How do you think about the world your kids will grow up in? I just find it very strange, that I would sit at home on Zoom my whole life to better facilitate having kids who will themselves sit at home on Zoom their whole lives. Is this really the human experience we are passing on?
> I just find it very strange, that I would sit at home on Zoom my whole life to better facilitate having kids who will themselves sit at home on Zoom their whole lives.
Is this not conflating one's work life with one's life outside of work?
I don't doubt that being at work with people is good for socializing with them since people seem to be better suited to that format of in-person interaction (even though that's not necessarily "doing work"), though there's also nothing preventing you from seeking out events outside of work, be it with your coworkers or other people.
I think that claiming that you'll spend your "whole life" on Zoom calls is a bit far fetched, unless all of your life is work and the kind that is done primarily throughout meetings. While the argument that you make is noteworthy, i think i should point that out.
Personally, i rather enjoy being able to step away from the computer and into fresh air, to go and play with my dogs or so on, as well as to not have to spend hours during commute for no good reason or live in a city with polluted air (there was black soot on the edges of my windows when i did live there).
The logic of "remote first" is that there's no need to be located near the people we spend our lives interacting with, since we can just mediate all interactions via the internet. Why would that stop with work? Personally I have already taken that leap in a large part of my personal life; my desire to "shoot the shit" is not fulfilled by the topics on offer at the local bar, so I come to HN and Reddit. Also my friends from past in-person school and work are scattered to the winds; I mainly interact with them via the internet too.
Schools are taking the leap. If commuting is obsolete then catchment areas are stone age. Education is poised to finally free itself from the Achilles heel that has plagued its entire existence: the fact that other children in the room are more interesting than the lesson. It's poised to be a renaissance -- in student performance broadly, but especially in equity, whether other students being disruptive or creating an anti-learning social climate are the actual nuts-and-bolts makings of a "bad school." There's no reason any Zoom school should be bad, no matter its student body, since students should have no influence on each other's experiences. Room and board costs for college will be a thing of the past; even the parking dramas that plague commuter students seem silly now.
Now of course human beings can't be "on" 100% of the time; there are also downtime activities like going for walks, playing with pets, and consuming media. Maintenance activities like cooking, cleaning, and exercise. It's true that remote workers, remote students, and remote socializers also partake in these activities. But I don't think that's life. I think the things you do with the majority of your focus and energy, with the majority of your daylight hours, are life. And while it works, I think it's really sad if if all those things are "sit in your home and look at at a screen."
Now perhaps you want to keep "remote" in a box that's just work, and do the other things in person. But tell me this. If you're going to live where there are good schools and plenty of like-minded friends, why not also work together in person there? And if you're going to live any old place, without any good schools or a reliable supply of like-minded friends, then how are education or socialization going to happen in person?
> Personally I have already taken that leap in a large part of my personal life; my desire to "shoot the shit" is not fulfilled by the topics on offer at the local bar, so I come to HN and Reddit.
This is a personal choice and one i can get behind: seek out whichever people satisfy your need for social interaction in whatever medium you're comfortable with. However, my argument is also that work isn't the same as your private life or at the very least those shouldn't be inherently coupled with one another.
> There's no reason any Zoom school should be bad, no matter its student body, since students should have no influence on each other's experiences.
This is debatable.
While the argument sounds nice in principle, at least in my country it appears that students are having difficulties with passing tests as well as they did previously, though it remains to be seen whether that's due to their environments not being adequate for learning, them not having external motivating factors to learn (e.g. a paid pedagogue of some sort who encourages them to pay attention and discourages the opposite), a lack of skills necessary to study productively in a remote setting (which could be solved with time), or something else.
On the bright side, it seems like nowadays many younger people are coming together and having digital study groups, for example, on platforms like Discord. I actually maintained a forum for my fellow students in university to help them deal with unclear questions in study subjects etc., way before the pandemic, but either way a technologically capable new generation is probably something to strive towards!
> And while it works, I think it's really sad if if all those things are "sit in your home and look at at a screen."
That's just the thing - if i can do my dayjob in X hours and spend the rest doing whatever i want, why should i have that X number be inflated to something larger due to a variety of inefficiencies?
Sometimes meaningless small talk in the office with people who don't always respect the fact that others need to concentrate which could be replaced by a call when both parties have the time or even a Slack thread or e-mail (for the more formal inquiries), even other engineers that want to do a bit of bikeshedding that might be replaced by an async thread in a merge request discussion, or being stuck for hours in commute even though there aren't always good reasons to be in the office?
There is a flip side to it, of course. Team building exercises and in person interaction, though perhaps those are better done as informal events (laser tag, gokart racing, escape rooms etc. come to mind from my current workplace), in person workshops that are also recorded so they can be viewed later and quite possibly the fact that the older, less tech savvy, or maybe the differently inclined people might not have organic async discussions because they're just not used to those, much like how another segment prefer them to in-person interaction in many cases.
There is a lot of nuance to all of this, as there are different types of people, all of which have their preferences which will oftentimes be the exact opposite. The push of many developers for remote are just an example of one group realizing that things can be done differently, who are now attempting to ensure further comfortable experiences for themselves, which might be at odds with other groups of people.
Either way, one shouldn't let their work become their life and vice versa, so conflating those is bad in my eyes. Similarly, one could drill down and say the same about "getting things done" at work vs just interacting with others (and the reasons for doing so - for some people work is most if not all social interaction that they get).
> Now perhaps you want to keep "remote" in a box that's just work, and do the other things in person. But tell me this. If you're going to live where there are good schools and plenty of like-minded friends, why not also work together in person there?
That's just it - many people out there don't get to pick where they're going to live or even study. Have you seen the real estate prices recently? What about the rent prices? What about the salaries of many people across different countries and professions within those? Software developers are in a privileged position, but even that isn't true always - many in India find themselves relegated to positions of "code monkeys" and definitely aren't paid too well. That also holds true for a certain segment of developers in Eastern Europe who work for local companies, not foreign ones, myself included. By my current estimates, to be able to afford to buy an apartment without going into debt, i might need approximately 5-10 years of saving money at my current salary and i'm paid better than most teachers and many other professions here.
Alternatively, even when living in a nice place, there's no guarantee that all of the people will be "nice", whatever the criteria for that might be. That example about a coworker that likes bikeshedding? That's from real life. That doesn't mean that they are a bad person, just that if you intend to get things done efficiently and do whatever else you want with the rest of your time, you need to optimize your working conditions for success. You get to pick your friends. You don't get to pick your coworkers, unless you want to job hop often in search of the best possible environment or sour your relationships due to not having excellent diplomatic abilities to set boundaries.
> And if you're going to live any old place, without any good schools or a reliable supply of like-minded friends, then how are education or socialization going to happen in person?
As someone who went through that, i can probably respond: poorly. That's exactly why online relationships and communities were so nice in lieu of any welcoming ones locally. Of course, one can eventually look into the direction of gradual change, such as i did when going to study in the capital of my country and found some friends, since i got the government to pay for my education (for the most part) due to good grades, however it is definitely nice to have interest groups or even to be able to keep in touch remotely, especially given the pandemic. Of course, there's quite a bit of variability there - you can meet someone online and it can turn into an in person relationship, or on the contrary, you can meet someone in person and keep in touch with them online.
Apart from that, of course, you can also seek out groups or events that concern topics that you enjoy, likeminded people that you might not have known otherwise, to hang out with them and get to know them better in events. It might take a bit of going beyond your everyday routine of commuting to work and back home, but it's certainly doable, whether your interests are movies, boating, anime/TV shows/music, tabletop games, hiking, cars or anything else, really. It just takes a bit of personal initiative in that regard.
This is perhaps one of the better aspects of urbanization, given that these groups tend to require less travel, even though there are further arguments for/against living in a city or even nearby it.
