And also anecdotally, every professional office worker under ~30 I know has been absolutely miserable during this remote work experience, and is yearning to get back to the office - most for a full 5 days a week.
Anecdotally - I'm 30(just), I'm leading a team of people under 30, and everyone is saying that they cannot imagine ever working in the office again. Our company announced they will expect people to come in for at least 2 days a week from September and we're extremely unhhappy about it. If I get an offer for full remote from someone I can't say I won't be tempted.
I'm quite definitely under 30, and I just quit in order to stay remote. I'm so much more relaxed, and I can spend actual quality time with my wife and friends. I'm not sure why anyone would want to go back.
I'll wager a guess that a lot of those other "under 30" cases were people living with 3 other jerk roommates who used to just come home to sleep but now had to put up with each other for a whole year.
Yeah I suspect the real connection are people who look to depend on the office culture to provide a key part of their social interaction. In some cases that will track with age, but not always.
Even some of the people who thought they wanted remote work are realizing it’s not always as fun as it sounds.
We read a lot of headlines about how the future is remote work and the HN bubble is full of people claiming they’re never going back from remote work, but I’m not seeing a huge shift toward remote work in actual job listings.
I worked remote pre-COVID. It anything, it feels harder to even land interviews for the few remote job opportunities because so many people are competing for a similar small number of remote jobs now.
1. Depends if the large companies who have committed to indefinite remote work will stay true to that policy. Then you'll still have a great deal of remote positions.
2. Those peers and their companies usually have had remote work forced upon them. See what it's like in a less traumatic time when people can work out of cafes and public spaces, maskless.
My own anecdote tracks. Never thought about the age correlation but most of my team are early 30s and younger. That group has been very negative about the remote experience. I'm much older and while I didn't like it at first, I'm in the camp of people who don't ever want to go back to an office. The people who are in between age-wise are a bit of a mix.
Possible reason from my own anecdata: I joined a new company in a new industry in the middle of the pandemic. I definitely prefer working remotely (I'm just past 30), but as a new hire I felt some disadvantages.
Mainly: my co-workers who have been at the company longer than I weren't very helpful with onboarding me! We're a little company, so documentation of a bunch of our software is non-existent and the specialized hardware setup we have has a lot of quirks I had to slowly teach myself the last year. I'd hit lots of problems that'd take 5 seconds of their time to diagnose and fix and I'd end up stuck for over an hour while waiting for them to answer a Slack message - or they'd randomly drop offline.
So there I am, working in my bedroom in a new job wondering if I'm a needy little snowflake not digging hard enough or whether the people I work with are just unhelpful because... reasons (still haven't met them in-person since my pre-pandemic interview). After a year I think it really is the latter, but it made me grumpy my early months here.
That could be a possible source of resentment from newer, younger employees. Set us up for success!
I still prefer working from home, but I did commute to the office for a happy hour recently. It was nice to randomly get coffee with the CTO in the morning and hang out with new friends in the evening - none of the "unhelpful" people showed up! :P
That is a tribal knowledge problem and is a sign of a core problem a the company. As it persists as the company grows it will be a detriment to anyone coming on board. Couple that with an unwillingness to help others and that is not a company to stay at long term, it is a warning sign.
I think it may be stressful to feel that unless you're in the office being noticed, you have to create a lot of little things to do which are visible on-line. Especially if you are new and don't have a long well-known history of being reliable and self-motivated.
I wonder if there are regional issues at play too.
My office is in Manhattan. It's been my observation that few people that work in Manhattan actually live in Manhattan. Nearly everyone I know of dreads having to go back to the office, and one of the primary reasons is because of the nightmare commute into the island of Manhattan via the various clogged up chokepoints.
> every professional office worker under ~30 I know has been absolutely miserable during this remote work experience
I mean, we've been through major lockdowns/curfews/personal freedom restrictions, lots of people got sick, lots of people died, most non digital entertainment ceased to exist, most sports couldn't be practiced...
imho you can't pin point "remote work" as the main cause of why people felt miserable in the last few months
Yeah. I've been 100% remote for several years - and while I personally love it overall I know it's not for everyone - but I really can't emphasize enough that pandemic remote work is not normal remote work.
As someone in their 20s without social media, I have exactly 0 friends. I live in a central European country and everyone around me has a friend group that originated during their childhood; they have childhood friends. I do not, mainly because throughout my time in school I switched schools a whole lot for various reasons. Over the years I've also grown quite insecure about it and anxious.
Now I also happen to not like alcohol or smoking which really reduces my chances of meeting someone my age to 0, because I don't go out to parties and such. Not that it was even possible during COVID-19.
I'm happy that I at least have supportive parents, siblings and family. But I think there are a lot of young people in my situation and many of them only have parasocial relationships, for example with Twitch streamers and YouTubers.
Homeoffice has been hard with all the distractions home has to offer and I really do miss eating lunch with coworkers. I'm going to start studying at university this fall so I'm optimistic that I might make some friends there.
Maybe try reaching out to some coworkers and see if they'll meet you for lunch somewhere in between. I have one I meet every week, and one I meet once a month or so, and another who I meet up with but not for lunch, just a 10 minute chat or so.
I don't smoke or drink. You can still go play billiards, work out at a gym, find a pull up bar in public, join a bicycle group ride, skateboard, join a yoga class, hang out at a maker space, go to a car meetup, go off road driving, go camping or hiking in a national park, go to concerts, start muay thai or bjj, etc. I meet a ton of people without alcohol.
You're right.. I suppose I am also a very shy person. But for starters, I joined a soccer club. And hopefully soon I'll get over my anxiety of going to the gym, I've been wanting to go for some time.
I am in the same camp, though, drinking doesn't exactly expand the options that much, just so you know. The real problem is our generation doesn't really seem to have many places to actually meet and make friends with others our own age. It is either some club (not exactly conducive to long term friendship building) or online in some way. If you don't make lasting friendships during college, many of us 20-somethings are kind of screwed unless we bust our asses trying to join communities outside of work. I've been thinking about volunteer work for instance.
It’s hard to make friends as an adult. Especially:
1) If you don’t have kids (socializing with other parents).
2) Don’t go to church/synagogue/etc (church attendance in decline)
3) Do not live where you grew up. (People chase opportunities in other cities.)
4) Aren’t in school any more.
Neighbor friends are also possible, but it can take many years for people to become comfortable enough to be friends, and due to #3, there’s often not enough time for that to happen before people move.
Half my friends are from work and half are parents. They’re not super shallow friendships but also not soul-level deep, either. Deep friendships were left behind from college days.
I've been seeing this sentiment shared recently and what I always suggest is to
1) Look at your hobbies
2) Find people who share those hobbies
Plenty of opportunities exist whether through meetup, BumbleBFF, local postings in cafes/on lamp posts, etc. (this is true of cities, remote destinations may be more difficult but thats the tradeoff of living around less people I suppose)
If you can't find groups for your hobbies, try starting them! Doesn't have to be a permanent leadership role, but if you get the ball rolling others will likely come and BOOM you've found potential friends.
If you don't have hobbies, look into volunteer groups. Rewarding and often extremely kind people who will value what you bring to the table.
With covid remote, I finally started exercising more regularly and attending meetings for local hiking groups and a maker group that I had been putting off for ages. And I think my productivity at work increased because of it.
Changed jobs to negotiate a permanent remote situation and am not going back.
I think it’s fine for some people to want to be on office, but think that a lot of work in the tech area should have the option of remote - and frankly would be better remote first with in-office allowances instead of vice versa.
I find this perspective interesting. I'm 36, have no kids, don't go to church, don't live anywhere near where I grew up or my biological family, and haven't been in school for a very long time but have no shortage of friends or even deep friendships. I think culture is a huge reason. I live in close-in Portland, Oregon and I think the main thing we all have in common is that we all enjoy going to see live music and DJs together. Urban living and music can have a huge ability to replace everything on that list. In fact, my partner and I will be throwing a vaccinated-only music festival this summer and we have about 100 people invited, the vast majority personal friends and only a handful have kids. However, I think working in tech helps. Most of my old friends who never made the jump from the service industry into tech by going to code school or something like that had to move away because the city got too expensive. In short, music + tech + urban makes finding and keeping friends easy, at least in Portland.
Contemporary architecture doesn't help. In 70's developments houses have front porches, but sometime in the 90's they turned houses around, and now everyone sits on their back deck or their games room in their cardboard palace. You don't encounter people any more when you are walking the dog.
As psychologists worry that the coronavirus pandemic is triggering a loneliness epidemic, new Harvard research suggests feelings of social isolation are on the rise and that those hardest hit are older teens and young adults.
In the recently released results of a study conducted last October by researchers at Making Caring Common, 36 percent of respondents to a national survey of approximately 950 Americans reported feeling lonely “frequently” or “almost all the time or all the time” in the prior four weeks, compared with 25 percent who recalled experiencing serious issues in the two months prior to the pandemic. Perhaps most striking is that 61 percent of those aged 18 to 25 reported high levels.
Some of us have been stuck in single rooms with no family or social contact for over a year.
Exercise groups - Illegal
meeting up with other people - Illegal
dating - Illegal
going outside without a valid reason - Illegal
Former friends with established families and large properties with gardens berate you for complaining, as its selfish, "people are dying!", but they travel for holidays,
take their kids to stay with their parents so they can have a weekend getting drunk in their garden, etc that sort of thing.
Not friends anymore.
Also most people who I considered friends before, it turns out are just acquaintances. People I've known for 10-15 years who it turns out don't care about my wellbeing, just see me as a guy they did activity X with, went to events with, etc. A whole lot of that.
Also lots of people do not like the fact that I questioned the rationale for the lockdown measures, questioned the data ( as in wanted to know what the actual data was), etc. They did not like it AT ALL.
Now restrictions might be lifting in the future, I am faced with the situation of being without a social circle. A social life of nothing. The only people I speak to are my colleagues, and that's how it's been for quite some time. Again I emphasize that it has been illegal to even try to change that, and socially taboo enough to question this and say that this is making me miserable as fuck that any existing friends have abandoned me, lots of blocked contacts on whatsapp (there's this impression amongst many that questioning the lockdowns, asking for data, saying this is not good you personally makes me a republican conspiracy theorist nutcase, etc).
How do I rebuild a new life when my ability to trust other people is lower than I ever thought it could be?
I have no family to lean on for support.
As far as I am concerned I might as well be a secret Jew in 1944 Berlin for the level of trust I have for other people now.
>Also lots of people do not like the fact that I questioned the rationale for the lockdown measures, questioned the data ( as in wanted to know what the actual data was), etc. They did not like it AT ALL.
>As far as I am concerned I might as well be a secret Jew in 1944 Berlin for the level of trust I have for other people now.
Holy persecution complex, batman!
Millions were dying and being asked to wear a mask, social distance and wash your hands was too much of a sacrifice for you? You may want to take a hard look at yourself.
I don't think its right to downplay another persons suffering. We are social creatures and many people were put into situations that both actually isolated them while revealing the shallowness of their suposed support networks all at once. That's more or less what this person is explaining / venting about and it. I don't know if you've ever been isolated and / or lonely, but once you are you realize it is not a state we are built to withstand.
social distance means different things to different people based on where they are and their situation. For OP social distance seems to have meant spending all of their time completely alone in their home as leaving it was actually illegal. In addition they found out that none of the people they considered friends really cared enough to even reach out and see how they were doing. That can be quite a slap in the proverbial face and it is jarring to discover you are alone in the world.
I am in my early 40's with 0 friends.
Had them earlier in life and once I had kids I just could not figure out how to balance kids, work and friends. Now I have no idea how to make new ones.
appreciate the tip, assuming you mean at a coffee shop or something similar?
Still have the kids though :) so cant really go grab coffee that early. I am sure most of the problem is me not figuring it out but I am pretty much at a loss, I work remotely, have younger kids that I have to take to school and pickup, feed etc. Finish work at like 6 then kids until 9. So weekdays are out. Then weekends seems like there is always something to do or I am just exhausted and feel bad abandoning my wife and kids to go do something.
I know I am the cause of my own issues, just not sure of the solution.
I also feel bad abandoning my wife and vice versa but I realized recently its still important to find space for that. After some mutual encouragement we've begun taking turns here and there watching the kids, purely for the other person to make plans and go out. Of course, it doesn't help making friends necessarily, but having that habbit does provide the space for it when the opportunities arise.
This is because a lot of them have social lives that revolve around the workplace, usually because they're still at their first or second place of employment and they don't have kids. When work leads to evening dinners and bar runs, it's a vital part of the social experience. When you work with a bunch of seasoned developers in their 30s and 40s, you find that they have taken ownership of their social lives and their priorities after hours often do not include you.
Any comment like this is immediately hit with a flood of "well I love working from home". I'm under 30 and absolutely miserable working from home. The lack of any social interaction with my coworkers combined with a personal lack of a social network outside of work has left me lonely and isolated. On a positive note the lockdown has pushed me to begin exercising, start eating healthier, stop drinking, and start learning a second language in prep for a long sabbatical abroad.
You kidding? I loved this pandemic so much, i want to marry it and have children with it!
No pointless work "morale events"; no wasting hours a day on commute; ability to do something useful while a build is building, like putting in a load of laundry instead of just reading HN while waiting; and spending a lot more time with my GF as she is also WFHing.
I suspect you are speaking only about people who are unable/unwilling to put effort into the "life" part of "work-life balance" and thus depend on the "work" part to give them what "life" gives to all others: companionship/friendship/fun/purpose
