusions that remote work is an improvement for office politics. If anything, the extra effort required for relationship-building in remote teams just gives the politicians more of a moat to protect their political domain.
> It sounds counterintuitive at first, but fully remote moves even more conversations to side channels
I am 100% experiencing this right now. It isn't negative, exactly, at least not yet, but a lot of informal discussions between teams that used to occur in the hallway, break room, or wherever, just doesn't happen spontaneously when we are all remote. So it goes through more traditional channels, which makes it more formal and more political in many cases.
As some one currently doing an internship this is wait I don't like what COVID-19 has done the workplace. It's much harder for me to build relationships with my coworkers, over hear conversations (in a good way) and have informal extemporaneous interactions when me and my coworkers aren't in the same physical place.
I'd say on top of that, remote work comes with some of the same communication problems as social media platforms. Without facetime, the assumption of goodwill starts to wear way.
The quickest way to resolve political standoffs in remote companies is to fly people out to an office and stick them in a conference room for a day.
The agenda barely matters. People just tend to behave better when they're dealing with a real human being that they've met instead of a screen name in Slack that they argue with every day.
This is why I never promise anyone 100% WFH or 100% remote any more. I tell everyone to plan for 0-3 weeks travel, giving some leeway for flying people out for face-to-face planning.
== People just tend to behave better when they're dealing with a real human being that they've met instead of a screen name in Slack that they argue with every day.==
The usage stats for our MS Teams instance shows this. Before COVID hardly any messages, after a massive increase as you'd expect, but private messages outnumber public messages 10:1 or more. Several times I've found out that there are multiple private chat groups all for the same P1 or Project instead of using Channels that all staff can see.
I saw the same thing with Slack stats at a company. Plotted over time, private messages started at like 10%, but eventually reached something like 80% after a couple of years.
I've tried to convince my colleagues to use MS Teams channels instead of chat groups, to increase searchability and spontaneous joining (rather than needing to be invited). They've mostly resisted because they prefer the interface for group chats.
MS Teams makes a substantial distinction between:
- group chats, which appear like any other chat interface (Whatsapp, FB Messenger)
- and channels, which appear as potential threads to be nested (which most chatters _hate_)
MS Teams also has much greater overhead for adding members to a Team, which is a prerequisite for looping them in on a @mention within a Channel. All of these are much easier and straightforward on Slack, but you're basically stuck once your Corporate IT Overlords have selected a Product.
>As a counterpoint, we had a mix of remote department and in-office departments at my last company. Transitioning to fully remote made marked an increase in politics every time.
That basically turn Office Discussions into Internet discussions. There are many things that just dont translate well with words, or even with Voice and Video Call.
5. don't like the barrier to communication, isolation, and distraction that WFH brings.
It's not for everyone, don't act like WFH is some sort of amazing thing that only people in bad situations or who are incompetent dislike.
1. is straight up incorrect anyway, my schedule has gotten more consistent since working from home. It's entirely based on your own ability to start and stop your workday.
Yeah, I'm 7 months into being forced to WFH and I still hate it. I like the work/life separation going into the office brings. I actually liked my commute since I took the bus, so it was time to read and decompress. I like seeing and talking to my coworkers. I like having the variety of simply being out of the house. I like not having work stuff at home, so when I'm home, I don't have the temptation to do work. I'm glad WFH works for so many people, but it sure does not work for me.
Same, been in semi-forced WFH since late March, and don't like it. It'd probably be fine if I could go to a cafe or had a proper office. As it stands I barely leave the house except to occasionally grab food, and that's not nearly enough. Honestly the last time I felt this bad was my summers in high school where I didn't have a way to go anywhere, or money to do anything with.
WFH is fine for me. WFH without my usual extensive travel and without the ability to otherwise mix up my schedule is tiresome. And I have a good home setup and have been working remote to greater or lesser degrees for around 15 years or so.
Yeah, I think the combination of not being able to realistically take breaks or travel is having the larger effect. My home setup would be fine if I had the room to put my desk somewhere not in my bedroom (it's arguably more comfortable than my office) but the routine of: roll out of bed, make coffee, desk, make lunch, desk, make dinner, couch/desk, desk, roll into bed sucks a lot.
I’ve just started nuking entire two-hour blocks of time out of the day, which is always pre-filled with back-to-back half hour crap meetings, so that I can go out on a bike trail. Most of the time people don’t seem to care, but on occasion when someone asks me why I wasn’t at their precious half-hour crap meeting, I respond that I had some kind of “carers” issue, and if there is anything relevant they need from me to send me an email about it, and I will reply with the info. Amazingly, that seems to effectively address whatever issue the crap half-hour meeting was for.
I'm fortunate to have a forest/river trail I can walk to. So long as the weather is halfway decent I do at least a mile or two (and can do up to about seven) every day. And there's basically never anyone on it.
Yes and I did for a while earlier this summer. But I fell out of the habit and it's getting cold now here in Minnesota. It was nice to just have it part of my daily routine.
"...looking over shoulders and taking attendence."
Being micromanaged remotely isn't much fun either. Like having a stalker. I'd get voice calls within minutes of a Skype status update. "Ah, no, everything's ok. Just grabbing lunch. Thanks for checking."
These are truly the worst. I remember management being very upset when they switched from hipchat to slack as they no longer had such fine grain controls over visibility. Its somewhat inconceivable to me that, by now, they haven't realized it will only backfire.
Introverts have never been the majority, even in tech. I'd also argue that with the rise of social media masquerading as development tools (gitlab/github), extroverts are now more over-represented today than even just a few years ago.
Has anyone else noticed that the typical IT introvert turns into an extravert when talking to other IT introverts about the things that they’re passionate about?
> 2. They don't like being at home (family or workspace issues)
Wanting to work somewhere other than your home does not mean you don't like being at home, nor that you have family or workspace issues. I would assume that some of us have a newfound appreciation for the energy and architecture of the modern cities and offices. I love my home but it's just not the same kind of space.
Or, their home is not a place of work, its a home. I dont want my home to be anywhere near my place of work, or anything like my place of work. There should be a clear segregation of these two places.
Like you, I am genuinely baffled by "WFH 4 days a week" arrangements (as compared to "WFH when you have errands that make it necessary", which is pretty common). If I have to come into the office 1 day a week, then I still have to foot the bill for a home office within driving range of the office, which sucks.
I think at once a quarter you're starting to look at the ability to live on the other side of the country and fly in when necessary, which I think is much more price efficient.
I think coming in to the office 1x / week would let you live quite a bit further away than coming in 5x / week. At least for me, I could do a 60-90-minute drive to work 1 day per week, but would not want to 5 days.
I had a job for a bit over a year where I commuted 90+ minutes door to door many days. Even though I could take the train if I wanted to (after driving to the station), it still got old and I wouldn't have wanted to do it long term. I'm about the same to go into my company's Boston office now--I'm technically out of our suburban office and in practice I've been remote for a few years--and it makes for a long day but one day a week would be pretty doable.
But for what benefit? Will the office be full sized (forfeiting the cost savings to the business), or will teams have to negotiate which days they’re supposed to come in (forfeiting a large amount of the team building benefits).
It just seems like a lot more work and hassle than being fully colocated or fully remote.
Teams schedule conference rooms. Even fully remote, teams will presumably get together physically a few times a year. Whether you're "fully remote" (and maybe have to fly to a get-together) or schedule weekly/biweekly office time will be a function of how a team/company wants to operate.
There’s a huge difference between a few times a year and once every 1-2 weeks, both on the company and the employee. At once a quarter we can just rent a coworking space and fly in, but at once a week everyone needs to live within ~90min of the office and the company needs to maintain some level of excess office capacity in order to seat these workers 1x a week.
To my eye remote 4x a week forfeits most of the benefits of full remote purely for the sake of a vestigial habit. It seems superior to me that either the team either goes full remote, or reverts to a “remote work when errands require it” arrangement.
I don't necessarily disagree and, in fact, you're describing the way that my broader group is organized albeit with some subset of people normally going into an office.
That said, there are plenty of people who want to go into an office semi-regularly and, if you tell them they're going to be 100% remote--even if financial arrangements are made to subsidize a co-working space in some manner--they're probably not going to like it and will probably leave for a more office-friendly company.
If your office is in SF, WFH 4 days a week doesn't let you live in ultra-low-cost rural Iowa but it could let you at least work in slightly-lower-cost Modesto or even Redding. Not ideal but better than a $4K/mo SF apartment. I think I'd be willing to live with a 4 hour commute once a week (or get your private pilot's license and you're about 1.5 hours away). Not convenient but do-able.
The idea of flying to work is fun, and I have seen it pop up in a lot of these WFH discussions. But even if you have your GA license, you'll need to rent or own the plane, pay directly or indirectly for hangar space and fuel, and deal with the air traffic congestion that would arise from more than just a handful of people trying this trick. In my opinion these barriers make private flying too dissimilar to driving a car to make it a feasible commute comparison.
I was looking into it for commuting from Pueblo, CO to Denver. The place I was interviewing was a short walk and bus ride from an air field, and Pueblo is about 20-40% the cost of a similar commutable home in Denver, the flight (which I have done a dozen times in MSFS) is only 55 minutes. So round trip with commuting to and from the airports/fields, doing preflight, and parking, was only 3 hours which is about the time it takes one way by car assuming normal traffic.
Totally agree. I've got my ticket and I wouldn't do it unless I actually lived on an airpark with a hangar at my house, and I'd have to get my instrument rating to be able to rely on it for commuting.
It's like when you were in college, and you do assignments at home, and then get together with your study group, your TA, your professor, or your project buddies, in the computer clusters...
A home office sounds a lot cheaper then a place close enough to the office to reasonably commute every day to me. Spending an hour or two commuting 1 or 2 times a week is manageable, but 5 times is not.
Hypothetical question: What if it was WFH 4 days a week but the company foots (a) the difference between your rent and the median rent for the square footage of your living space in the country you live in, upto some reasonable limit, AND (b) all of your home office equipment and furniture?
I feel like tying work to the cost of your apartment is a distressing step towards company towns and company stores. Let labor and capital negotiate for rates based off what the cost of the labor is and the value it provides the company rather than coming up with Byzantine formulas that imply that a workers housing cost is the business of the company.
I wonder why a landlord would even entertain such an offer. It's not uncommon for leases to be ~15 years. That is a hell of a risky move to think that you'll be ahead by offering a buyout with the hope of finding new tenants.
(it's a 15 year lease, with the cost increasing from $45 million/year to $68 million/years over the 15 years. Hope there's some option to re-negotiate in there)
"Remote-only cuts out the in-person experience entirely, which is problematic for building teams and culture"
This is stated as fact everywhere but I've not seen supporting evidence anywhere.
I spend about as much time in my day speaking to other people as I would have done productively and by choice before. The only difference now is that I'm more able to avoid extraneous meetings and other drags on my time that don't benefit from my participation (because they're largely irrelevant to my work and vice versa).
In any case kudos for taking this step which I'm sure is not an easy decision to make given that it's a fairly seismic shift to how most companies approach work and employment.
That can be a good thing for non-charismatic types. I know that I've hurt my career at times in past due to in-person failures like being visibly angry or raising voice over dumb statements/power-positioning by leader-types. Being remote has helped me throttle those reactions and not be so public about my feelings.
Well if you've hurt your career with in-person failures, wait until you experience the context-free over-reaction that come from a faux pas made in a faceless medium that keeps record of your transgression forever. Getting mad at someone in-person also provides an opportunity to build a relationship that allows for a more intimate sharing of emotions; try getting that with email and slack.
If you're used to communicating online, this is no issue. As an anti-social type myself, I'm more comfortable with communicating online and I'm confident in my ability to not commit a faux-pas that easily compared to in-person.
I think you underestimate how much WFH helps people with social issues.
While I agree with this, I also think this is to a large extent because videoconferencing is currently pretty bad. It used not to be a critical necessity, so companies treated it as such. There's a lot of improvement that could be made to alleviate the disconnect somewhat, but of course not eliminate it.
> Remote-only cuts out the in-person experience entirely, which is problematic for building teams and culture
The people who say this are the people you never see doing any work. They use the office as a social gathering place. They seemingly have no real job, despite a lofty title and high salary. They are the bane of existence for high functioning employees.
This is one of the few hills I will die on. I've never heard of a productive critical employee complaining about not being in an office. Every single one loves remote work because they can actually get work done.
It clearly doesn’t apply to OP because Dropbox are shifting to WFH, but so many of the arguments I’ve seen for offices returning are a variant of “I miss the social aspect”.
Fine, say that, I often miss it myself too, but realise you’re also arguing to compel people in the near term into a situation that could lead to them contracting a disease that could kill them.
Even beyond that, while many people might miss the meetings, I guarantee there are at least some people in that room getting stressed out because it’s actively blocking them from doing their job for no reason.
This is anecdotal too but I’ve worked on new projects, with new people, since this started. I’ve not met any of these people face-to-face, but we get along great thanks to being able to video/audio call whenever we want or need to. Every conversation I now have contains exclusively willing pariticipants. It’s great.
Well you have now heard of a critical productive employee complaining about not being in an office. I am one of those guys who delivers faster than anyone and to a high quality standard, and I hate WFH permanently. While I enjoy no commute, I miss being around colleagues.
I prefer some combination of WFH and working in-office.
I spend about as much time talking to people, but I talk to less people. I don't like it. I've come back to office recently and so much more bandwidth to exchange information IME.
Anecdotal evidence like everybody else here, but after having worked from home 100% for several months, we're finally back in the office 50% and it has been great. You don't notice how much the team spirit and culture is affected until you actually get back to the office.
> which is problematic for building teams and culture;
Why? I've been remote for about 8 years. I don't think I've had any problems building relationships. The only thing you miss from the office is the time spent screwing around with co-workers. I guess you could consider that "Team building".
If you are genuinely asking, there are people, myself included, who don't think virtual interactions are a substitute for building relationships. It's the same reason I want to transition to meeting someone in person after talking to them on a dating app. I can totally understand that everyone is different and may not think the same. For instance, if the only advantage of in-person interactions at work you can think of is goofing around, I suspect you are better suited for remote work.
The reason to transition to in-person for a dating app is because the relationship is supposed to become physical. Not so in an office - I don't think the analogy makes sense, because they types of relationships are so different.
My first month of work, I inadvertently got pulled into a playing soccer with a few coworkers. I didn't know many of them but by the end of the day I felt close enough to a lot of them that I was a lot more confident talking to them whether it's for help with a product, general programming questions, or in some cases personal stuff.
I'm sure I could have cultivated those relationships over the course of working there much longer but I don't think there would be any virtual substitute for that one soccer game.
That was my exactly my experience. Many of those soccer team mates became the closest colleagues ive had largely BECAUSE of the time we spent winning and losing!
The best friends I've made in my career were from remote only teams. I guess you could say full remote is problematic in the sense that so is in-office for building relationships/teams. It's a trade off and I suspect the winning strategy is the one that is invested into the most, rather than one being inherently better than the other.
We've been doing a couple of things now that everyone is wfh. We have these mixer meetings on Friday where you meet with people you never work with normally, in small groups, and talk about what you're working on. We also have online trivia contests and other games sometimes it just shoot the breeze (as sanctioned, boss scheduled meetings).
As someone so has worked from home a lot over the last 20+ years and had been working from home for a few years prior in a business where everyone else was in the office (until this Spring), I appreciate the extra time hanging out.
I was fine before but part of that is that I transitioned from full time in the office to wfh when my spouse was relocated.
> ... which is problematic for building teams and culture;
Maybe I am alone in this, but I care very little for culture. Perhaps it's because I am a freelancer. I work for a company to bring results and I just try to communicate clearly. When there's doubts we have a chat over Skype, since sometimes direct communication is just more efficient than using chat.
I believe people can work well as teams while WFH and some kind of company culture (whatever that means) isn't really necessary for people to be effective.
For the past 1.5 years I've been working for an Australian company. I do mobile dev from Thailand. There's an Indian team doing some BLE-related mobile dev from India. There's a guy in Vietnam also doing mobile dev. We have a guy in Taiwan doing low-level hardware programming. A guy in Japan doing hardware design. A Russian guy in Georgia who's doing we web-related stuff. And the leadership is in Australia. Everyone seems to be able to get along pretty well and without much misunderstanding. Perhaps it's also the nature of our work, the product we work on.
Why do people feel it's important to build some company culture? What does a company culture even mean?
REI I believe is moving to a model, after having just sold their massive new HQ to Facebook, where they will establish a handful of micro-offices around the country where their now distributed team can meet.
Plenty of kinks to work out I’m sure, but feels like the future of work to me.
That's the way it should be IMO. It's idiotic to have to drag oneself to the office to do work which can be done just as well, if not better, without getting out of bed. It's also bad to not be able to get teams together from time to time, to brainstorm, discuss things, and just plain get to know each other. I hope companies find a happy middle ground at some point, and I also hope managers can figure out how to manage people effectively in such circumstances. Currently nobody at the previously "butts in chairs" companies knows how to do that, and my manager friends at places like Google, FB and MS are unsure if they're "holding it right".
Am curious what sort of metrics and studies that Dropbox HR plans to do to assess this change. The current COVID-mandated WFH atmosphere is a lot different than how things were pre-COVID. In particular, there's the impact of children at home, and for ICs there's a special stigma (due to COVID) to support isolation. However, Dropbox's culture has always been uniquely supportive of IC independence during pre-COVID times despite the fancy office, "Michelin Star" cafeteria, etc. Curious to see how the change is assessed, even if the detailed hypotheses supporting it are never fully explained.
Thanks for highlighting the set of challenges (and also right near the top of the blog post).
Do you or the EIU intend to make the study results more broadly available? (There was a good discussion of Nick Bloom’s recent surveys yesterday, and this would be a nice addition to that body of work)
Edit 2: the survey writeup is great (and I’ve submitted it separately if people want to discuss that; Dropbox itself moving to remote allowed w/ studios is its own discussion)
> collaborative work in "studios", basically reimagining the offices into collaborative/convening spaces that you go into from ~once/week to once a quarter depending on team/role.
Doesn't this also have the problem with neither flexibility nor community, especially for once a quarter? More importantly, this means that people now have to maintain their own home offices but still have to live close to a big city and pay the stupidly high costs associated with that.
Most big cities, if you drive 1-2 hours, you can get to much cheaper housing and that's a pretty doable commute if you only do it every week or two. And for once a quarter, you get on a plane--which is pretty much what my broader team did pre-pandemic.
>Remote-only cuts out the in-person experience entirely
Not necessarily. I work in a group that's very distributed and we get together (normally) a couple of times a year plus another once or twice with a larger group.
Of course, that doesn't work if it's more like getting together in person every week or two.
In any case, I agree it makes sense to collaborate. If you wander into the office and no one you know and work with is there, it doesn't make much sense to come in.
I work at a 100% remote company, and we do this as well (before covid). We're a smaller company, so I'd be curious to hear how it scales, but at least for us I've found it to work pretty well.
I think it scales because, at a larger company, everyone isn't realistically going to get together anyway. So you get together in groups of various sizes. (And there are usually opportunities to get together with an even larger cross-section at things like user conferences.)
I will take 4K video and audio that doesn't drop off and a world where there is universal fiber/good connectivity. Then after that, we can talk about VR.
>This really is the way to do it in my opinion. Collaboration is one of the hardest parts to do remote (though I think VR could make this better)
Give 'screen control sharing' (for lack of better name?) software a try, two variants I've used are USE Together and Tuple. Being able to have two sets of input devices for the same screen is actually fantastic for collaboration - the pair-programming experience is arguably better than being there in person.
Definitely agree with the idea of a scheduled in office time. I work ~400 miles from my company's office and get there several times a year. I enjoy WFH, but would prefer being close enough to go to the office more often.
I'm sure you have talked to your exec team at length about the pluses and minuses of that type of structure. That structure feels like a great trade-off that gives employees enough flexibility to reduce their housing costs, while also keeping the culture in place.
Would you mind sharing some of the thoughts your team had while you explored the options available? It feels like such a good move IMHO, I'm very interested in learning how you got there.
Yeah so not really a new concept; in NL we've had this for a while with names like "het nieuwe werken" (the new working) or "flexwerken" (flexible working), which in practice means open spaces, no fixed desk, clean desk policy, etc.
I personally prefer having my own fixed workspace, tyvm. I'm just glad I was able to make it work in the various assignments I've had over the year (e.g. a fixed workspace).
predominant WFH w/ ability to get together at the office seems like an excellent mixture of flexibility and adequate face time. Strict mode on either ends of the spectrum is non-ideal for most people I would assume.
> ad hoc "WFH whenever you feel like it" gets a sort of worst-of-both-worlds situation where you neither get the same kind of flexibility nor the sense of community you typically get from an office
Can you explain what you mean by WFH when you feel like it reducing flexibility?
I guess it's not surprising but I am super disappointed by some of the comments here that show a total lack of empathy for people who aren't like you. I mean, you love working from home? Congrats, more power to you. But the number of comments stating that "only people who are good at office politics like going to the office", "only incompetent managers need to see you in person", "your co-workers aren't your friends", etc. are, as I would generously put it, tone deaf.
For many (most?) people this has been the worst working situation of their lives, and attempts to minimize that are insulting. I believe it will be especially bad for those early in their careers, trying to find their footing, get mentorship, and build their network.
I agree that the comments you've cited are a bit ridiculous.
But it's also important to acknowledge that pre-Covid, only a tiny fraction of jobs were remote at all. People who preferred remote work had very little choice in the matter. Our society assumes that commuting to work and sitting in a cubicle (or worse) is fitting for 99% of the work force.
So what I mainly see here aren't the comments you cite, but a "ugh but I like the office", which gets very little sympathy from me in a society where, virus aside, the majority of jobs are office-only. Like, the world is already tipped in your favor.
To put it into perspective, I was so desperate for a fully remote job that I took a $50,000 salary for it when I was making $130,000 in Austin, Texas. Now I live in South America on a beach doing exactly what I want to be doing.
I don't like the optics of calling Covid a "good thing", but it must be pointed out that it got offices (like my former job) that were adamantly ass-in-seat only to go remote-only. It spurred fundamental (hopefully lasting) shifts in our work culture. And a lot of them were a long time in the making and waiting. How many of these companies that were firmly ass-in-seat are now fully or mostly remote realizing that the sky isn't falling? I hope we reach a better equilibrium.
Ideally our employment options would have something for everyone without you needing to go for a $50k job to get what you want. Another culture change I'd like is for WFH options to come with a signing bonus to get your home office sorted out, something that's sorely lacking.
It's also time for us to raise our voices and be heard. If we pro-remote people don't say anything then companies could easily think that everyone wants to go back to the way things were.
There has to be a balance though. I'm desperately missing the office and have experience moderate depression for the first time in my life working from home. Atm everything I read is 'WFH is the new normal' or 'we'll never have an office again'. If the balance goes too far to home working then folk like me will need to start clamouring for offices. There needs to be a balance and acknowledgment of each others preferences else this will become a crazy unhealthy culture war.
Something that might bear considering, is what is the office providing you that can't be served some other way? Socializing can be served outside of work (friends, hobbies), Work structure or a dedicated work space can be created without requiring a company office (pay consideration for co-working space or re-allocate commute costs/proximity premiums to a larger living space with a dedicated room for work). For most companies, if they are paying for an office, they are going to require people to come to them. Remote folks lose the main thing they want, the ability to work remote. For the office preference folks, the reasons are varied and can often be solved for sans office.
Americans have increasingly depended on work for connection and meaning as various non-work social institutions have withered. It is probably a bad thing that work is a core social network for a lot of us, and we should all attempt to diversify our networks.
It's tough to have lots of non-work social networks, especially when you work full time and have children/a family.
It's completely understandable that work has taken such a central place in many people's lives. It's probably not ideal, but it is completely understandable.
I actually have a large social life outside of work, far more than the majority of folk I work with. Unfortunately that's all gone atm and unlikely to return until covid is completely over.
As to space, co working isn't the same as an office and having an home office requires moving and spending a lot of money. Many of us don't have expensive commutes that offset that cost
I expect full remote will be quite rare. On the other hand, I also expect that at many companies I do expect a new normal where many/most people are not in the office on a given day so the office may be there but the prior office experience will not.
I've day-dreamed about doing this exact same thing. Moving down to Costa Rica, drinking out of a coconut and working on the beach indefinitely. How do you like it? How long have you been doing it?
Not OP but I've been doing it in SEA for about 5 years now. Usually I stay in one place place for 6 months or so then take 6 weeks off to travel until I find a new beach to work from while sipping coconuts, but I'm feeling more like being settled now and I've been in Vietnam for the past year (bonus: no covid here). There are large communities of like minded people out here doing this, lots of couples in their late twenties and thirties and even a few families. Not to mention the local culture and people are amazing.
For myself, it allows me to work freelance part time and work on my own projects which are far more interesting to me than working for other people, which I couldn't afford to spend time on back home.
The biggest pain point is visas - depending on the country you'll probably have to do a border run every one to three months. Also, technically, you'll be working illegally but at least in SEA this is ignored as there are loads of co-working spaces that cater to the digital nomad crowd and nobody official has ever complained about any of them to my knowledge. The countries presumably view us as rich long term tourists. Thailand is the first country to make moves to legitimize this with a (very limited) working nomad visa.
I hope in the future more places will do this as this movement grows.
Thank you for highlighting this. As others have said, I could not agree more.
As a Product Manager, working remotely 100% of the time is absolute hell. And I say this as someone who was already working from home ~70% of the time before (and I was mostly ok with that).
I also wanted to pick on a few of the categories you mentioned:
> "only incompetent managers need to see you in person"
Some of the best work I've done is when I'm able to go brainstorm in a room with my leadership. Lacking the ability to do this as we plan our next release, or the next 3 year strategy or whatnot is extremely difficult.
Having competent management means that they understand when this is valuable and when it's not.
> "your co-workers aren't your friends"
I hear this a lot, and I have to feel bad for people who have never experienced true friendship at work. At each of my jobs, I've made lifelong friends. Friends I've since vacationed with, stood up as a groomsman in a weeding for, etc. This is part of what made those jobs so rewarding.
I think the general thought is that "jobs change, so that 'friend' might not be around next week", and that's true. But in my experience, if they're true friends, changing jobs doesn't change that.
This says more about me than anything, but where else am I going to meet friends?
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All of this to say, in addition to being tone-deaf in light of the current reality in the world, these sentiments are also suspect under normal circumstances.
These things may be true for some people at their place of employment, or for them personally, but it's hard to understand where this comes from.
Why can't you brainstorm in a virtual room? I've been part of that many times over the years, and it works, too.
The only thing I miss is taking walks with coworkers. That is where the real value was for me. Something about walking and talking that is so beneficial.
I'm talking about conversations that might take all day, or days. Breaking down enormous problems. Deep collaborative work.
Can you do this in a virtual room? Yes. Will you achieve the same outcome? Early results (in my case) seem to indicate the answer is "no".
I want the ability to pace around the room at times. Look my collaborators in the eye. Pick up on non-verbal cues that are often impossible to see remotely. Step away as a group to share a much needed lunch break.
And when passionate people are involved, and many viewpoints are present, the ability to all argue/debate a topic vigorously - even show frustration at the right moments - and then all share a beer at the end of the day, is critical. Having that same vigorous debate on Zoom and then dropping off to our individual lives doesn't leave room for reconnecting with each other as humans - something that is critical for maintaining relationships.
Not every project requires this kind of interaction. But for things that do, the remote format just doesn't work well for everyone.
What you are describing is what we did with a half remote team at least once a quarter. Fly everyone in, have collaborative meetings during the day, team bonding at night.
I do think one of the core issues with the current Covid situation is that companies which are now completely remote can't do the normal bonding things that remote companies used to do.
Given the ability to do so, I do wonder how much of the concerns around remote work could be resolved.
Yeah, though even simple efforts yield big dividends. We schedule about 20 minutes after our company all hands to 'zingle', which sometimes includes breakout rooms to just hangout with a dozen people in an unstructured way. We do weekly "pub trivia" and other social activities. I've gotten in the habit of booking social lunches with coworkers, where we just hop on a zoom and catch up over lunch.
I won't say it's a perfect substitute, but not doing those things would be a disaster.
> Some of the best work I've done is when I'm able to go brainstorm in a room with my leadership.
That suggests you and your team have communication issues and meeting in person is just a plaster over it.
Why exactly do you need to see other team members in person?
> I have to feel bad for people who have never experienced true friendship at work
Why do you think getting friendly with people at work is appropriate? Mixing work and personal life will introduce unconscious bias and you will give different treatment to people who didn't invite you to their weeding. This is bad for business.
It seems like you just feel lonely and you use workplace to find friends. Can you see how wrong that sounds?
Did you think about finding a hobby, getting good at something other than work and meet people that way? (there is plenty of meetups for people sharing the same interests)
> That suggests you and your team have communication issues and meeting in person is just a plaster over it.
That's an interesting conclusion. What makes you believe that?
Would you say the same thing to a band trying to practice together...virtually/remotely? Why or why not?
> Why exactly do you need to see other team members in person?
I covered this in another comment under this thread.
> Why do you think getting friendly with people at work is appropriate? Mixing work and personal life will introduce unconscious bias and you will give different treatment to people who didn't invite you to their weeding. This is bad for business.
I see you're intentionally being snarky about my typo.
But on topic - again, I ask, what makes you believe that? There are plenty of studies and psychologists who would disagree with you. Go read some of the articles on Harvard Business Review that explore the dynamics of friendship at work, and how important / rewarding they can be.
> It seems like you just feel lonely and you use workplace to find friends. Can you see how wrong that sounds?
I'm not lonely. I'm also an introvert. But when friendships form, it's a beautiful thing.
Why do you believe this to be so "wrong"?
It's a simple matter of simplicity and practicality. I'm more likely to meet like-minded people in the workplace, and those people aren't necessarily even on my team or even in the same department.
As I mentioned in my parent comment, I do feel bad for people who have not had a chance to experience this - it seems you fall into that category.
> Did you think about finding a hobby, getting good at something other than work and meet people that way? (there is plenty of meetups for people sharing the same interests)
Of course! And I do those things, too. But my hobbies tend toward solitary activities (cycling, tinkering with electronics, coding side projects). Yeah, I meet interesting people at the local Raspberry Pi enthusiasts meetup, but rarely people I'll form close friendships with.
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Friendship at work might not be right for you. But don't mistake that with it being "wrong" or "inappropriate" for everyone.
I'm genuinely curious (and feel free not to reveal anything you aren't comfortable sharing), but I really wonder if age/geo/length of career factor into this.
Often, the mindset you're promoting seems to come from a lack of maturity and understanding of the importance of relationships in the workplace. I'm not saying that's necessarily the case for you, personally but I'm genuinely curious to understand where you're coming from when there's so much evidence to the contrary.
I think no one is thinking past "but I'm more productive!", that's including employers and employees.
Productivity is not the be-all end-all of a career! Human interaction (of any kind) is important, "wasting" time going to lunch with colleagues is important, serendipitous encounters at the coffee machine are important.
I know for certain if my employer decides to go permanent remote, I'll be looking for another employer. This is not the way I want to live and work.
The first 2 months of lockdown, I was crazy productive, working till midnight every night. Then little by little I'm slowly finding it harder and harder to concentrate. My productivity has fallen enough that my manager has called it out. So, at this point the commute and my eating habits have been the only thing that has significantly improved from this WFH lifestyle.
Go take one-two weeks off if you can, seriously. Even if just to stay in your area, maybe do some park/nature walks. The reset truly helps. The need for vacation didn't go away because of quarantine.
If you've watched Red Dwarf, the entire reason that Rimmer was brought back as a hologram, was so that Dave would not go insane.
And another crew member could have been brought back, but Holly determined that Rimmer would be best. The conflict, you see, was required.
Many here decry the "waste of time" of being interrupted. Their attention divided. Yet you're indicating that after a few months of endless, day long shifts free of interruption, productivity has dropped a bit.
It appears for some, Holly was right. You need a Rimmer.
Productivity has nothing to do with how long you work... but working until midnight does sound like a recipe for burnout. You should take a break to reset, as soon as you can!
That's a hard opinion to push during a pandemic. I might be ok WFH during normal times (I strongly suspect I'd dislike it still) but atm it's nigh impossible to get enough human interaction outside the office.
While yes, we're living through a pandemic. Nobody is suggesting these things should/can happen during the pandemic. People need to decouple WFH and pandemic thinking though.
Also, I think we should fully support what's suitable for people. I want to work remotely, but I want you to be able to work the way to prefer as well.
> I am super disappointed by some of the comments here that show a total lack of empathy for people who aren't like you.
I've noticed as of late HN has been riddled with comments such as: here is my extremely strong thoughts on X with my personal anecdotal experience Y, and therefore this is how the world should work.
> I believe it will be especially bad for those early in their careers
Agreed. I think it can be equally has bad for someone midway into their career who is thinking about taking on more leadership opportunities.
I completely agree. Additionally, as someone in the thread pointed out, this decision really doesn't make sense by Dropbox. You have a series of problems that I can't see a solution for.
1) If we have Dropbox Studios, who dictates the frequency of those visits? If a manager dictates, there will be resentment of some sorts. If its a democratic vote, what about the people that can't make that date?
2) Assuming the dates have been finalized, the people that cannot make that date are at a disadvantage. They might not be in driving distance to a hub or for other reasons. That would mean information again has to be propagated back virtually for all members.
3) If a date is set and all the necessary people have come together, is it essentially a company day off? If the goal is to meet and talk to people without doing solo-work, I would assume its filled with meetings or events. If this is true, this doesn't make sense to do it too frequently. If done infrequently, it defeats the purposes of these studios.
All of the thoughts so far don't even go through the cliques / groups that would form that can be gatekeepers of information for true remote workers that can't meetup.
The visits are either dictated by policy or agreed upon by the participants. A place will probably want both, a low frequency one by policy and freedom for the employees to set any frequency to themselves. Voting doesn't make any sense, you need all the participants to agree on a date.
The policy meetings ought to be fixed and with a low enough frequency that people can plan their lives after them. Like once every 6 months. Otherwise people will resent them.
After a date is set and the people come together, they can work on whatever they decided to have the meeting for. Of course, it's probably not for doing solo-work, but the company shouldn't dictate a lot here. It would go counter to the goal of the studios.
I imagine the company expects every worker to be able to meetup at some point.
I figure it doesn't make sense to commit to it if they can do it without committing, but not a bad thing to give it a go. I figure
- most ideas are bad,
- judgement is a crapshoot but improves the odds up to 50/50,
- trying and either rejecting or committing (or going bankrupt) gets the odds of the better solution prevailing in the market up to 60-odd percent.
Plenty of confounding variables, lots of opportunity to get unlucky and draw the wrong conclusions (or just have your priors overrule weak evidence against them), but it's science and we haven't found anything better yet.
Many people who thrive working from home have been forced to work in the office for their entire career and are now VERY driven on defending their improved working conditions.
Yes. And the flip side is you have people who hate WFH (especially in the current situation) who liked the everyone in the office model really fear that, even absent 100% remote, the in-office experience will be much reduced with many of their co-workers coming in seldom. And meetings will all still be on Zoom.
There are a lot of incentives to stake out positions. People don't really want to be fully remote at a company where most of their co-workers go back into the office most of the time and people mostly don't want to go back into an office where it's mostly just teams having all-day meetings now and then.
>So basically anti-WFH people are sad that they can't hold pro-WFH people hostage anymore.
Ehh I think this comment is what the root comment was critisizing. I think a more empathetic lens is that you can either provide a remote-first or in-office-first experience for a team, and that at a larger office many or most teams being remote-first would detract from the office-first experience. I think it's short sighted to assume that having 200 people primarily in the office would be significantly different than 400 people, for example, but going from 400 to 10 certainly would.
The good thing is that after companies finish out corona, engineers will have more remote-first work options and still plenty of office-first options - I don't think there will be much in the way of hostage taking, but I'm sure some folks will be (rightfully) miffed if they joined a team for one experience and post-pandemic are getting a different one. They are also able to find a new job :)
I expect post-pandemic this will definitely be an early interview/discussion question. Or spelled out in a job posting. Which is fine. It certainly tends to be with respect to travel. People will certainly switch jobs to companies with preferences that match theirs and that's fine.
Replace Zoom with whatever meeting solution you like, but it's probably for the best that all meetings be on some sort of meeting platform long term.
At least in my experience, people seldom take notes during meetings; they rely on their memory and forget about everyone else that didn't attend. Not to mention that if you're typing on your machine during a meeting it's assumed that you're not paying attention. Even just recording everything can be good so you can go back later to review critical decisions.
> People don't really want to be fully remote at a company where most of their co-workers go back into the office most of the time
At least from my perspective, I dread this idea because, as employees who were already mostly remote found out a long time ago, employees at the office will typically neglect remote coworkers. Be it through not meeting in an accessible format, not sharing important decisions, or similar oversights.
I've personally experienced great improvements in terms of team coordination due to WFH: we've scheduled meetings in advance, we have notes for key decisions, there are proper documents for inter-team coordination (instead of relying on memory and ad-hoc discussions), etc..
> people mostly don't want to go back into an office where it's mostly just teams having all-day meetings now and then.
Do you mean the scenario where employees come in a limited number of days for meetings? Or where everyone is in the office 100% of the time with certain days that are all meetings?
Personally, I think the former makes best use of in-office time. This does vary per person, but I think the best use of the office is as a collaborative space; it's the main feature everyone seems to be lamenting. So use it for its advantages.
So get the collaborative benefits and then let everyone else get their work done. This is much more personal, but I absolutely hated people dropping into my team neighborhood and interrupting me with questions/trying to locate someone. If you want some of my work time, that's OK, but you can't do it whenever you feel like it; schedule time and stop pre-empting my tasks.
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WFH in general seems to require more structure than in-office work. This adds some overhead for individual employees, but likely will result in massive gains long term. If your meetings are scheduled, there's more time to prepare. If everyone is taking notes, then there's less need for meetings to understand decisions made elsewhere.
Ancillary communication tools were severely under-used before WFH. I'd be happy if we went mixed-office after learning how to coordinate more effectively, but I consider it likely that in the rush to get back people will drop the ball and work will reset to in-office vs WFH.
>Do you mean the scenario where employees come in a limited number of days for meetings?
What I meant is that individuals who would prefer to be in an an office come in and mostly the only other people there are other groups doing their own thing.
And I agree about the structure. Where I work, people have been pretty good about using shared docs--Etherpad for a long time and Google Docs now. But with everyone on video calls, shared docs are now used pretty religiously for most meetings.
Also agree about the use of office. I'm happy to come into an office now and then if it's for a particular purpose. I've no interest in coming into one to work individually or maybe run into someone and have a serendipitous conversation. Serendipity is fine but it's actually pretty inefficient.
See also all the posts about "I had to work from home during a pandemic, with forced restrictions on other activities and social gatherings, while also home schooling my children and dealing with an inordinate amount of stress and disruption to my life, therefore I hate work from home and would never consider it given the choice."
The last 6 months isn't really representative of why we should or should not be encouraging WFH, but it at least seems to have opened more doors to accommodating it as an option in companies that would have previously been against it.
There's an in-person CIO Symposium event I usually go to and this year it was spread out into a series of short virtual events. One very common theme is that necessity made them do things that they were skeptical about, thought would take too long, would be really hard and... the world didn't end and, in fact, things turned out better than expected. A lot of experiments that people were afraid to perform were performed for them and things turned out not bad. Or even well.
Of course, WFH is a mixed bag and I expect 100% remote to be rare but I do expect a lot more flexibility at many companies.
My hypothesis is that WFH has been somewhat ostracized, generally, by companies for bad reasons that would otherwise benefit employees who find it beneficial.
The pendulum is now swinging in WFH's favor and those who it benefits want to cement it as a very viable and practical alternative to the traditional office model.
I wonder if it will swing to an extreme the other way, as many pendulum like responses tend to. In other words, if WFH will become more common than is reasonable as we reach and then pass an ideal.
My issue here is this is not really a honest conversation most of the time.
Wanting to work from home generally means just that, wanting to work from home. Not wanting to work from home however usually really means "I don't want others to be able to work from home", it's about taking options away from other people. The exception being people who don't want to work from home because they have a pack of screaming children at home, etc - in their case saying they don't want to work from home is actually honest.
Your comment is a good example. For your perceived issues to be resolved, we need to make other people work at the office. The idea that others shouldn't have the option to work from home because them being at the office helps someone else build their network is not something I can agree with.
I came to say exactly this. In addition, we can't forget the people who have to work in the city but can't afford to live there, so their lives are made vastly more difficult.
Sometimes the commute is just too stressful, even if you live in the city. My partner's well-being has visibly improved due to going into the office only when necessary.
Maybe WFH should be renamed to something else. It doesn't capture all the subtleties of flexibility and choice we're asking for.
I recently pinged 2 co-workers for Friday afternoon remote "water cooler calls". I could send the relief when they had some informal time to vent and freely chat. I can recommend it wholeheartedly.
I've noticed this too. I've made it a point now to call up some of my team members at least once a week for no purpose other than to have a venting session.
I don't think I ever realized how much of this venting must have subtly happened in person, but since COVID I think most of it gets bottled up and people get very frustrated when they can't casually talk through these issues in person. My team has collectively agreed that these "venting calls" are great if only for the reason that they make you aware that you're not the only one with frustrations, and I think that really helps morale.
> I don't think I ever realized how much of this venting must have subtly happened in person, but since COVID I think most of it gets bottled up and people get very frustrated when they can't casually talk through these issues in person.
I hadn't considered this angle before reading your comment, but the psychological impact of this alone is huge. As any therapist will tell you, working through frustrations and integrating negative experiences instead of bottling them up is crucial.
This is something I already struggled with prior to COVID, and I've been seeing a therapist for years now for this (and many other) reasons.
The thing about bottling things up is that it kind of "works" for awhile. Until it doesn't.
So we probably haven't even started to see the longer term impact this will have over time.
Commuting is destroying cities (we give up space for cars, noise pollution, pedestrian streets, etc.), people (how much time do you lose in commute?), and the world (pollution).
Cars were invented in an era where cities were not as dense, and where jobs were mostly done in person. With the advent of the internet and personal computers, this is changing, that you want it or not.
This is a problem all over, but it's 100x worse in America, where it's basically impossible to survive in 99% of the country without a car.
Redesigning cities is glacially slow even with a clear political will, but taking a bunch of people off the roads at peak times is quick and relatively painless.
Not sure why working in office isn't considered a luxury? You are literally making your whole team commute from various parts of the city just to have a face to face contact. Mind you that this arrangement has been created because in the past there was no way to effectively communicate, but now this is no longer a problem, therefore commuting is just a thing from the past that some people are too attached to, akin to preferring listening to vinyl instead of Tidal or something. Why people should live in the past? That ship has sailed.
I think part of the issue is that the work from office advocates are more concerned about their needs and pushing their needs onto others who may have a different preference.
I hope in the future companies will allow people to work the way they prefer, whether that's in office, remote or something in between.
The one major reason i fully support remote work is, its effect on "age bias". You may be in your 20's and you may not feel the pressure. Once you hit 35+, you see age-bias everywhere. Its better to have job opportunities based on skill rather than how you look.
As someone who has worked from home for a decade, I predict a mental health apocalypse in the near future. Working from home permanently requires support infrastructure not everyone has access to. It also requires a different approach to work altogether which, again, not everyone is capable of adopting.
If you have family, work from home is great. But if you're single, staying cooped up alone at home can be a disaster.
I find this expectation really strange. It's like 'violence in games', if you refer to it everyone will nod, but how it became such a widely accepted fact is at best unclear.
I'm sure some cases of it happened somewhere, there are some papers, and some appeal to authority is a given, but do we really know if WFH equals mental health issues en masse?
For example, I wonder if: long commute, all the preparation before/after a work day, and resulting overall diminished free time causes more mental issues or not.
What about constant interruptions, loud neighbours and that white light above you, even though you'd rather have it yellow? All the inconveniences of sharing a place with other people, wouldn't any of this take a toll?
Seems to me when "office" is heard everyone thinks of that one nice summer evening after work and had a few beers yada yada, nobody seems to remember that cold-ass winter day where you would rather stay in 5 levels of blankets yet had to go to office, then slipped on ice and landed on your ass.
Maybe it's true and WFH will turn most people to madness. I'm just saying it's not an established fact of life, and opposite is also very much possible.
> What about constant interruptions, loud neighbours and that white light above you, even though you'd rather have it yellow? All the inconveniences of sharing a place with other people, wouldn't any of this take a toll?
Are you describing working in an office or working from home?
I understand the sentiment here. But there are different lifestyles. For some, home is where they spend a majority of their time outside of work. I've optimized my home around my lifestyle.
WFH doesn't require building a sensory deprivation tank.
Since going remote, I work in a swimming pool about 50% of the time. I have a good pair of noise cancelling headphones, a Panasonic toughbook, and a "floating standing desk" (a raft turned upside down). I smoke a cigar, sip a nice whiskey, and crank through my work. Then I go spend time with my family and friends.
It's not quite a concrete bunker beneath my house. But I'm not coming back to an office anytime soon.
Depends on which office, and whose home we're talking about.
It's not my goal to shoot your anecdote with my own.
My post above is more about the tendency to focus on WFH as a mental health tragedy, while WFO is never held under this scrutiny. Is it possible that herding millions into offices [of various quality] had no major impact on mental health? Yet it's called an apocalypse when opposite becomes a trend.
One's "mental health apocalypse" is another's relief from pressure. If you often hear one angle maybe it's now becoming a chant rather than rational discourse.
Maybe we can do better than approaching this from that one specific angle, and consider both as valid options. Leave the people with choice, and let them pick whatever is best for them. [1]
[1] My anecdata shows most people given the choice pick their homes or places they like over the office, and offices nowadays are almost empty. But obviously it's anecdata, doesn't mean "everyone" wants it that way (they don't) and YMMV.
Preface: I don't think full WFH will happen after COVID, I think companies will try it and slowly end up reverting back to more of a partial WFH schedule like Microsoft just announced, for a number of reasons.
That being said, I agree with you here. I our current work situation right now is causing a ton of stress and mental health issues, but COVID and our current political climate have a much bigger hand in that than just the WFH part. What WFH looks like right now is not what a 100% WFH lifestyle would look like in a year or two. I've had the ability to WFH when ever I wanted for the past 4 years and I can tell you, my current WFH situation is much more draining that it ever was before.
I think your video game analogy is pretty spot on. There are problems with 100% WFH, but "mass mental health issues" just seems like a boogieman.
The thing mostly talked about is social isolation and it seems pretty straight forward that going from time in the office to the same time at home reduces social contact.
Yeah, for me it's less "working was my only social interaction" and more "with covid, we can't work in person and we also can't go do our own things with friends."
Losing in-person work relationships at the same time as social relationships is rough. Luckily I get along well with the person I live with, but the lack of ad-hoc social interaction is unsettling.
Or, it’s good that people will be forced to build social networks outside of their work, as it was a bad development that citizens began to depend heavily on work for meaning and connection.
People have always relied on work for building social lives. Even when I worked in a shop, I'd end up going for drinks with those people and making friends. When I moved to a new city, my entire social fabric stems off of work (even if the majority of friends are now 1 or 2 steps removed, I needed that foundation to bootstrap).
We're already in a loneliness epidemic, WFH will make that 10x worse.
You’ve misread my point, and are arguing against something I didn’t say. I never said that people didn’t have social networks at work before, I said that they didn’t depend so heavily upon them.
People used to also have extensive social networks outside of work through various religious and social institutions, most of which have withered in the past 20 years or so. This is a huge part of this “loneliness epidemic” you mention. We should rebuild those so that people alternating their work structure isn’t a debilitating blow to their social network. This is particularly important since people change jobs much more rapidly now, which disrupts any social network based on work.
I completely agree. I'm single and have worked from home for years, minus a brief contracting gig in an office a few years ago. I made sure to make time for seeing people though. I have friends in my neighborhood and we would meet up for lunch or tea during the week and I would always go out on the weekends. With social distancing it's been really challenging.
I'm fortunate that I have friends that are also careful that live close to me that I can still see. It's not as safe as completely isolating, but I also weighed the risk of completely isolating myself from everyone and I decided that I had to be okay with a certain amount of risk of infection. People don't really talk about the death toll of mental health problems, but it's substantive in certain demographics. I keep telling my friends that you can't eliminate risk, just mitigate it to an amount that you're comfortable with, and that amount is different for everyone.
Complete isolation is not a sustainable plan. I've been looking at what my lifestyle is going to be like until we start getting this under control, which doesn't look like it's coming in the short to medium term.
I'm not telling you to completely isolate, but this is wrong:
> I keep telling my friends that you can't eliminate risk, just mitigate it to an amount that you're comfortable with, and that amount is different for everyone
This is a pandemic, any risks you consciously take are risks you're forcing the people around you to take too.
No single person can set the amount of risks he wants to take, it has to be decided globally.
I don't know about this argument in general: it seems about the same as saying we shouldn't criticize people for drinking and driving because they should decide their own risk tolerance. Sure they're deciding the risk to themselves, but they don't necessarily get to unilaterally decide their tolerance to risking others without criticism.
That's a solid metaphor but it ignores that there's a considerable downside to self isolating. No one has major mental health issues because they can't drink drive. If someone proved medically that they had to drink drive or feel suicidal I'd have a hell of a lot more sympathy for them risking it.
The reason he's confused is that he's thinking of isolation in terms of its impact on community transmission rate. That should definitely be part of your personal calculations (evaluating your personal risk without concern for any risk you create for others is sociopathic, if common).
But the truth is that even the most basic measures of isolation would suffice to properly mitigate the community risk if the community would broadly take them, and the most severe personal isolation on my part will not protect the community in any meaningful way if they don't.
Wearing a mask when it's appropriate and avoiding crowded/unsafe spaces is really all we owe our community. Anything further you do should be based on your personal evaluation of risks - I'm more isolated because we have high-risk relatives that we see regularly.
Edit: It's worth noting that this position is specific to the pandemic in question - it's totally plausible that we will get another pandemic later that requires us all to take more stringent isolation measures. And the evidence suggests that we will probably all die.
You don't think that in the next one, people will be more willing to believe that all the freezer trucks full of bodies in the streets actually exist, and that the nurses and doctors all over the world saying "this is really bad" aren't crisis actors? Because I'm inclined to agree we're screwed.
> No single person can set the amount of risks he wants to take, it has to be decided globally.
globally is a bit of a stretch, but people already do this on a local level. this is what is happening when the government imposes/relaxes restrictions on the number of people that can be at an indoor gathering, the types of businesses that are allowed to be open, whether restaurants can offer indoor seating, etc. as long as the person isn't exceeding the limits set by their democratically elected government, shouldn't they be free to set their own risk tolerance?
There are other risks around mental health, so you have to balance them. I’m a single person who is an extrovert and I get depressed when I’m not around people — to the point it’s hard to function.
The balance is different for each person. Being intentional about the people we share space with goes a long way; nobody I know is going to concerts or crowded bars which makes contact tracing a lot easier.
The fact that you're being downvoted shows how American HN is. You're plainly correct, and anyone who isn't indoctrinated in the Cult of Individualism knows it. The nations that have performed the best this year have been the more collectivist ones.
Vietnam, South Korea, New Zealand and probably some others I am forgetting. By the obvious metrics - fewer deaths, fewer cases, smaller impact on economy.
What's also becoming very apparent is how many people use work as a means to escape an unhappy home life.
Things like an unhappy marriage can be dealt with by being at the office a lot, or working at home in a big enough home that you can remain isolated. The current situation forces a lot of these issues to come to a boil.
Even if you're just unhappy with who you are and what 'home' means for you, being forced to deal with it can be rough. Work is to many workaholics the same way a bar is to alcoholics. It's a place where a coping mechanism becomes not just a way to deal, but a sign of success.
Home can equally be a place to escape an unhappy work life.
I've always tried to keep my work, domestic, and social life separate. I work in an office and I live with flatmates/roommates who aren't close friends. My work problems stay in the office, my domestic problems stay at home, and my social/relationship problems don't follow me home. It's less about one or the other being a coping mechanism, but my (lack of) capacity to deal with multiple problems simultaneously.
I don’t think it’s family vs not family. It’s all about personality. To wit: If you’re single, work from anywhere you want is great. But if you have a family, not having a place to escape the distractions of home life can be a disaster.
I'm single, and transition to WFH has made a great improvement to my social health.
Sure, all people need social interactions. But these interactions don't need to be defined by work. I work in caffe 10 meters from my apartment. Sit with laptop in the park. Meet with friends. I don't drive, don't use public transport, but walk an awful lot.
And thanks with great, mostly asynchronous communication at my workplace, I sleep as much as I want to, and work exactly when I feel like it, and never ever hear or see my colleagues — only text, mostly comments as opposed to instance messaging. Sometimes I just slack off for three days straight. Sometimes I go into work binge for a non-interrupted 20 hour refactoring session. Not even because there's some deadline, feeling of responsibility or any other kind of negative motivation like that — just because I enjoy it and don't want to stop!
I feel like I've been on vacation for the last three months, and yet repository stats show me that I'm more productive as I've ever been.
Oh, and the best thing about all of that? I live in a country with much lower cost of living than US, but thanks to headlines like this, I feel that I'll soon be competing for exactly the same jobs and salaries that SF engineers.
My dog is my work buddy. He's always around, gives me an excuse to take a lunchtime walk, always available for cuddles when I need it. I have a family, that are with me in the evenings, but a pet during the day is a great companion.
> But if you're single, staying cooped up alone at home can be a disaster.
During COVID I would say this is more of a problem but in my 8 years of remote work I don't really miss the office at all. In normal times you can get out if you want to head to a coffee shop or something. We do video calls which seems to help some of the team members feel better about the situation. Having a commute was absolutely the most stressful thing for me.
I do most of my socializing outside of working hours. Being alone and remote doesn't seem to effect me but I'm also super introverted. I understand this may effect extroverts differently.
everyone has to get out of the house and making actual friends in life. co-workers aren't friends, bosses aren't friends, clients aren't friends, work relationships aren't friends. we all need human interaction... join a club, a gym, yoga, bike club, whatever, just interact with people that doesn't involve talking about work. and sitting home and playing video games while good, isn't getting outside.
It really saddens me whenever I see this (apparently common) sentiment on HN. Through every job I've had, I've met some of my very best life-long friends. My wedding party is over half people that I met at work. A couple of my former bosses are people I see every couple of months (pre-covid) and are invited to my wedding. Even one of my past clients is someone that I keep in touch with regularly (for nothing related to work).
Not everyone at work is going to become your best friend, but if you're automatically assuming that anyone you meet through your job is completely "off limits" for friendship, you're really hurting yourself. I can't imagine working at a place like that.
HN takes it a bit too far, but there is some wisdom in maintaining a boundary between work and personal stuff. like suppose you are struggling to recover from alcoholism. you might want to confide in your close friends. you might not want to share this with friends from work. you almost certainly should not share this with your boss, even if you consider them a friend.
I treat work friends as a sort of "probationary friend". I'm happy to meet up and do stuff outside of work, but I'm a bit more guarded than I would be with someone I don't work with. I might hesitate to introduce them to some of my more "out there" friends (for whatever reason I seem to attract a lot of very weird people). once we no longer work together, they can just be a normal friend.
>like suppose you are struggling to recover from alcoholism. you might want to confide in your close friends. you might not want to share this with friends from work. you almost certainly should not share this with your boss, even if you consider them a friend.
I would absolutely share this with my "work friends" and even my current boss. When one of my previous bosses shared with me that he was having trouble at home with his spouse, it wasn't like he suddenly became a bad boss. If anything, it helped our work because it gave me the opportunity to be more understanding when he seemed more worn out or needed to leave early for the day to go spend time with his family. If he had told me he was struggling with drinking, then I would know that maybe we should go play sports rather than to our weekly happy hour. We build each other up, both inside and outside of work, because that's what friends do, and it has the nice side effect of making our professional careers better, too.
Perhaps I just have had a lucky stream of working on unicorn teams, but I would hate to work at a company where I couldn't share details of my life with the people that I spend 40-60+ hours a week with. Obviously every workplace and relationship is unique and you aren't going to share everything with everybody (I'd share the above details with my current boss but by no means with all of my bosses), but I don't understand this attitude that you shouldn't share anything with anyone that happens to have a common employer.
To me, work is just another facet of our relationship alongside the many other facets, no different than if we had met through volunteering or went to the same gym. I don't share everything with every coworker, just like I don't share everything with every other person that visits my gym. But I also don't shy away from sharing things with someone just because they are my coworker, just like I wouldn't shy away from sharing things with someone just because they also use the same weight set that I do.
I'm not saying you shouldn't share anything with anyone, but there are some things where the upside of sharing isn't worth the potential downside. when dealing with someone who is responsible for evaluating your job performance, it's unwise to volunteer reasons for them to doubt that. it's hard to judge productivity, especially for engineers. if you go through a rough patch but say nothing, people might never notice that you were less productive for a month or two. if you tell your boss you're having an issue with alcohol/drugs, they might perceive a drop in productivity that didn't even exist! unless your issue is so severe that it can't possibly escape notice, and/or you have a good plan to fix it very soon, there's just no reason to share this kind of stuff.
also, I would say work is quite a bit different than a gym. it's a lot easier to find a new gym than a new job, and it's much less disruptive to your life if you have to do so.
> when dealing with someone who is responsible for evaluating your job performance, it's unwise to volunteer reasons for them to doubt that. it's hard to judge productivity, especially for engineers. if you go through a rough patch but say nothing, people might never notice that you were less productive for a month or two. if you tell your boss you're having an issue with alcohol/drugs, they might perceive a drop in productivity that didn't even exist!
My boss and I have a good enough relationship at work where I'm 1000% confident this wouldn't happen, and if said boss did "perceive" some kind of drop in productivity, their response would be to help me with that rather than turn it into a negative. Indeed, during COVID when I expressed to my boss that I was having a tough time, his immediate response was to ask how he could help and to offer me a couple days off to recharge.
And the reason we have that relationship is specifically because we treat each other as friends that also happen to have a working relationship, rather than letting the work relationship dominate all else.
Not everyone will have that kind of relationship with their boss, but I believe it is something everyone should aspire to rather than immediately rejecting it as even a possibility.
there is always the exception to the rule and i'm glad that your workplace is an environment you can share stuff like that. however, for most of us, we would get fired or condemned if we spoke freely like that.
It makes me even sadder when people's social circles and even their entire social network align strictly with work.
I've met plenty of good friends at work, but I'm very happy my social network includes mostly people doing different things with their life. It means there is much more breadth of perspective, and you realize very easily that work isn't everything.
It sounds like you also might not have had much experience in the current "everyone is friends!" startup office culture. There's a pretty strong pressure to socialize all of the time, during lunch and after hours, with everyone. The people get laid off and they are erased from that social circle, typically people won't even communicate with them anymore. It's repulsive.
I think all of what you are describing is a symptom of letting the "co-worker" facet of a relationship dominate all other facets. In other comments I've been using the term "work friends", but I use that term loosely because the reality is that they are first and foremost "friends", it just so happens that our friendship was first kindled through work.
For me, being co-workers is just one small facet of our friendship. We do talk about work sometimes, just like sometimes we talk about sports teams we have in common or other hobbies. But we don't only talk about work. I don't feel that my perspective is limited at all because my co-workers have introduced me to their spouses, who might be in totally different industries, or to new hobbies such as surfing or soccer, or brought me along on trips to new places or encouraged me to volunteer. All of these things have expanded my perspective greatly, and if you trace them back far enough, all of them are originating from my co-workers.
In your startup example, I have been on teams where this culture was the case, and certainly with some people I have completely lost touch after they/I left the team. But for others, even though we worked together work was not the dominating reason that we were friends. When I left the team we lost that one facet of our relationship, but our friendship still survives because we have many other facets that facilitate it.
So I think the problem isn't when someone's social circle aligns strictly with work. I think that's fine. I think the problem you are describing is when it turns into a "work-dominant social circle" rather than "a social circle that just happens to have the same employer in common".
Furthermore, I think the "anti work friend" attitude is counterproductive to this. People are saying "don't spend your time building friendships with co-workers because if you leave work you will lose your friend". But if you carry this attitude and don't build a friendship that is strong outside of work, then of course your perspective is going to be limited to work, and of course you will lose your friendship with that person once your work ends. It's a self fulfilling prophecy.
I think it's important to make the distinction that while you can be friends with your colleagues it's very important to also have friends outside of work. Having friends from work is great, but if you only have friends from work then you have nothing outside of work which isn't healthy (for example, if things start going poorly at work then it can feel like you are trapped).
I disagree. At any of my previous jobs when work started going poorly, my friendships were, if anything, a boon to me because I had a support system that immediately understood my work situation and challenges. They were immediately in a position to help because of their close proximity both to me and the challenges at work I was facing. After leaving one job, the relationships with my "work friends" were invaluable to me in helping me find another job since they were in the same field and had connections I could leverage.
Outside of work, my "work friends" and I go out to eat, go play sports together, hang out at each other's houses, etc. We talk about work sometimes because it's obviously a common interest, but our friendship doesn't revolve around it, and if someone severs their relationship with the employer that we have in common, it does not mean our friendship also severs.
I would look at this from a different angle. Work friends have extreme pressure to be around you. They get paid to be around and collaborate with you. You can't easily determine the extent of a relationship standing on its own merit if someone is literally being paid to collaborate with you. With that said some of my best friends came from former jobs as well, but if we're talking about emotionally vulnerable people they especially need relationships outside of work. Imagine all of your relationships being tied to work and inevitably you get fired (as most people will experience in their life). That would be devastating without support outside of work. What if it turns out your friendships only lasted because of the financial incentives to be around each other and common in-office conversations?
tl;dr; relationships outside of work are important and that's not sad to me because it doesn't prevent anyone from also having friends inside of work.
I consider my coworkers to be my friends and it's one of the reasons I like working at my current company.
I agree that having lots of different outlets for connection is great, and I also acknowledge that there are a variety of ways in which work can complicate friendships. But, if I'm going to spend 40+ hours per week on work, I'd like to do it alongside people I genuinely like and care about.
i did that for almost 20 years where i previously worked. i thought of my co-workers as family and friends and it got me no where and caused lots of stress (its hard to say no to someone when they are friends). i don't know, maybe it had more todo with co-dependency than anything else.
now i've been working at a place for almost 3 years and i'm not friends with a single person here. i don't let these people know my business and have a complete separation of personal and work relationship. i honestly have less stress cause i can say no without giving a crap if my co-worker gets mad at me or doesn't want to talk to me (which i prefer). i do my job and go home to be with my friends and family.
also, if another opportunity comes my way, i have no problem giving my 2 weeks notice and packing my bags. life is a lot better now.
I have friends in my running club, cycling friends, Peloton (half virtual, half local) friends, friends from cities I used to live in, friends who have moved away.
If you have family, work from home is great...sometimes. It depends on the people. Sometimes small children, or even adults, are better able to cope with you being occasionally gone, than with you being there, but don't bother them. You could end up either being continually interrupted, or else having to say some variant of "stay away from me" to a loved family member. Neither is a good situation.
Not to mention that some people, for financial reasons, must live in places far too small to spend their waking lives in along with their sleeping lives.
Hah, I feel the opposite. Having my family at home is what makes WFH unbearable. I'm constantly exposed to the stress of getting a child through the hybrid learning school schedule.
I get absolutely no quiet time or alone time during the day, whereas my office has many quiet places for me to clear my mind for a few minutes.
I can only speak from my experience, but being a single man living alone in a one bedroom after moving to a new city in January was absolutely awful. After spending two months in a new city, everything was immediately shut down and I was stuck working at home in my 13x13 room I rented.
The room I slept in was my office and my dining room as well, not to mention my entertainment room. Instead of seeing all my coworkers (who I was fond of) every day in the office, I now saw my small team during our 15 minute stand ups, which would only occur about 2 or 3 times a week. I saw the gas station clerks more.
I hated it, and I didn't really have a support system. I'm in my final year of university now (that work experience was an internship), and I will definitely look primarily for places that will have an actual office environment.
I think we are already seeing it. I think the increased polarization I am seeing this US election cycle and here in Canada is partly due to this effect.
I'm not so sure about that. "This" WFH situation we are now in is very different from what a normal remote-only situation would be like after COVID times are over. People are at their wit's ends right now because they cannot do many of the things outside of work that they used to do. If you have a small child, you used to be able to take them with you on errands and impromptu meetups with other parents and families to break up the day and entertain them.
Now, many people carefully plan out these occasions to make sure they're not bringing anything back home to their own family members. The same can be applied to childcare and even senior care. In normal times, you wouldn't have your kids home all day to interrupt you and require help with schoolwork (or even logging into Zoom).
Additionally, I've found the hardest part of this year is that there just isn't much to look forward to on the weekends - no big group dinners to celebrate birthdays, no vacations to other cities, no bar nights with old friends.
>If you have family, work from home is great. But if you're single, staying cooped up alone at home can be a disaster.
I like the break from my family. I didn't get it during WFH. Enjoying being back in the office now.
It's all just different strokes.
Having some companies that choose to go all in on remote gives those people who it suits them some options and for those of us who prefer WFO we know to avoid those companies.
It's polarizing, so I think it's good if companies kinda just go one way or the other.
There is already a disaster in being forced to go into the office for some of us. For those of with social anxiety issues, being forced to come into the office every day is incredibly stressful. I haven't had a single panic attack since we went remote for Covid. My mental outlook changed from struggling to get through the day to enjoying life.
When companies say they're allowing permanent WFH, we have to consider this in the context of a non-covid world. After lockdowns are over, people who work from home will not be isolated to the same extent. They can go to a restaurant or park and eat lunch. They can see neighbors in-person. It will not be nearly as isolating as covid-induced WFH is.
Anecdotal but this is exactly what has happened to me. I live alone and have been WFH since March. It's gotten harder and harder and since September I've had outright moderate depression. It's directly linked to WFH and living alone.
The better solution is to not have empty lives outside of work. I realize that's a hard problem to solve, but it's worth solving, and maybe WFH will help spark that change.
It's a harder problem to solve when you've moved across the country (or world) to work for years at companies that actively cultivated a world of "work and play at work"/"hang out after hours" with legitimate professional incentive to participate.
There's a real sense in which Bay area tech companies invested in social infrastructure to make living in a place where you have no real personal connections sustainable, so if they stop providing that benefit, it can be a real problem to those with less social resources.
WFH saves money for the company, I just hope that some of the expensive (to the company) perks like prime real estate, free meals, exercise programs, etc. can be translated into at least a minimal budget per employee of: Internet connection reimbursement, annual budget for workspace improvements (ideally with a large initial budget, like $1000 or more for desk, monitor, chair, etc.), and possibly some other perks.
But it will likely just be on the employee to pay for all these things, and the companies will reap the benefits.
In short, for remote working employees (any employee that spends >30% of their time working outside an employer-designated office/client site/etc over 3+ months), all employers must have a written contract with the employee, that must:
* Define the tools & workspace necessary to provide a sufficient & safe workspace, for which the employer must cover any costs
* Define working hours (with some requirements on flexibility)
* Be voluntary, in both directions (employers can't fire people who don't want to change to remote work, employees aren't entitled to remote work if employers don't agree)
* Detail how, if at all, the employee's productivity might be monitored, and do so with reasonable regard to privacy and ability to disconnect from work
* Ensure equal treatment of on-site & remote employees, including pay, job stability, promotions, etc.
There's some caveats in there for force majeure, such that this doesn't immediately apply for the unavoidable remote setups created by COVID, but will apply for ongoing remote work where that continues in future.
Woah! Very cool. I hope to see something like that in the U.S. soon. The voluntary line strikes me as a little odd -- but I think that's because I believe soon, employment contracts will start mentioning "x days WFH per week/month" as a perk.
Wouldn't it be easier to compensate for these costs via salary increases? Not everyone will have the same needs, and attempting to track everyone's expenses seems more complicated than necessary.
Although, come to think of it, it might make sense to mark some amount of money as an "equipment stipend" or similar on paychecks. That way, it's clear to both parties what the funds are intended for, even if there's no actual mandate on how to spend them.
paying it out as salary is less tax efficient. simply marking it as "equipment stipend" would probably not be enough to prevent it from being counted as income under tax law. if you already have accountants to track business expenses, it's probably more efficient to do whatever the minimum amount of expense tracking is needed to make it a non-taxed expense. plus if you give everyone a budget, there's always the chance that some of them won't spend all of it each year.
Salary increases are less effective at achieving the goal. If the company thinks a $5k desk and monitor setup will make me most effective, I might think that with a $5k bonus I'd rather spend it on other things. Stipend + stipulations is the best way to go.
But most people don't know that there are massive tax benefits to working from home (at least in Canada) you can write off the percentage of your house you work in of your rent and stuff like that. That alone can equal a $1000 a year or so.
But from a company point of view, getting rid of the office is a massive save in money, so I suspect some will increase salaries or offer other perks such as skipthedishes accounts or what not. Most will just pocket it though.
> But most people don't know that there are massive tax benefits to working from home (at least in Canada)
That's generally not true for workers in the US. If you are self-employed, yes, you can take a home office deduction, but not if you are a W2 employee.
The US used to have an "unreimbursed employee expense" itemized deduction, but even then there was a pretty high floor (had to be more than a couple percent of your total income) so most people couldn't make use of it. That deduction was eliminated in the 2018 tax law.
2x is hardly exaggeration, but my amount was including extras and other office stuff you can write off (power, internet, heating, office supplies, etx)
It applies to Canada as well. Claim 25% of your home as a business expense means 25% of any capital gains are taxed, unlike your primary residence which isn’t taxed.
“You may have to report a capital gain if you change your principal residence to a rental or business property, or vice versa.”
However, it looks like there were some changes that may allow you to avoid it (business use was a small fraction and you didn’t take advantage of tax benefits from business use).
I don't think you get to write off work expenses as a W2 (ie, hourly or salaried) employee in the US. pretty sure only independent contractors get to do this. otherwise, everyone would be doing this for commuting expenses.
(At least in Canada) commute to your "usual place of business" is explicitely excluded from write-off. Also, if your employer reimburses you for travel (mileage) you can't write it off at tax time.
I tend to think of the junior engineers, who might not have a ton of disposable income.
In the before times, they would be put at a workstation with a $2-3000 desk, a $500+ chair, reliable Internet and power, and usually a new(ish) computer, monitor, keyboard, and mouse.
Those engineers don't have the income to get all those pieces for home use; they'll get a cheap Ikea desk and chair, a middling-quality monitor and keyboard, and if they're lucky, their workplace provides a reliable computer at least.
But even for 'overpaid tech workers', there are some tools of the trade you invest in for your own good, but the company should also provide the basics (e.g. reimbursement for things used primarily/exclusively for business).
I think you'll see something akin to the Joel Test [1], but for how companies manage remote. What equipment are they providing? Are you getting a one time allowance to buy your home office setup (desk, external monitor, etc)? Are you getting a stipend towards your internet connection? Are they providing a corporate managed mobile device (why are you using your personal device for work!?)? Do they provide you with a support contact within the org if you need technical support or are you left to flail on your own? Do you have the option of a coworking space allowance so you're not always having to work from your home? How enjoyable and well put together is your onboarding process?
> Are you getting a one time allowance to buy your home office setup (desk, external monitor, etc)?
Note that this really should be a recurring stipend. Nothing lasts forever; everything has a service life. I think a three- or four-year depreciation makes sense on a lot of these items, although this is probably something which should be considered an industry standard.
Wow, great article! It's astounding how forward thinking this was 20 years ago, and how relevant it still is. It's even more amazing how many companies still don't live up to these standards today!
I'm 2 decades into my career and have been working from home for a fortune 100 company for 2 years before covid (well, we would meet once a week in the office but just for meetings), so when the pandemic hit, it didn't change our work habits.
A cheap Ikea desk is perfect for my needs. It's a wood counter-top board and 2 adjustable sawhorses. Cost me about $200. However where I spent the money is on a good 5k monitor. With these 2 (and a saddle chair), I have everything I need for a workspace that is far more functional than an expensive modular furniture desk (ie. cubicle) with a low-res monitor.
you don't need a $2-3000 desk just to hold a computer and some monitors. you can get a large desk with electronic height adjustment from ikea for about $400.
I'm a junior engineer and I already happen to have a nice chair, computer, and monitor at home. my desk is a piece of trash from walmart, but it gets the job done. altogether, it's about $3500 worth of stuff if bought new. I wouldn't be happy to pay for all that in one go for work, but it wouldn't be an extreme hardship either. I would gladly pay that in exchange for permanent WFH.
I've been a dev for 20 years and I have a second hand Ikea table that works great and a $60 chair from staples which I'm thinking of upgrading to Steelcase from ebay that is a few hundred. My old PC is much quicker than my crappy PC I used to have in the office.
I suppose I don't feel overpaid, given that I'm living in a 1BR apartment. And now with my office closed, I'm somehow supposed to find a dedicated space in my tiny-ass apartment where I can:
a) Setup the same configuration of laptop, multiple monitors, a desk phone, and an Ethernet jack into my router.
b) Sufficiently insulate the background noise on the hours of Zoom meetings I'm expected to join every day from my girlfriend working in the dining room, and the cacophony of screaming children in the apartment above me.
This solution reeks of tone-deaf executives who would think, "What? You mean all of our employees don't have freestanding houses with a spare bedroom or basement that they can easily convert to a home-office?"
It really changes the whole "I live with someone" situation. A 1BR with a partner may be reasonable when you each go to work for 8+ hours a day. A 1BR when you're both working from home, taking meetings and calls, etc, is a completely different story. It means a 2BR is really a requirement for most people who are in a relationship IMO, and that's a massive cost difference, many thousands a year.
> I suppose I don't feel overpaid, given that I'm living in a 1BR apartment.
I was about to post on this topic as well when I saw your post. There are people on our team who have been working in less than ideal circumstances at home for more than six months now, and who are really struggling as a result.
Even if people do have a good space to work, if partners are working at home together there's often only enough room for one of them to use that good space at a time. Again, not ideal.
My priority at the moment is securing some office space so that people have some respite from the endless grind of working at home under these circumstances.
I expect at most companies, people will have a choice to come back into the office they were in previously once it's safe to do so. That said, it won't necessarily be like it was before. For example, there may not be assigned seating and people you work with may choose to and be allowed to come in occasionally or rarely.
But I'm not sure what you want done in the current situation?
Certainly some people are in a worse situation than others in many different ways. However, I'm not sure what employers are supposed to do right now other than to be sensitive to the challenges many people are facing. It's not like a $1K stipend for equipment (or whatever) is going to solve small apartments, kids learning at home, partners on Zoom calls all day, etc.
In general, I think employers should provide some sort of outside-home working space once practical, at least for employees who didn't sign up to work remotely.
Is it, though? I've always brought my own tools - my Aeron, my preferred high-refresh monitors, a Linux dev machine where possible, my monitor arms, my IDE.
I have a good setup. I know it works.
It's not as feasible to get my own standing desk in each time so I let that go. But they always give me everything and I just set them aside and use my (superior) tooling.
I don't think that's paying the company. That's just me buying tools that are optimal for me. I don't really need each employer to do that for me. These things are mostly buy it for life (except for the desktop and IDE license).
I'd never even consider paying for an IDE I need for work. Why would a company not buy me software that has a direct and immediate impact on my productivity? Huge red flag.
All of these things are productivity improvements. And I'm sure any company would buy them if I cared, but $200? It's a rounding error. And it liberates me from any choices they'd make.
IntelliJ Ultimate is $500 for a commercial license I believe (and you need a commercial license to do work for a company over a certain size, even if you pay for it yourself). Sure it's not going to affect my finances either way but:
1. The 2 minutes it takes to file an expense report is a good trade for $200 (I don't make $6,000 an hour at my job)
2. It's the principle; they should pay for it, not me.
No, you don't have to do that¹. Where did you get that info? I don't want to argue your personal value calculation and I accept that you feel the way you do, so let's set that part aside.
I've been using my IntelliJ licence at multiple jobs on my own and AFAIK if I don't get it reimbursed I don't need a business licence.
In the past I’ve been a dev at a company that didn’t understand software development at all; and fighting these battles is exactly why I left. Different strokes for different folks, but it’s great to work somewhere that gives me the tools I need for the job without having to ask, and certainly without having to source and pay for them myself.
Those thing aren't gone, they've already been paid for and are being written off.
Of course, with new contracts being negotiated, not having to pay for all these expenses will give an employer more leeway in terms of salary. However, remote work also increases the candidate pool, so the net effect is going to be lower salaries.
We give people $5k for setup (includes PC, though), reimburse cell and internet (and ask them to upgrade) and basically spare no expense on webcam, lighting and ethernet setup.
Ethernet setup - do you hire techs and electricians to run cabling?
The biggest issue with me for WFH has been the quality of my internet connection and it was entirely on me to get Comcast to come fix my lines and run my own ethernet to my basement "office".
If you intend to work from home then of course hire an electrician (or low voltage contractor, don't even need an electrician) to run an Ethernet cable! If you won't invest $500 in your WFH setup you're missing the forest for the trees.
Why should my employer make permanent improvements to my own house? That would only make sense in a lifetime employment kind of situation. If I have Ethernet run in my house that's going to be usable for 10+ years. Not going to be at my current employer then.
It can work. I installed one in my dad's old house and it worked like a charm. But when I went to put one in my house a few months ago, I did get it to work, but I had to try various locations of ethernet jacks and power plugs to find a combination that both worked and usefully extended my WiFi.
Interestingly, the commissioned study opens with a productivity argument being much more than any of those perks:
> Loss of focus due to distractions translates to an estimated annual salary cost of US$34,448 per person in lost productivity, or US$391bn for US companies in
the sectors analysed, equivalent to 28% of baseline salary payments
that argument is idiotic. from my personal experience, at least, I had FAR MORE interruptions when I was working in the office than I have when working from home.
>But it will likely just be on the employee to pay for all these things, and the companies will reap the benefits.
Not for long, surely. Workers' productivity has presumably not changed much and the companies remain in fierce competition for employees so why would a drop in de facto compensation be the new equilibrium?
Employee salaries are a huge expense because housing near San Francisco or New York City or wherever is expensive, so you have to pay those salaries to get people to sign up. If you can hire someone in Arkansas (who frankly would rather keep living there then move to SF) you can pay half the salary or less.
Technically any time you use work equipment for personal use you’re either supposed to pay rent or they have to put it on your w2. Including every time you take your work laptop home and check your personal email on it.
But the IRS right now doesn’t enforce those small amounts. They only care when you use the corporate jet for personal travel.
But when you leave, if they let you keep the stuff, they either have to include the depreciated value as income on your last check or you have to pay them for it.
When I left my first job they let me keep my computer and phone and I paid them $60 for it, which was the legal depreciated value.
Context: I was in the interview pipeline before/when this announced, so I've gotten some additional clarification on the logistics.
I think this is strictly worse than providing employees with the option of where to work (office/remote/some WFH). Something missing in this announcement is that you still need to live in one of the main cities with offices (SF, Seattle, Austin, Dublin) in order to receive full pay. Moving anywhere gets your pay adjusted to the "local market".
So to avoid a pay-cut you need to stay in an overpriced city, but you don't have a nice office with meals/snacks/nice desk setup that you can go to.
Ironically WFH, whilst being forced to a local actually makes it more expensive. You could live in a tiny studio when your office was available. So now you must rent a sufficient space to include your home office -- In a locale where the price per sq ft is higher.
someone invent a murphy bed that converts to a desk that converts to a toilet so our workforce can live in a space smaller than solitary confinement.
You could be local but within "commuting distance" of the office, which could include Sacramento, Tracy, etc. for an SF office. I think you could get a 2BR in Sac for the price of a studio in SF.
We might also see some exodus from the Bay Area, which would put a downward pressure on tech salaries till they hit some equilibrium.
I also wonder what enforcement mechanisms exist short of an IRS audit to make sure you're actually "local" and not in a cheap cabin in North Dakota. Employers could monitor corp traffic, but I wonder if it's actually worth the cost to enforce and they'll just go by honor code.
I too wonder about the equilibrium. I have heard that SF rents are down 20%, Which is probably understating the issue because many landlords opt for vacancy over lower prices (due to how loans work and the difficulty of raising once started).
> but you don't have a nice office with meals/snacks
I was watching an interview recently, might have been buried in the middle of The Social Dilemma, where the speaker mentioned that this class of concierge service risks infantilizing people, and in particular in a time when code that young programmers author effects more and more of the population, that's dangerous.
The implication was that we need people to grow up. If they're going to be responsible (in the specific case), then they should be/get prepared to take responsibility (in the general case).
How is serving nice meals for lunch "infantilizing" people? I'm simply stating that this is a concrete benefit of employment at these companies. If they choose to move away from providing it, then they should adjust salaries to reflect that, otherwise candidates will join firms that do.
You can be within 100 miles of a main hub city and be paid within the same band. 100 miles from Seattle is quite a lot of options for instance that are not expensive.
And "full pay" is relative to the cost of employment for each area. For instance the adjusted amount you would receive in say Kansas still is quite a lot for the area.
Companies who go permanent WFH must be saving a fortune on leasing space costs. If these savings don’t make it to the employees who’re using their private space for office work for free, then it’s really bad.
In the steady state your point is right, but transiently a lot of companies are holding the bag right now. Dropbox specifically just built a 770000-square-foot headquarters in San Francisco which, let's face it, they didn't need in the first place (they were already trying to sublease 100k sq ft before COVID). Now they're marketing 1/3rd of that space into a massive glut of unwanted SF office space.
The real issue is that one made a bet on a future that didnt come true. The opposite could easily have happened too. Oil prices could have hit $1k a barrel and people in the suburbs would be crying about the $500 fill up.
Great for you. But not everyone has the same circumstances. I was a short walk from my office, a beautiful route I run everyday anyway. But I live in an old flat that expensive to heat. Wfh saves me nothing at all and is going to be extortionate over Christmas (additional ~5-10% of my income in bills).
Not only will they save money on office space but many of these companies are requiring employees to take pay cuts if they move to a lower cost area. Like all the sudden your value to the company changes because you moved?
It's not like the commercial leases all ended overnight. By the time many of those leases are done, the world will be on track towards normalcy instead of away from it, and people will be dying to get out of the house and interact with other people regularly again. Permanent WFH will eventually become an artifact of covid time like mask usage.
Meh... working from home for 3 days a weak is great... all the time, really sucks (for me atleast).
Yu miss all the fun with coworkers, all the fun side projects, productive or not...
..on the other hand, working from home, especially when they promote "whenever you feel like it", means you're "on call" all the time. Having "core hours" (eg 10-15h, weekdays) and having everybody available then (for calls, meetings, skypes,...) is ok, but I imagine this will mean ealy morning and late night calls and tasks, and workers will never be able to fully separate work and free time.
Anecdotally, but having done 100% WFH for over a year now, I think the first point depends a lot on company culture. We're given explicit permission to use work hours to play games/hang out together, specifically because of the lack of traditional social structures. In the same vein, we're given regular time to work on work-related projects of our choosing.
It definitely doesn't work for some people, but a lot of problems I've seen people bring up can be rectified by the employer. Some of them can't be, but those that can shouldn't be expressed as fact.
I'm very curious how we're going to look back on this moment in 3 or 5 years time. Is "let's try WFH" the corporate equivalent of "let's try an open marriage" for couples on the rocks, i.e. a "beginning of the end?"
Just wildly speculating here, the result could be the opposite. But it strikes me as possible that this could been seen in retrospect as a damaging trend, sort of like open offices.
I think the whole tech industry is working from home right now, so no one is missing out by some folks in an office and others at home. Once the extroverted folks start migrating back to the office and people start having FOMO, I think then we can have the debate about what happens next. Right now it's all just speculation.
Also, once the kids go back to school and single people move back to the city or new suburb, where things open back up, this will also play into the debate.
Why work from home when you can venture to the office (or corporate co-working space), find a little nook and work with fast internet, free snacks and a change of scenery.
This was interesting: "Next, we’re embracing what we call “non-linear workdays.” We’re setting core collaboration hours with overlap between time zones, and encouraging employees to design their own schedules beyond that."
I've been WFH for about 8 years and have found this just happens naturally. At least for us it did. My team is in 3 different timezones and do work for people in 9 timezones. There is no "9-5", it's just not practical.
Dropbox, like all other tech companies where I worked, was already completely informal about office hours. Some people would arrive at noon, others would be leaving.
I'm working with people across the globe, no doubt a circumstance of a thousand small decisions. Scheduling some meetings is 100% impossible, and often times it involves taking meetings early (7-8AM) or late (7-9PM) in order to make things work.
Even if you carve out time during the day to compensate for those, it's not what I would describe as "practical."
I see up to about 6 hour time difference works pretty well for regular meetings. More than that and people are taking calls outside regular hours which isn't great on an ongoing basis. (Though execs, etc. do it all the time.)
It's one thing to have the option to WFH and quite another to be required to. I think the second is a net loss, because lots of people can be more productive and balanced in a professional office environment.
Kind of. It depends how much people are expected to return to the office for team syncs. If you have to go into the office once a quarter, you can relocate to a more affordable area if you want to.
With WFH being permanent I’m about to move out of my 2bd apartment into a 5bd house all while saving large amounts of money. This is a win for all parties; work pays less for an office and I pay less for better housing.
I would not under estimate the value of a shared "life culture", and not just "work culture" as expectations don't always line up with reality when having an office in a truly different culture. Sometimes it is amazing, other times it is a difficult situation from my experience.
In the early days of Dropbox, engineers went to really loud bars late in the night, and them settled their designs in the bar with god-knows how much drink. This culture made it really hard for engineers with a family, or for those like me who simply hate, I mean really hate, noisy place or excessive drinking.
Well, I guess this WFH policy would help leveling the playground. Bar culture sucks.
Wouldn't the WFH culture also encourage (post-COVID) a lot of informal meetings, people getting together in coffee shops, bars etc to discuss things in person?
Only if collaborators stay close to each other and prefer hanging out. When everyone is in office, calling a hangout in a bar is easier, compared to when everyone by default stays at home.
It's for the same reason why people are negative about companies that require working from the office without any WFH. There are people who are established with their jobs and their teams who don't need to can just sit down at home and go. There are others who prefer the interaction and find themselves more efficient in a non-personal setting like an office.
The negativity is that many of these companies may start trending to a required work from home model as opposed to an optional/hybrid approach.
There is also a smaller worry that these companies will offload a lot of the cost to their employees (i.e. not paying for internet, space, food, etc) without compensating them for these perks that were otherwise promised/expected.
I expect optional/hybrid will be more the norm. Of course this doesn't apply so much to companies that don't have urban offices, but the biggest cost issue for employees is that for those who want to live in an expensive city, extra space for an office is a big premium. They have Internet. Most companies don't have free food. etc.
Do you mean the increased productivity will be the competitive advantage, or they'll have a recruitment advantage to be able to attract candidates with a comfortable work space so they're not stuck at home? As a hypothetical candidate in my next job search whenever that is, I'll definitely be wanting the latter.
Personally I suspect early-stage companies, and companies working on "hard" technical problems that require more collaboration and abstract thinking will have an advantage by working in person. But who knows! Maybe a silver lining of the pandemic is that we'll finally get some usable data on the effects of remote work and remote culture.
I would love to see a chart showing number of applications they receive before this announcement and after. I'm guessing they gonna be swamped with resumes today.
It was clear that it's going to be a domino effect. Each time another tech company moves to permanent WFH it puts more pressure on other companies to do the same. They wouldn't be able to compete for talent otherwise. FANNG can still compete without moving to permanent WFH because of their reputation, salary and benefits, and the fact they have offices everywhere. But most companies cannot.
I think the effect will reverse after a while. Sure a lot of folk want remote jobs but there'll also be plenty of folk at Dropbox and following companies who want an office and will start looking elsewhere following covid.
I don't think so. Dropbox are not closing the office (they will likely downsize) so folks who want can still go in if they live nearby. I'm sure most companies would keep some office space available. Also, I'm sure most fully remote companies would pay their employees for home office expenses, which includes co-working space if an employee prefers that. (most people don't have an extra room available for office). By co-working space I mean a dedicated space where you can leave your laptop, monitor, etc. It's not like going to an actual office where your co-workers are, but the big advantage is the commute. Co-working spaces are everywhere so you can pick one close to you.
> It's not like going to an actual office where your co-workers are
Exactly. That's what I miss and there'll be folk at Dropbox who miss it too. For folk who live in cities and/or don't mind commutes they might give serious consideration to moving to a company with a traditional office.
I know personally that if post covid my organisation scraped the office or if enough folk WFH permanently that it was dead, I'd start looking for a new job
This idea of the future of work being permanently changed is really prevalent right now. It’s not going to be. Future of work, that is.
We’re in the middle of the storm right now. We’ve all been bailing water for 7 months or so, and lots of people think that we’ll be bailing water forever now, even after the storm clears.
I’d wager that within a couple years at most of COVID being squashed, most if not all the companies declaring themselves remote-first and remote-permanent will reverse those policies. Despite the added costs, there are just too many advantages to offices.
Companies which have offices will out-compete the rate of innovation for remote only.
Marissa Mayer, coming from Google, the first thing she did when she took the helm at Yahoo was reverse the WFH policy because execs realized it was a huge productivity loss.
Or the cat is out of the bag and people won't be able brush off remote anymore now that it has been demonstrated to work? Companies might be able to push the peons back to the salt mines but it is far from settled at this point.
I started a 6 month contract at A Large Enterprise about 7 weeks ago and it's been intensely wierd. My team is split over two sites (same timezone, different countries) and every single member of the team - including someone who started after me at the other site - is working at home. Except me.
I have not met any of my team face-to-face, but they have also not embraced what I would consider modern temote-working tools. We don't have Slack (see above, 'Large Enterprise') but we do have Teams - except nobody uses it. We have a team email alias - except nobody responds to it. The only communication appears to be Skype for Business (i.e. Lync) calls - notwithstanding that some cow-orkers are in noisy environments, one regularly has unreliable enough Internet that he can't connect, and one has mic problems which means we hear about half of what she says. It also took a week and a half after I started for me to get my corporate approval to use Skype for anything but text, which meant we had to abandon my arranged first-week 'meet the team' session because I couldn't hear or speak.
I'm working in (approximately) devops, and things are, let's say, not well automated here, so they're justifiably terrified that if one or two people get infected, and others get quarantined, it could have a significant material effect on the company - so not only are people working from home, they are banned from entering the office. Except me, for some reason I haven't managed to ascertain...
One thing I've been wondering about is RSI liability with WFH. Some companies spend a significant amount on workplace ergonomics to prevent/manage RSI. WFH, though, is a much less controlled environment. E.g., a particular worker may not have the physical space for the recommended special equipment.
While that may be true of some companies, it has not bee my experience. In most of my jobs if I had an ergonomic setup it was because I took responsibility for it myself and asked for all the things I needed to make it happen.
Since you are otherwise liable for the safety of your own home (if you own it), then this should be no different. You're responsible for your own bed/couch/etc's ergonomics, and also for your own home office. Like, it's your house.
The OSH Act applies to work performed by an employee in any workplace within the United States, including a workplace located in the employee's home. [0]
I skimmed across the comments and was surprised that no one talked about housing prices. A house is THE biggest expenditure for most tech people, because the tech jobs are concentrated in a few places with high housing prices.
Notwithstanding all the downsides of WFH, I will happily permanently WFH since I can move to cheaper place and enjoy a large house to myself, even if I need to accept a lower wage (but not so low that the cheaper house price is no longer worth the move). As for all the socialization, I'd rather find it outside work.
As for the mental health some people talk about, being able to afford a large house will do tremendously better for my mental health than being able to interact with people face with face, especially when those people are only bonded to me by money.
I think companies will increasingly adopt this model as the "big guys" (ie MSFT, AAPL, GOOGL etc..) start to give clarity to their employees that WFH will be the norm.
To counter-balance the solitude, offices will be team building destinations.
WeWork may transform itself into a "business travel company" powered by technology of course. Companies will host off sites once or twice a month in different parts of the country - or the world - and WeWork is positioned to own the entire vertical of managing transportation, housing, event spaces, food...
Permanent WFH sounds great. In some places, like the Scandinavian countries, employers are responsible for the workplace. Ergonomics and such. It is right now unclear how this would work when people will work from home.
One of my clients is worried about this, that employees will get hurt from having bad office chairs, and-what-not, and having to pay up for it. The solution during the pandemic has been to allow employees to come in and grab chairs, monitors, etc., from the office.
It's an interesting development of what a workspace is.
Improved Collaboration is often cited as an advantage of the office. I've been working from home throughout covid and I haven't found this to be the case.
If anything, I have more energy due to less distractions and this gives me more energy for collaboration.
The extra energy also makes the collaboration that does happen better because I can concentrate easier.
Apart from that, my productivity working on code as an engineer has gone up probably 2x what it was in the office.
Trello’s UX is awful. I wonder if there’s a correlation between remote and poor UX? I can think of other examples of famous remote companies with bad UX.
I work for a remote first company for years, and they are now doing the same thing, and I hate not having an office so I can sit and code alone with proper infrastructure in a quiet manner. The company is basically offloading the office costs to employees. I'd appreciate if they give me a 20k stipend to invest on an Air conditioner unit for my house. The heat this year is being brutal in the Bay Area.
Silicon Valley got started because a bunch of people with too much free time were in the same town with people they could poach.
I've been imagining a scenario where a bunch of WFH people collectively pick a random town near a decent CS college, move there, and once they have settled in, begin cooking up their own startups.
Curious, what makes this move (and all the rest of the WFH companies) permanent? Won't in the future when things go back to normal the cities will pressure the companies to have their employees go back into offices to make the economy moving? You know, coffee shops, restaurants, etc need to survive.
The longer this goes, the more normalized it becomes. There’s also the fact that some percentage of workers have made it very clear that they do not want to return to an office, and companies fear mass attrition to permanent WFH companies if they don’t setup a release valve.
A VP recently told me that he expected 15-20% attrition if he demanded a return to the office once this is over.
On the coffee shop front, the most likely outcome is that remote workers will move to smaller cities away from NYC and coastal CA. Coffee shops and restaurants will still get patrons, but there will be more of them in Denver and Austin than SF and LA.
> You know, coffee shops, restaurants, etc need to survive.
in general, yeah, but do the shops and restaurants that exist to serve downtown / office park workers need to survive? I'm not convinced that WFH changes the net demand for these services. if these businesses move away from places people commute to and move into places where people actually live, I would consider that an improvement. I'd much rather spend my food budget on happy hour at a local pub than a rushed 30 minute lunch.
> if these businesses move away from places people commute to and move into places where people actually live,
Here in the UK,I'm hoping this will happen. We've been suffering the 'death' of the local high street for years, and many local communities are non-existent because there are no longer local social hubs. For every coffee shop or pub closed in the centre of the cities, another could open in a rural area. We'd all be better off for this, I know it.
More people working from home maybe have a small impact for local restaurant/pubs etc. but i doubt it will be significant enough to revive somewhere with a "non-existent" local community.
The reason food/drink service does so well around offices is that there are 1000s of people in multi-floor offices in one area. All within 5-20mins walk of good places to go.
An average town may have more people, but they are spread over miles in houses or flats. Unless you live right in the town centre the convenience of going out to eat/drink is just not the same.
Popping out after work with friends (or just colleagues) is convenient for everyone as well. At home you have to round up your mates and all agree on a time.
People will still go to coffee shops and restaurants. It's just that the location of those places will move from office hubs to residential neighborhoods. That's a good thing.
I'm sure co-working spaces will still have high demand so many office spaces would turn into that.
I don't think so. I don't live in SF but I'm sure it's a nice place to live. There's still a lot going on there, like universities, food, diversity, etc. Rent and house prices in the city are likely to go down, which is a good thing given how insanely expensive it is right now. Long term it might be even good for the city.
The tax deficit for this year is going to really hurt the city. SF makes most of its income in tourism and tech. There isn’t much travel right now and there is a tech exodus. So the deficit is growing everyday.
Bars and restaurants have been either on strict lockdown or reduced capacity since early March, a lot of them that have been around for decades are closing.
So now we have an exodus of small businesses, tech workers, and reduced tourism.
The city will have to convince tech workers and small business owners to come back while they probably increase taxes to work off the deficit. The lack of small businesses and increase in squalor will impact tourism even after COVID and the longer COVID goes on the more damage there is.
I don’t see the SF govt cutting expenses until it’s absolutely necessary. Overall it seems like an uphill battle. I feel really bad for the small business owners in SF who are likely never going to recover from this.
That's not a SF only problem. All major cities (NYC, Amsterdam, Paris, etc etc) suffer from reduced tourism and tax money. There's no question that a city like SF would suffer more than many other cities given high percentage of its tourism is business travel. But the city still has a lot going for it besides tech. And at least FAANG for the most part will still attract many people to the area as the majority of them are not going fully remote yet. The city can also try to attract more diverse industries such as pharma companies that still require office space. They can also increase property taxes for a few years if they need to. Yes, SF as the center of tech as we know it is probably dead, but it doesn't mean the city is dead.
If you want to be productive from home you need place where no one interrupts you. For a lot of people it means renting place where they can work. This basically shift costs for workplace from company to employee. I do not think that removing offices for solo work is good idea.
None of these are truly permanent, unless the company started that way (gitlab, for example). Just as they shifted from office to compelled WFH, they will shift back, with some lag time, when this is over.
I would be very skeptical about anything becoming 'permanent' at this point. Let's get over the pandemic first and see what the brave new world looks like.
This is an interesting development. I wonder if their offices will move further and further away from their HQ. And further away to South America or Canada
Funny thing about Slack is they had a super strict no remote policy before covid. If they had really believed their tools they would have allowed WFH even before covid. Now they don't really have a choice to not WFH.
This is the least of all expenses. Tech workers in SF can charge more because they expenses are universally higher. Remote workers in cheaper places can (and will) charge less.
I started using Hubstaff for time tracking for myself and a co-worker, and I was kind of disgusted that one of the headlining features they advertise is "the client will take a screenshot of everyone's screen at any interval of your choosing". Yuck.
Just as permanent this decision may seem, they could also reverse it permanently when covid is a thing of the past and people and productivity yearn for the office.
These companies think they're some kind of trend setters or they're embracing some kind of new way to work, Nokia was doing this back in the early 2000's in the Americas. No one had a desk unless you needed one. Otherwise you came in sat down where ever you liked, plugged in and went to work. You decided your hours, you decided when you came in or worked from home. They also subsidized your home Internet connection by about 50-60%. They had complete respect and trust in the individual.
Took a Pandemic to change these companies minds about WFH or flex schedules, etc.
Yahoo also went for WFH in a big way, until a CEO change and they did an about-face. It will be interesting to see how many of these companies "do a Yahoo" in a year or two.
Remote-only cuts out the in-person experience entirely, which is problematic for building teams and culture; and ad hoc "WFH whenever you feel like it" gets a sort of worst-of-both-worlds situation where you neither get the same kind of flexibility nor the sense of community you typically get from an office (since a large percentage of the team isn't there on any given day, and folks that come in the office less tend to be at a disadvantage in terms of visibility & recognition).