I have 2 kids. Commuting took a huge fraction of the available time I could be spending with them and for them -- asleep 8, working 8, kids sleep a couple hours longer than I do, so absolute max of 6 hours on a workday I could spend doing everything I need and want to do with my kids and spouse. Taking 2 of those hours for commuting is not just 2/24 of the day, it's 1/3 of the total time I have available. Juice is not worth the squeeze.
I think the fundamental problem you've identified is the workday is too long. 40 hours a week is a lot, and most people work more than just 40 hours, sometimes much more.
Why have society's productivity gains not gone into reducing the time we spend working? Why do we seem to have ever-less free time?
Here's the thing: long term, I don't think work-from-home is a good way to reclaim time. Losing the geographic separation of an office makes it easier to start doing work outside of normal hours. Expectations of being always-available will continue to increase—after all, you're already in your work environment, so what is your excuse for not completing that task on Saturday?
Shitty workplaces will be shitty workplaces. You can have traditional offices where work-hours are respected, and you can have traditional offices where everyone is "forced" into doing crunches and staying until midnight.
I think one thing people always misunderstand it: WFH doesn't need to mean separating work and home is impossible. Separate room that you can close if you have a house. Or going to a co-working space. Or in my case: Renting a 2-people office with a colleague.
Well, my anecdata is that this got much worse at my company after COVID made work-from-home a thing. There used to be no expectation that you would work after leaving the office; people would stay late sometimes (not that late), but once you left for the day, that was pretty much it. Some of my coworkers literally didn't own a computer at home.
Some of it was on the workers' end (including me). It just becomes so easy when you're in the same physical space at all times.
That falls 100% into "shitty workplaces being shitty workplaces".
"My workplace used WFH as an excuse to get more labor out of us outside work hours" is not evidence that WFH is inherently going to lead to that. It's just evidence that your workplace is shitty. It is one anecdote, not actual data that can be used to describe trends.
I also think that it's important as a remote worker to set boundaries and communicate them. It's really hard to know when you are working from the other side of the monitor. So, you have to be like: "Okay, it's 4:30pm, I'll take a look at this in the morning" and then leave like you normally would.
This. I'm fortunate to work in a place where working hours are respected and when you're off, you're off. Before COVID hit, I got into the habit of showing up to work and leaving a good hour and a half earlier than everybody else, so I could avoid being compressed in the metro. No one actually cared, and pretty much everyone got the memo that I'm not available after 5 PM, so no one expected any reply from me after that hour.
When COVID hit, and we all switched to WFH, this continued. At one point, we were only working part-time, but were free to work as we liked. Some did a few full days and took the others off, others worked every day, but fewer hours. This worked fine, too, because there was flexibility on both ends. Need to set up a meeting at a time when Jim isn't usually working? See if you can move it earlier / later. Not possible? Jim'll see if he can work later / earlier and adjust some other day.
I think the lesson is that what counts is both sides trying to work together. Of course, if either party tries to abuse the situation, like slacking off day in day out, or always setting up meetings outside regular hours, this falls through because the good will is lost. I work operations, so I sometimes had to drive to a datacenter at five in the morning to replace a switch or whatever. But I also sometimes could clock out at 3 PM to attend to some personal matter because it allowed me to not have to waste time waiting in line or some such, without having to take the afternoon off.
My anecdata is that it got a lot better. I probably worked like ten hours a week less on average during the whole 2020-2022 pandemic period. I even have weird nostalgia for the two months that we didn't have daycare at the beginning, which I remember thinking was really awful at the time, but when I look back now I remember spending a lot of large chunks of afternoons playing with my daughter when I would have previously been at my office. I was certainly a less effective employee though!
I disagree. I really like my work and I really like my family. The problem with commuting is that it introduces a gap of mediocre-to-awful time use in between those two things that I really like. Working fewer hours wouldn't solve that. I'd just be doing less of one of the things I like to do, replacing it with either a meh activity (if I can take public transport or there is no traffic on the drive) or a super frustrating activity of driving in traffic.
We haven't kept on lowering the weekly hours because despite the unstoppable productivity gains, people want more stuff.
Want to work 6h per week? Live on the strict minimum.
Want everyone to work less. Not happening.
Regaining time spent commuting is a pure gain of time without conceding on throughput.
An argument could be made that if all workers who can converted to remote but also went part time, all kids would truely have parents and environment deadlocks we face would be more half solved.
But here we are still debating which of hybrid, on-site or remote is best for some company cultures, whether the model benefits employers or employees most and how can we make populations and businesses swallow a carbon tax
The first demand of organized labor was 10 hours - the 10-hour movement. And they made a concerted effort and were successful, to a certain extent, to obtain the 10-hour day.
By the late 19th century, Hunnicutt says, the workweek begins to shrink to something closer to 60 hours a week for more and more people.
But it took the Great Depression to make 40 hours the norm. Government saw a shorter workweek as a way to fight the massive unemployment crisis by spreading the remaining labor out over more people. That led to a series of laws that eventually enshrined 40 hours as America's workweek in 1940. And it seemed like that trend would keep going. The most respected economist of the era, John Maynard Keynes, famously predicted that improving technology and increasing efficiency would deliver a 15-hour workweek by 2030.
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A California bill is out to redefine the work week as 32 hours.
Keynes was pretty good economist, not sure he took into account that industrialisation then got us into societies of consumption.
Once we solved the production problem it didn't take long to invent new ones.
If his prediction is right we would already be at the 20h week. Not sure why we would suddenly get into sprinting sprinting for the next 7 years to catch up with the productivity gains observed in the last 93y. Efficiencies have many folds increased.
All the California bill will do is guarantee access to lower paid jobs. Not necessarily bad since so many low paid jobs dare to get workers to do 40 + non paid extra time.
Ironically the workers who delivered the bill and those who will vote in its favour all work somewhere between 60 and 80h per week. And will continue to do so if the bill passes.
The point the parent comment was making is that some people want to work more. If you want everyone to work less, you would have to mandate it by law. That is, not just a mandate on what employers can require, but a mandate limiting what individuals can choose to do. That's a fine proposal if you're into that kind of social engineering, it's a reasonable point of view that I just don't share. But in the country I live in, it's a certainty that a mandate like that targeting how individuals can choose to use their time would never fly; you couldn't get it passed, but even if you did, the backlash would destroy it right away.
> A California bill is out to redefine the work week as 32 hours.
In France, the official workweek is 35 hours. It was brought in with the same argument: spread the work to more workers. Didn't exactly work out as expected.
People who are advertised to, and told that they aren't good enough unless they use <product>. Ads create negative utility by attempting to make people less satisfied with what they were already happy with.
Obviously "not all ads", some ads do useful work of informing the public about a useful product when word-of-mouth isn't working "fast enough". I'm adding this line specifically to pre-empt nitpicker replies.
I'm not seeking to blame the average earner over the super rich.
Most people are very much attached to consumption, it's been a bigger factor that kept the common 40h week than the employers very possible desire to keep workers hustling so much.
Which people? In term of numbers and total impact that would be regular people, more so than those possibly having more leverage on defining what a working week should look like.
In any case the control is over the regular people. If the latter change the other bunch will de facto have to revisit how much they consume, by rough as much.
It's pretty much everyone who wants more stuff, when they can afford it. But the kind of stuff different people want varies a ton cultural and individually. But no, it's not that "regular working people" eschew possessions while the rich consume. "Minimalism" and "FIRE" and "#vanlife" type things are all distinctly wealthy phenomena. It's people who can bail out of that lifestyle into a life of bounty if they decide to. Working class people may have fewer possessions (though this isn't even necessarily true IME), but that doesn't mean they don't want more stuff. Every "regular working person" I know is trying to save up money for stuff they really want but can't yet afford. The only people I know who talk about consumerism and people having too much stuff are those who can already afford anything they want.
Commutes are long. They also need to happen at specific times. It’s easy to start your day +/- an hour or two when working remotely. It’s not really an option if you’re expected to be on site by a certain time and have home obligations prior to that.
Commutes are also a stress and danger. I used to commute ~1.5hours in and out of DC and had to stop after getting home one day and realizing I couldn't remember anything from the drive I just did.
I can attest to that. Been working remote for many years and home office is draining so i head out daily, outside the peak hours, across a small part of the city only, a precious pleasure.
> Why have society's productivity gains not gone into reducing the time we spend working? Why do we seem to have ever-less free time?
There are per-employee overheads (training comes to mind, probably tax & conditions law too). That means the economically optimum equilibrium is still to concentrate knowledge into select employees and have them work hard. Imagine that to achieve a certain outcome we can do it with, say, either need X people working Y hours or 10X people working Y/10 hours. Of the two, X people is usually a much better choice for employers because it reduces the per-employee overheads.
People also seem to misjudge their own preferences. Many might say that they'd like shorter days, but when tested they usually prefer to work more and have more stuff. Employees would like to work less hours in principle, but if you offer them more hours + more pay they take that deal.
In short, in practice, employers and employees both seem to prefer it when people work long days. If employees get more productive, both side of the bargaining table tend to negotiate for hours to stay at about the limit of what workers are physically capable of.
>In short, in practice, employers and employees both seem to prefer it when people work long days. If employees get more productive, both side of the bargaining table tend to negotiate for hours to stay at about the limit of what workers are physically capable of.
If that were true our workday would be something like 6 hours.
>they usually prefer to work more and have more stuff
My paycheck is the same whether I work 40(45) hours per week or 90. I've actually reduced my productivity rather than increased it because there's no point in being more productive as an employee. All that will do is give me more work to do for the same wage.
The answer is that we (I speak as an American) hate lazy people and view anyone not working full time plus as lazy. That's it. There's no additional overhead that magically appeared as productivity went up. It's greed and presenteeism. Work hard so your boss notices you so you can get that sweet, sweet 1% raise and a promotion that entails 200% more work. Why?
I don’t know if you’ve only ever worked for clueless management (a real possibility), but good orgs care about output not butt-in-seat time. In a healthy org you will be promoted because you are delivering value more efficiently, not because you are grinding more and more hours. Obviously the latter makes your effort more visible to management, but it’s not the only way to stand out. You’d be surprised how few employees really understand how their work translates to business value; just bringing a mentality where one thinks a little bit more critically about what they are doing and how things could be done better with the same amount of effort will make one much more upwardly mobile.
> In a healthy org you will be promoted because you are delivering value more efficiently, not because you are grinding more and more hours.
Everywhere I've worked promotions are handed out by brown nosing. While, yes, you need to have a baseline of skill it's not nearly as much as one might expect. You can hit senior while being a junior if you sniff enough of your boss' farts.
>You’d be surprised how few employees really understand how their work translates to business value
That's really irrelevant in my experience. Sure some places may be different I haven't worked at every single employer. I've done the enterprise, mid-sized, mom and pop, and start up gauntlet both as a contractor and a full-time employee and it's not been much different regardless of the company.
>how things could be done better with the same amount of effort will make one much more upwardly mobile.
I don't care how much better something can be done. I care about a paycheck. I've pushed myself to near burnout for jobs before (plural) and you know what happened? Nothing but more work added to the pile.
So at the end of the day I do the bare minimum required to hit my metrics. The people that put in the hours are surprised when we get the same raise. In some cases, people that do less than me get promoted and then have to figure out why they took on so much more work and responsibility for barely an increase in salary. It's laughable.
Butt-in-seat time, as you put it, is the metric nearly everywhere actually cares about. Status go yellow? Where were you and why were you AFK?
So, sure, I guess you could say that I've only ever worked for clueless management but in my experience all management is clueless. I've never worked anywhere IT or not, nor have I ever known someone personally who has worked anywhere, that management could turn the lights on in the morning without help. That's just what management is. The people who can do the job are doing the job. The people that can't get promoted to management.
> My paycheck is the same whether I work 40(45) hours per week or 90. I've actually reduced my productivity rather than increased it because there's no point in being more productive as an employee. All that will do is give me more work to do for the same wage.
Broadly speaking, that isn't correct. In the short term, over maybe a few months, the logic works. But over the longer term money tends to move away from unproductive workers and towards more productive workers. People don't make hiring, firing and pay decisions every day but when they do relative productivity is a consideration. Thinking this way leaves you open to being outcompeted.
Try years. The hardest working people I've had as coworkers are the same ones getting shit raises and no promotions because they're "too valuable" to move out of the position they're in. Meanwhile I've left the company after a few years for massive pay increases and they get to figure out what they're going to do with their year after year pay decreases thanks to not getting raises above inflation.
Your experience may differ and that's fine. In my experience having worked at numerous businesses from startup to enterprise it's all the same. Hiring budgets are always bigger than retention budgets. 1% raise vs 10%+ salary increase. I know which one I am going to pick.
> There are per-employee overheads (training comes to mind, probably tax & conditions law too).
The more significant overhead is internal communication. Recently, after coming back from a week-long vacation, I spent an entire day catching up on unread chat messages and e-mails. [1]
In a group of N people where everyone needs to communicate with each other, you will have N(N-1)/2 lines of communication, i.e. communication overheads per person even scale quadratically instead of just linearly (like the things that you mention do). Having a hierarchical org structure alleviates this somewhat by centralizing the flow of communication, but this introduces a different set of inefficiencies which most people around here are intimately familiar with.
I used to work 70% part-time (i.e. 5.6 hours per day) for a while, accepting the trade-off of less money, but more free time. However, as I ascended through the ranks, I ended up going back to full-time because my current position as senior IC involves so much communication work (meetings, mails, workshops, etc.) that I would not be able to do any actual programming if I were still on 70%. And the programming part is what I like the most about the profession, and also where I feel like I produce the most value, so I'm not quitting that.
[1] I opted not to "Mark all as read" because I have learnt over the years that it's actually very valuable to be up-to-date on what people in adjacent teams are up to, even as an IC.
You may feel like we're working too much, but the statistics paint a different story: we continue to work far less than we have historically. I agree with your concerns about work-home separation, but related to your example we're less than a generation removed from when the expectation (outside of those downtown office jobs) was that you probably were working on Saturday.
i think it's an interesting question. to me, i actually don't mind being available for a bigger portion of the day because it has come with a lowered total amount of time doing work. i generally enjoy my job so i am a fan of the blend -- I'll wake up, do an hour of work, go to the gym, come back and do another few hours, go run an errand and make lunch, some more work, then maybe meet up with friends and finish up some stuff before bed. i find this to be a win win, I'm available for my coworkers across maybe 12 hours instead of a strict 8 but in total i work less than when I was going into the office
The problem with the idea of “everyone working less” is that some people won’t work less. Even now, there are people who work more than 40 hours / week.
Someone who works 25% more than you will make 25% more wages and will afford a 25% more expensive apartment, etc.
So long as you’re comfortable living in a suburb with lower desirability, you’ll be fine. But you might get priced out of places where people work more…
In fact, it doesn’t take a law for you to decide to start working less. Plenty of people work part time… You just need to balance how much you work with the affordability of the lifestyle you want to live.
Here's the thing. Right now, it's difficult to work 25% less for only a 25% pay cut, especially when you include other benefits. And that's because people who work less than 40 hours are considered more temporary and less dedicated—because the market of "part-time" job seekers usually is more temporary and less dedicated, as of today.
But I think that's cultural.
I'd like to encourage more people to re-evaluate how they're spending their time. If a certain mass of workers decided they'd prefer to work 30 hours, it would become easier for others to work 30 hours as well. Not entirely unlike how normalizing remote work allows more people to do it.
You're assuming less hours = less pay, which is unwarranted.
Someone who is at work for 40 hours is not necessarily "working more" than someone who is at work for 30 hours, it just means they are less efficient. If both workers produce the same output, they should be paid the same.
In many cases, it's easy to make a 40 hour job into a 5 hour job with proper planning and automation. But since workers are required to be at the office for 40 hours a week anyway, the work "expands" to fill the time with useless meetings and time-consuming manual processes.
I have 6 parrots. They require hours of care everyday. The fundamental problem is the workday is too long, and not that I made a choice to add 6 parrots to my life.
...I really do appreciate this take, even if I can't completely get behind it (kids aren't parrots). But couldn't you make the same argument about commuting?
But there is a reason that we have some amount of legal structure (and should have a lot more IMO) to avoid employment discrimination against people who have children, but not people who have lots of parrots: Unlike pet parrots, children are very important to society, and societies that fail to incentive having children end up with fewer children, and that's bad.
> and societies that fail to incentive having children end up with fewer children, and that's bad.
I mean, citation needed. I know that e.g. Japan is having issues with an aging population but they could probably fix that with more immigration if they wanted to. The US certainly could.
I'm a VP managing six projects. They require hours of care each day. The fundamental problem is that the workday is too short, and not that I made a choice to add six projects to my life.
I love this. At it’s core there’s an element of communism in people wanting the benefits that today accrue to the hardest workers, while being allowed to allocate their own time according to their needs.
Not communism, but socialism, and yes, obviously. That's what governments are for, to balance the needs and desires of society against the needs and desires of individuals. Every government, including those thought to be very capitalist like the US, is constantly striking and re-striking this balance.
This is how a person like Mitt Romney can be both a ruthless private equity capitalist and also an advocate for natalist policies. There is no capitalism vs. socialism binary. Both things are good for a society in different ways for different things at different times.
While that is true, in the 3 years I've been working from home I gladly trade a few hours on the occasional Saturday for 10 hours of commuting per week.
> I think the fundamental problem you've identified is the workday is too long. 40 hours a week is a lot, and most people work more than just 40 hours, sometimes much more.
Citation needed.
> Here's the thing: long term, I don't think work-from-home is a good way to reclaim time. Losing the geographic separation of an office makes it easier to start doing work outside of normal hours.
It this some plot from employers? "We are forcing you to the office for your own sake so we won't make you work from home on weekends"?
> Expectations of being always-available will continue to increase—after all, you're already in your work environment, so what is your excuse for not completing that task on Saturday?
Is this a serious question? Because I have other more interesting things to do on Saturday.
The folks with wealth have seen our productivity gains. We as labor have not. We seem to have less free time because we're working more. We have less free time. We should be down at least to 32 hours per workweek at 4 days. If we unionized we'd be able to negotiate such things. Unfortunately, our industry as a whole seems somehow illogical about that as it, we're all some 100x rockstar type. As it stands that we (IT/Software Engineers) are classified as salary exempt (in the US at least) is incredibly damaging. When you can be made to work 70-hour workweeks with no additional pay and with your job hostage, I'd say that's a perfect time to unionize.
But broadly speaking we in the US view down time as somehow the greatest sin imaginable. Take time off? Better be sick. Don't want to spend 3+ hours of your day in waste? How dare you, you entitled commie!
WFH is the best way to reclaim time that we presently have. I get to lose two hours commute and an hour lunch that wasn't really mine anyway. My work week isn't going to be reduced so the time I have around that is what I can reduce. Given that I see no other way to do that besides working from home. When we work from home we must be diligent to create boundaries. Don't install Slack on your personal phone. Don't put your email on your personal phone. At the end of your workday shut the work machine down and leave it until the start of your workday.
>so what is your excuse for not completing that task on Saturday?
I don't work on my personal time without additional compensation. If you want that task done on Saturday you can do it yourself. If you want me to do it then you can wait until Monday.
> WFH is the best way to reclaim time that we presently have.
Is it? WFH is great for many reasons but the normalization of WFH is also bringing a lot of pressure for more hours. Some (many?) companies are using those hours you are no longer commuting to do more meetings.
Nobody (at least in Silicon Valley) would do 8am meetings because commutes made that impractical. But if you're sitting at home already.. hey let's meet at 8am.
Everyone had to leave the office at 5 to 5:30 to go sit in traffic. But now you're home already, so let's run this meeting to 6:30 or 7pm. You're not commuting after all, let's be productive with the time.
Anyone can find an arrangement where they work less. You seem to imply everyone should be required to work less, so that you’re not competing with people that are willing to allocate more of their time to work.
You don't compete with people that are willing to allocate more of their time to work. You compete against who can get more work done in the same amount of time. If you work for free why would the employer give you more money? You've already signaled that you don't have self-worth. You get nothing, boss laughs at you, and you think you're indispensable because you worked 60 hour weeks for the last three years with barely anything to show for it besides more work.
We shouldn't be required to work less. We should get the benefit of our productivity. If you are more productive you get punished by getting more work thrown your way.
>Anyone can find an arrangement where they work less.
Sure, anyone can quit their job. I don't see how that's helpful.
You misunderstand, you're competing with both kinds of people in your career all the time. There's no opting out. There's a global pool of talent and it's one big market.
But an important corollary is that you absolutely do not have to be at the tip top of that competition to live a good and successful life. It's a global competition, but there are a lot of slots to be filled out there.
The incentives in place for businesses seem to dictate an ever increasing production of profits. There's no target production quota, where any excess is reduced to give more profits to employees.
I mean...if I could teleport instantaneously, then yes, the office would be less of a problem. I could work directly with co-workers and then pop up back home for my breaks and lunch and so on. But that isn't possible at present (maybe ever).
Even if a close cycling trip, that's still a burden most don't want to deal with anymore. Just think about cycling in a heat wave or thunderstorm (they're common where I live and dense enough to where being outside for just a second is the equivalent to jumping in a lake)
It is a little nicer from an efficiency standpoint to have more experienced workers around to train the new ones, but that doesn't change the fact that those experienced workers are now quite mobile and can get a new job with little effort. When my old company went to hybrid we started immediately losing the best talent. It was a trickle at first and then a dam bursting. They're finally accepting remote-only because they don't have a choice. Their engineering staff went from an average of 8+ years of service to like maybe 3, and that has huge inefficiency losses.
WFH, everything is in a 5 minutes car or 15 mins walk radius for us. The office would be 1h+ of commute away. And all that just to go there and put noise cancelling headphones to concentrate on my work.
But it's not only that. Kids need more than just being transported, fed and put to bed. You need to rush home to cook, do chores because you didn't have time to pick up the mess in the morning, take care of them. Then once they are asleep, more chores, and then your free time starts at 9-10pm, until you crash.
Being at home, especially flex time, nothing prevents you from doing laundry, and because you eat at home, you can do a bit more dishes after lunch, start cooking something for supper, etc. It alleviates my routine a lot and I also work more time with less stress.
It's crazy how upset this website gets about an inconsiderate coworker breaking them from the "zone" but doing laundry in worktime is the natural order of things.
Doing something like laundry, or taking a shower, or making coffee, is an excellent time to think over those knotty problems that refuse to give way when you are at the computer.
Just a bit startled people feel doing chores in their work time is normal. This is against the backdrop lore here of hyper focus, hyper productivity that is alas only chronically ruined by inconsiderate others.
Sincerely, who gives a flying ** as long as things get done? All I can tell you, having 2 loud conversations going on in an open office almost the entire day is going to mess my performance up far more than taking a 30 minute break hanging laundry while I can still hear myself think. But the former is considered 'business as usual' and the latter is considered a no-no.
You'd think for once the money people would think about the money, not the method.
Just say what you want to say instead of hiding behind your snide comments.
Those methods already exist, albeit weak, and business management still routinely favors theatrics over measurements. You can put their noses on the metrics clearly pointing out the slackers, and they will get personal and touchy-feely as to why the metrics aren't correct. You can point out the plethora of studies and arrogantly they will believe they know better. Of all the hills to die on regarding performance, taking a break to do laundry certainly isn't it.
Metrics like what? LOC? Number of commits? Am genuinely interested. These certainly can be gamed, and not really useful for admin, creative or QA type of work.
People have different abilities and work ethics, so a workday serves as the absolute lowest baseline for meeting commitment. Working remote allows you to game even that while not adding much (from employer's POV naturally - there's definitely added value for the employee).
If I do laundry and quick groceries in my worktime it's a lot less of an issue if I have to log in to quickly flag an error outside my worktime. Balance is still needed, but that's a world of difference when flexibility goes both ways.
(inconsiderate workers are an issue however you turn it)
In what way is that at all crazy? These are two entirely different things, and the first one (being interrupted) is bad while the second one (taking a break and doing something mindless) is good. It would be pretty crazy to have the opposite view that the bad thing is good and the good thing is bad...
What are you talking about? You're going to kill yourself if you don't take breaks throughout the day. If this is a new concept to you, you're cruising for a bruising.
Edit to add: Whether I'm at an office or at home, I go on at least one 20 to 30 minute walk and ideally two or three each day. I've been doing that for over a decade. I have no qualms saying that in public. Any employer or manager who sees this as a negative habit because I'm doing it while I'm "on the clock" is not one I have any interest in working for, and I'm very happy if they'll filter themselves out of my set of prospective employers.
If you do computer work, it's important to move your legs and extend your gaze into the distance, often. What you're advocating here and are "startled" that it's "controversial" is just strictly unhealthy. Don't kill yourself for a job. There are many many employers who won't require it of you, because they know that happy healthy employees are more creative and more productive than unhealthy burned out zombies.
I naturally took breaks when I worked from home, at the same rate I do when I work in the office. I don't cook meals for the family or do other errands when working. If there's a home emergency requiring me in a WFH situation I'd work the time owed afterwards. 24 years in the workforce, thanks for the concern but think I'll manage.
I really don't get it, what exactly do you think is the difference between doing laundry or cooking a meal when you take a break vs anything else you might do on a break?
But location is a limited resource - and thus, the cost of living (such as real estate) in a location that is of such convenience would be higher than a further away location.
Therefore, you're just traded the time for money.
WFH solves both problems at once. AKA, it increases efficiency of the entire system.
Don't know about your location, but where I live (Switzerland), kindergarten or school is decided based on location people live, not work. You can't just arbitrarily pick any school you want your kid to attend to (or you can but then you pay non-trivially).
Also, most of us change work more often than where we live (wasn't true for me in the past but should be from now on, and I think I was an outlier).
Another point - moving kids older then say 6 between schools/locations is pretty harsh on them too. For every single one that thrives with such dramatic changes and finds new friends easily there are tens who struggle.
It changes, but not that much. Being 20 min from home is still a lot more than 0 min.
Having a quick chat when your kids get back from school, taking a 10 min break with your family, spending 15min cooking a fresh lunch instead of waiting in line at the restaurant etc.
Of course not everyone wants that proximity, but if you do that's a big deal.
In most of the places the HN crowd works, it is hard to live in close proximity to the office with a family, you need to be dual income earning the big bucks and if you live in a low col area, they you have no guarantee where your office is located because jobs aren't clustered close to each other.
Because even with Star Trek teleport WFH means do not need to dress up accordingly to some common social dress code, enough for traveling outside depending on the season and so on.
I WFH in my underwire in a dedicated, locked, room at my own home in my own environment. So the problem is ALSO the office, not just the commute. The problem is the absurdity of keeping up models that was needed in the past, but have no reason today for most, they are needed only by some giant capital who profit pasturing humans like cows.
This is the problem: a society not centered on actual tech levels and for the people instead of for exploiting the most for the interests of a very little cohort.
I don’t want to cycle 20 minutes when it’s 105F outside (today), or 30F outside (February). Frankly it could be a 5 minute cycle and it’s not going to happen in those temperatures.
Secondly, when I get there, I don’t want to sit in an open plan hell hole listening to other people on video calls talking about things which are irrelevant to me because there aren’t enough meeting rooms with AV equipment.
I like the office more than most of my coworkers like the office. And I hate the office.
If commuting was counted and paid as a job function (which it categorically should be if your employer is demanding it), I might consider it. The other issue is that I've invested a lot into my home office. It's comfy, ergonomic, and extremely unlikely to be matched by the bargain bin garbage that employers furnish with.
And then move as often as you change jobs? Never settle in somewhere and build something up? (I'm not too often changing employers, in fact they moved offices to some more distant location to ""optimize"" than I changed jobs..)
Yes this is true. I work remotely now but I often choose to "commute" into town via bike or car, I'd say more days than not most weeks. But I would never go more than ~20 minutes by choice.
Whilst more time could be spent at home relaxing, I've just had a soak in the bath and have finally worked out why my dog would not come in the bathroom.
I'm lying there detecting the foul odour of my neighbours diet wafting through the overflow hole in the bath and basin!
At least my supplements are improving my olfactory bulb, who would have thought being on a mains water supply is a low level neighbourly germ warfare zone.
No wonder the water companies tell us to spend no more than 4mins in the shower!
This seems to be pushing the fluid in the trap, and I say that because I can hear it from the basin which has its own trap and the bath and the toilet.
I can watch the water in the toilet rising and then receding when the basin and sink gurgle.
I also would not put anything past the US and UK military around here.
Vent stack is probably blocked. Or possibly not connected in the first place, if somebody did a lousy job with the plumbing.
Basically, the sewer line should be vented to air on top of the building somewhere, or in some cases air could be let in via an air admittance valve. This should prevent the creation of a vacuum that would cause gurgling or odors.
Havent checked the vent stack, but it was clear as far as I could look down when I put the vent on top of it. Maybe some builders rubble blocking things.
I'm not ashamed to say that as soon our company enforced return-to-work policies (and not even flex/hybrid which would have been acceptable), I absolutely quiet-quit.
Bare minimum productivity.
And in my quiet-quit zone, I'm spending at least 20% of that time in the office sifting through roles trying to find the perfect hybrid/remote role.
p.s. the title of this article says "WFH perks" ... that's exactly what's wrong with how the Big Cheese view WFH ... as a perk ... it's not a perk, it's leveraging technology to make your staff more productive with the benefit of a more balanced life ... while, literally, showing mercy on them by not forcing the sardine-commute on them 5 days a week.
I have yet to see anything indicate remote work makes knowledge workers more productive. I prefer hybrid word, but exclusively because of the benefits outside of work. Anecdotally, I’m probably around 80% as productive at home compared to at the office.
Anecdotally, I’m probably around 150% as productive at home compared to at the office. How's that for a reverse card?
Seriously, I can't stand hearing other people talk. I can't stand hearing their keyboards, or their mice clicking, I can't stand to hear people walking around, I don't want them to be able to talk to me abruptly.
Work gets done faster when I'm allowed to focus in my own controlled environment.
For what it’s worth, I agree with all of your office complaints. Yet, personally, I’m still more productive at the office. I liken this to working out at the gym alone vs. with a personal trainer. Working out alone is like working from home. No one is watching you to keep you accountable. Feeling sleepy? Take a nap! Whereas at work you have to appear productive all the time, similar to how it’s hard to slack off when working out with a trainer. And the easiest way to appear productive is just to be productive.
Looking at the paper, their "10 to 20%" figure is based off of three studies, one for call center employees, one for Indian data-entry workers, and one for Indian IT professionals. The one closest to most of HN's audience is the IT professionals case, and even in that one they note "measured performance among these workers remained constant while remote." In addition, they only mention how "productivity" is being assessed for the call center case (call volumes), not the other two.
I think a lot of it is going to be both the person and their environment. I have a separate office workspace, and have built up a fair bit of compartmentalization at home.
I'm also very frenetic about focusing (or not), so the ability to work for 10min and then be distracted for another 10min is great for me. That might sound like I'm less productive, but ... my work output is higher than my coworkers and is generally completed earlier.
I can realistically see it being a net loss, because I think a lot of workers aren't in tune with how their minds work relative to focusing on a tast, and a structured environment is perfect for dealing with that.
I clearly remember Sonia Lebel, a minister of the provincial government, explaining WFH worked and that the public workers were more productive in that environment.
I agree, but American knowledge workers have somehow been convinced that the best path forward is to remain ununionized, at-will employees, which means the desires of the workers are always superseded by the desires of capital. In the capital class’ eyes, productivity is more important than worker quality of life.
Well, that depends on your null hypothesis. Most of the decision makers in corporate America know what in-office environment is, they have risen through it. So they don't need any more data about it.
Remote work is a new paradigm which needs heavy investment in rewiring the culture of work. Obviously, the burden of proof is on remote work to prove it's utility.
It bears remembering the massive misalignment of incentives here: the funds like Blackrock holding large portions of the stock in these companies also hold significant positions in commercial real estate, so if they let WFH become permanently widespread they could suffer a big loss on that, hence the push for companies to enforce work from office. Many companies themselves also have commercial real estate positions (if only in their own office buildings), which they don't want to lose value.
>Of the billions in tax incentives granted to US companies every year by cities and states, many agreements require workers to come into the office some of the time, or at least live in the region. For companies receiving these incentives, relaxing in-office attendance could be costly.
>The state [New Jersey] said it will revoke benefits granted under the multibillion-dollar Enterprise Zone Program to companies whose employees no longer work on site at least half the time.
I wonder why that is? I suppose the governments of states with big cities stand to lose a lot of tax revenue if employees no longer need to go to those big cities to do their jobs, and can instead work from (and pay tax to) states with lower cost of living.
The whole point is these states/locales offered big tax incentives to companies to open offices in their states, with the benefit being that companies would bring jobs and tax revenue to those states. With remote work the primary benefit to those states is lost.
Perhaps one other benefit to remote work is states will stop with this "race to the bottom", where big, rich companies pit states against each other for bigger handouts. Remember the whole "Amazon HQ2" fiasco from a couple years back where all these states got totally played by Amazon? With increased remote work an "HQ2" makes even less sense.
The "zone" programs are for specific, limited, areas where the government entity wants to see the company employees spend their money. Generally areas that neThe tax break to the business is because their employees are spending money in the area where the office is located...some area in need of renewal/spending.
With WFH, the employees stay at home in their upscale suburb areas that don't need artificial incentives to attract money.
Exactly. The government of an area could spend $3m (say) to try to revitalize an area of town, but that might not even pay for redoing the sidewalks or whatever.
So instead they give a $3m tax credit to a largish company to locate in that area, which brings in X number of employees each day; and those employees will eat lunch nearby, etc. And then stores begin to open around that area because the demand is there. If done right, the government gets way more than $3m worth of redevelopment, and more than $3m in increased incidental tax revenue (sales tax, etc).
If done wrong it's a horrible flop, but they're usually just out tax money they wound't have received anyway. This is why you see it being done so often.
I loved the concept of index funds at first glance.
But Blackrock et al convinced me that there must be a better way. It's the responsibility of capital holders to employ their capital intelligently, not to hand it off to some faceless corporation and hope it gets invested well.
This means owning shares in companies you understand, and then voting in their annual meetings (this can be done asynchronously).
Capital is power, and deferring all of yours to Larry Fink is a horrible idea, even if you agree with him on most things.
Then they have no business investing in whatever it is they're investing in.
Everyone should do a minimum amount of due diligence on the companies that they own and that make up their retirement / house purchase / kid's university fund.
If not that, then it's better for most to accumulate capital by paying off their home loan or some other scheme that they understand.
The answer cannot be to hand off all power to a single megacorp that owns a significant chunk of the US economy and whose CEO gets to dictate the entire boardroom agenda for the whole country.
But I don't see how diffusion is a problem; it's simply decentralization. I think the main problem is disengaged owners who think they can buy-and-forget.
If every owner paid even a modicum of attention (even just skimming the annual report) and every owner voted their opinion, we'd see a much better corporate America after one single year.
Seems dubious. Most wealth is held by wealthy interests that prioritize staying wealthy. The collective will of small investors is negligible. And it’s not worth your time to invest in individual companies vs just doing an index fund.
It would be nice if there were index funds that promised to vote for socially positive issues on votes. That may be more impactful than social good indices.
According to this [0], 51% of stocks are held by the 1%. So you are correct that the rich control corporations. But 49% voting power is far from negligible.
Even a small minority of voters who care about an issue and raise a stink about it can swing a big change.
Most shareholders, including rich ones, are happily coasting along on autopilot. If someone with even a single share stands up in an annual meeting and makes a good point, I would pay attention.
The parent comment I replied to originally said that return to office is pushed at regular by a fund (Blackrock) that owns office space as well as shares in companies like say Apple or Google, even if that is a suboptimal choice for Apple and Google.
If there's a bloc of even 5% of ownership arguing against this at an annual meeting, it would be a major improvement in the state of affairs. Corporate America runs the world. We can't just relegate all important decisions to big owners by default - at the very least give them hell!
You're talking about activist investing [0]. It's possible but you still need a significant holding to actually have any leverage. Joe Blogs who owns 100 of 10000000 shares is not going to be allowed to talk at the AGM
> It's the responsibility of capital holders to employ their capital intelligently, not to hand it off to some faceless corporation and hope it gets invested well.
Would this mean that billionaires would have to manually manage their portfolios themselves? I assume not because they could hire a non-"faceless" firm.
Ultimately, this feels like an objection to BlackRock that would prevent the average person from having a chance but do nothing to stop the problem of large companies and already powerful individuals gaining more power.
I'm saying lots of "powerless" individuals actually have quite a bit of power, they just choose to let others take the wheel.
If all of middle and upper-middle class America skimmed their annual reports and voted their shares, things would change a lot. Boardrooms right now are full of people that somehow get in and stay in automatically. CEO's tend to dominate proceedings, when really they should dance to the tune set by the board, the composition of which should reflect the shareholders, which for a big corp is probably about half of the USA.
My 5 shares out of the companies 100,000,000 give me little power and is a huge investment of my time to vote intelligently with, and I have little way to coordinate my decisions with hundreds of thousands of other minor share owners. It would end up with the retail investors going with the path of least resistance or it'd be democratic noise.
I also don't care to use that power - my only goal is to retire one day by investing in the market as a whole through broad market ETFs. I have no interest in individual companies or how they vote. I, and the majority of other retail investors, are simply interested in financial security. Are we wrong to have that goal? Why do we need to start playing boardroom games that we can't and don't care to win?
Yes. Why you would expect a bunch of retail investors who have no interest in running a company to make the correct or best decision for the company is beyond me. Do you want those investors to lose their chance at a retirement?
I think it is a far-fetched scenario that Blackrock execs are calling board members to put pressure on CEOs to mandate RTO. So citation needed on your hypothesis.
I think it's much simpler - remote work can be awesome but needs complete rewiring of corporate culture, especially how we collaborate and communicate. Biggest obstacle to that is the ingrained habits of decision makers, who have worked for decades and find it easier to mandate RTO rather than changing their habits. On the other hand, I see remote being adopted by startups, typically led by young-ish founders who got used to the flexible lifestyle during COVID.
Well the CEO of Blackrock is publicly calling for people to return to office: https://fortune.com/2022/09/07/blackrock-ceo-larry-fink-remo... . You think he'd publicly call for it but then not use any of the massive power he wields to also privately call for it?
Doesn't it make more sense for the rich portfolio holders if the companies just re-direct office lease payments to extra dividends? That would result in higher net returns than arbitrarily trying to keep an entire separate office industry afloat.
Far more reasonable to me is the idea that management wants a communal atmosphere when working on team projects. You can disagree with this, and say it's unnecessary, but I am not sure why we need to generate conspiracy theories about Blackrock's real estate holdings. Silliness.
Anecdotally there have been several weird management pushes in my own employer “make sure everyone shows up for meeting X” that felt alarming at first. And when I asked a friend what was going on, the answer was that because they’d just leased this building pre-covid there was leadership push to use the space so it didn’t look like a mistake/waste. And it was just various wires getting crossed by ineptly delivered messages from middle management, not a hint to be sure to show up cause they were dropping layoff notices or something.
And likely with the market right now you can’t exit a lease or sell a building without taking massive losses, cause nobody else wants commercial real estate either.
So what I’m saying is, there’s often quite a lot of internal push at these companies to avoid realizing losses/making the COO look like an idiot/etc. It’s not just “blackrock wants them to”, although I’m sure that exists at the government levels etc. There is also broad corporate level resistance to the idea of realizing losses and taking blame for real-estate investments that are now underwater.
Not that anyone in 2019 could have predicted that the nature of the workplace would fundamentally change 6 months later.
Top talent probably never had much issue negotiating whatever they want.
It's the rest of us who are impacted. Most companies don't need or want top talent, just good enough mediocrity that will fall in line, do the work, and not make a stink about it. They don't care if they lose a few percent of top workers as long as they have a steady stream of easier to manage mediocre applicants. It's kinda a filtering process both ways.
But it's not just "top talent" as in the people who can walk into the number one company in an industry and negotiate their millions in compensation, it's "top talent" as in "the upper segment of whatever talent pool suits the roles".
If there are ten small dev companies who aren't competing with FANG because the upper end of their salary range is $80k, the ones that force office work will lose out on the top talent within people who're willing to work for that salary to the other small companies who offer WFH, even if none of the companies are discussing the type of "top talent" who are the best of the best in their field.
In my experience quite recently, the smaller non-FAANG technology jobs are in the $100K to $120K range. FAANG jobs, if you can get one, are more in the $150K and up range.
I dont live in the US, I was picking a random non-best-developer-in-the-world salary to make the point, not trying to accurately price specific jobs.
But surely 100-120k is far too small a range even for the US considering the variance of states AND the variance of companies from those doing similar work to FANG for cheaper all the way down to companies that just need a few wordpress devs to create small business websites?
Then I'm pretty pleased with my random $80k as an example of a salary that isn't near the top industry wise, but still has a sizeable pool of people earning, within which there's top - relatively - talent!
I’ve seen projects DOA and entire product lines and services slowly die once the engineering talent leaves. Cheap talent can be used for maintenance but new products and major revisions need a certain creative drive to envision the future and push through corporate entropy.
Is it talent, or is it experience and a sense of ownership?
Projects and products can fail when key people leave, because the organization no longer knows what it's doing. When the knowledge is gone, new people will have a hard time rediscovering it on their own. But they can have more success with new projects, because it's their project and they understand it.
For greenfield projects, voracious and relentless talent is integral to building great products. Talent is general aptitude coupled with fast learning within the general domain.
Experience can often be detrimental as the person may be too biased to see what they are missing.
I have experienced this bias first hand at AWS. Experience can be blinding as it doesn’t let you explore new ideas.
I didn't mean experience in general but experience with the specific project. If an organization loses everyone with that experience in a project, it's no longer their project. If they want to continue working on it, they must spend a lot of effort to understand it.
I have more experience in the academia and with volunteer projects than in industry. Based on what I have seen, while talent does exist, it's rare. Success comes mostly from having the right mix of people working on the right project in the right environment. There are far more successful people and successful projects than truly talented people.
The word talent is being used in two senses here. The original meaning - an employee, you’re using it to mean an inherent ability. The article is about the top performing employees.
Disagree. Every place I've ever worked has had 1 or 2 key guys on each team who made shit work while 8-10 others worked as you described. In the 27 years I've been working in the industry I've seen endless attempts both by individual managers and the industry to re-org or best practice or agile their way out of this, but the situation remains the same like a law of the universe.
First two jobs out of university everyone pulled its weight. Great team spirit and atmosphere in both jobs, but after this the experience in my third job hit me even harder. Suddenly I am one of those two guys and the other one quits.
I don't think this is a reality we disagree on... companies accept it too, but still keep hiring those 8 to 10 folks. But those 1 or 2 usually get special treatment of some sort. The 8 or 10 are disposable commodities.
OK, but still I think the logistics of "everyone comes to the office except for Dan who can WFH because he's just really good at getting things to work" is probably kind of a hard policy to implement.
Is it really that unusual? Even in the pre covid days, all the places I've worked had someone working remotely because of some reason or another, but the general policy was that everyone had to come in all or most days.
The WFH became almost a perk, like if you work hard enough and prove yourself, maybe we'd consider it.
If you look at the valuation of companies that hire or were started by top talent, all companies should want them. Crab mentality can make you rationalize scaring them away.
Companies hoping people forgot how nice it felt living in a nicer place and not commuting.
Being able to close my laptop, walk down to the beach and meet my friends is not something I will forget easily, nor something I want to trade for living in Madrid or Barcelona for a few peanuts more.
The paradox is that remote townhalls are probably so much more productive since everybody can just put it in the background and actually get things done.
This comment hits very hard, I can fully relate with this.
Also pre-covid I often worked in peripherals zones of Rome, one of the worst cities in Europe about traffic and public transport. I still have nightmares about those trips.
I live outside London in the UK, and the cost of travelling in daily is around $7500/year taking into account train and parking costs. Most software engineer will be in the 40% tax bracket for the top end of their salary. That means a company need to pay an additional $12500 to just break even.
If you do live in London, you will reduce your travel costs but your rent goes up. I don't have figures for this, but I expect it will work out roughly the same.
That is not even taking into account the costs of extended child care,etc.
I've been making similar calculations, but I include the travel time. An hour or so each way adds about 25% to the remuneration I expect. Given that the time is effectively fallow time that the company will receive zero benefit from, but would be available to me for reading, I can come down to 20%.
However, having to travel in to the office at all, even one day a week, would mean I still have to live within travel distance; this is a massive and expensive inconvenience. Not sure quite how to price that in.
Why wouldn't they pay me a higher rate? They'll pay me the least they can to get my services; where I live makes no difference to them. I'm sure that if they can get away with "we'll pay you less because you live far away" they will; it's up to me (us) to put a stop to that nonsense.
That works if you have upper hand in negotiations. In case they have 50 applicants for the job, and 5 pretty good then this can easily be a showstopper. Which is fine if you have 4 other negotiations happening in parallel, or possess a unique skill they desperately want (many think they do, most don't).
Its trivial for company to understand the relationships with location and pay in given country, when you come to an interview these rules are probably already sort of set in stone.
Like most fallacies they sound in the right but they are deprived of true sense.
Your personal cost cannot be a determinant of your compensation. Get into a huge dept or whatever and see whether your employer adjust your comp due to your particularly high must expenses or lunatic lifestyle.
What does make sense is what the market says is true. Even when it isn't.
Back then location was a predictor of a delta in compensation and that's exactly because there was no other way than to go to the office, hence be nearby.
Behind the fallacy is simply that they want to pick from the global pool of talent thanks to remote work, and want to use the location facfor to also lower the wage burden as they are at it.
There is a job market, i agree we should all put a stop to the non sense and if all goes well we can also start to ask ourselves why certain individuals are able to move to a limited number of locations in the world, other individuals having about the same profile only able to move to a more limited number of locations, and among those some only able to move to an even more limited number of places.
While political reasons also involved it doesn't make them ethically justifyable. A defence for more remote work and compensation not tied to location of the worker moves the needle towards the more justice direction.
The nonsense is the idea that they are paying based on your location due to your presumed costs. That is the nice way of saying they are paying you what they think you will accept because they think you are in a region where you do not have better options.
If you rejected the offer, and they wanted you, then the location based pay would magically change.
>> I live outside London in the UK, and the cost of travelling in daily is around $7500/year taking into account train and parking costs. Most software engineer will be in the 40% tax bracket for the top end of their salary. That means a company need to pay an additional $12500 to just break even.
The cost of lunch in Midtown Manhattan is now $15 to $20. People often say, "why not pack your own lunch" and others remind them they just took NJTransit-->PATH-->Subway1-->Subway2 with standing room only so carrying lunch is impractical.
Different segments of the population have different concerns. For the elderly and frail, it is their joint health and the difficulty of transportation without seating. For some, the $12500 cost is huge. For parents, it can be time with children.
I'd say the cost of commuting FOR ME is losing 40% of 50% of my free time with children. By the time I get home at 7:30pm or 8pm, their bedtime is approaching.
I'm currently on a 2/3 WFH/RTO schedule and it is a nice balance, especially after 20yrs or 5x schedules.
No it's just the money part. Taking a rush hour train to and from work in London adds 10 crappy hours to your week, and chances are you won't have a space to open your laptop either.
If you add those 10 hours the benefits of WFH become very very real.
It also doesn't take into account space and flexibility needs for a family. It's only equivalent for the least demanding individuals: single, relavitely young people. If you want to raise a family, London is easily 500% more expensive than the suburbs (because you need 3-4 bedrooms), and the transport costs are just total loss, since they don't allow you to travel (... together with your family, unless you pay a lot more)
I took a glance and it seems that your employer could pay for the ticket and then they don't pay income tax, or they can reimburse you for the ticket, but then they must pay income tax. Kind of a strange system. Would you be responsible for the income tax if they bought the ticket for you?
Not saying I believe you should work on site or remotely, just got curious about transit reimbursement rules in the UK.
That's a shame, we had tax-free transit and commuter rail benefits when I lived in Chicago. There's probably some cap, but every tax free benefit is income at your highest tax bracket. Apparently it's now $265/month for the train, with another $265/month for station parking.
A season ticket from Harlow to London - a 40 minute train ride - costs £4982.40/year (i.e. $6,351/year) if you're travelling 5+ days per week.
And that only gets you between national rail stations - it doesn't include the underground, or busses, or parking. They don't even guarantee you a seat.
It is a lot, but if you break it down it’s £400 a month or around £20 a day. Most London based jobs will have that premium baked in.
The choice people have is to move closer, and pay twice as much for a house of the same quality. So it doesn’t look too bad from that angle either.
Generally though, I think the London commuter isn’t getting a great deal. 40%+ tax, high house price, high commuting costs, long hours door to door, childcare potentially. You need to be earning deep into six figures to feel well off whilst living this lifestyle.
They can’t. The UK has been in a major cost of living crisis for years. This past winter even the middle class had to make compromises with their energy use to keep costs under control.
Trying to frame remote in mainstream media as a perk of benevolence from great leadership is in my view a wage supressing strategy.
If a business cuts office space by half or eliminates office space completely then that is a saving for the company, end of. Lease, insurance, Energy bills, internet bills, etc.
Framing this in the context of business to business. If my service created a saving for your company then everyone would agree that I could charge more for my service, as I stand to benefit from your saving. Somehow that disolves if the relation involves an HR department.
Hang on, you're saying a plausible scenario in the US is office workers carrying guns. How common is that?
I've been sidestepping opportunities to go to Austin on the grounds that I might be shot trying to commute to the office. Do I also need to factor in that whoever I'm talking to at the office might be carrying a gun?
I dont even know how seriously to take this comment.
First of all, active shooters can be found anywhere. Of course someone can go crazy and show up at the workplace with a gun.
Second, it depends on what you mean by common. 80% of active shooter incidents happen at work. However, you probably have less than 0.5% chances of being involved in one. Sucks when you are for sure, but these are pretty good odds.
Finally, avoiding an entire city just for that is dumb. Especially when you have way more risks in NYC or Chicago.
It's a sincere attempt to estimate the prior. Information on the US and guns is very heavily political. What american developers consider "obviously normal" about carrying guns to places developers go is probably as accurate an insight as one can find.
Probability of getting shot is related to how many guns are present. Prior to this thread I just assumed there were no guns in the office, because that's the European prior.
However I'm now thinking of the reaction to rust's no-guns-at-conferences stance where a non-zero number of people thought that was so contentious that they wouldn't go to a conference without their guns.
You say most active shootings happen at the workplace. If true, interesting in combination with the apparent frequency of school shootings.
I mentioned a specific city as I believe there's an association between Texas and revolvers which might skew the odds further.
Food probably won't get me to come in. I'm on a diet so I'd probably try to avoid the temptation. Everybody has preferences. Work is a serious place to me so going to a gun range (another serious place) isn't a big context switch in the same way something fun like a game is. I can't turn off enough to enjoy a game at work, or even during working hours.
You got a solution? Are you going to travel back in time to prevent the second amendment from being written? Or are you going to get a 2/3rd majority of state governors to call for a constitutional convention? Maybe you can convince 2/3rd majorities of the house and senate to overturn?
Well, one could take the whole "well regulated militia" thing seriously. Or one could say that "arms" was never intended to refer to weapons capable of killing many people in a short time, which is how it has been interpreted with respect to bombs and chemical weapons.
Failing that, sure, it would be nice if people could actually think the way the founders did, and seek a collective solution. But in a country where large numbers of people absolutely insist on the unrestricted ability to cause mass death, the only possibility is that the Constitution really is a suicide pact.
Maybe in the future “well regulated” will mean that a president creates a “National militia” or deputizes anyone with a lawful firearm and no one else can buy a gun outside of the militia. Of course this militia would be right wing but I guess dictatorship is how it could end.
Back then well regulated meant equipped. English has evolved over time. Of course if one day we had six liberal judges they might use the modern meaning of regulated.
I really want to believe you are not suggesting that a specific policy has, or will ever, stop someone from shooting up their office, but I don't see any other way to read this. Could you clarify?
Policies definitely work by creating friction. They dont stop all crimes, but they deter them. Just like locks on doors: sure people can break the locks, but often it deters them just enough not to bother.
This is why we have car door locks. Bicycle locks. Metal detectors. ID checks at stores. Unfortunately nothing is perfect.
… So you think that the friction provided by "no guns here" will even enter the mind of someone who was not stopped by the friction of "murder is illegal"?
In the American south, just about every public place you encounter will have people carrying guns, with a few exceptions. It's just a fact of life, you might as well pack your own.
Yep, and probably while going for a jog or hitting the convenience store to grab a gallon of milk.
As my former firearms instructor put it: "If a bad guy ever schedules a meeting on your calendar to mug you.. you should decline and not show up. Otherwise since bad guys don't usually book ahead, always be prepared."
One of the things we train people is that just because you can carry a firearm doesn't mean you should go places you normally wouldn't. If you consider a place too dangerous to go to normally, having a firearm doesn't change that.
In my recent job offer negotiations, I made mostly-remote a key factor. They wanted me. I didn't want to commute an hour each way every day when I could spend that time with my toddler instead.
I didn't give an ultimatum as much as say "I will stop interviewing with other companies and sign your offer now if you amend it to say I don't have to be in the office if I don't want to".
I am torn, I 100% understand the huge burden of commuting and the amazing flexibilities of working from home. I have a medical condition where I essentially have to prepare or at least bring all of my own food. This is obviously much easier when I WFH, and can prepare food ad hoc.
Although I do work for a large famous tech company, I have a sweet setup where I can bike to work (to my desk) in less than 10 minutes in Bay Area weather (which is cooperative probably 340 days a year), we are not working from office 5 days a week, and its somewhat socially acceptable to work limited hours (lets say 10-4:30) in the office.
Working in the office, I am so so so much more aware of all the other projects my team is working on, and the org as a whole. I am able to pick up on so much more. The little conversations, both about work and not are lost when WFH. Obviously many companies never 100% committed to remote work, and some of this could be made up for by different technologies and processes. But in my opinion it will be very very very hard to reach the fidelity and bandwidth of information of in person work.
I think you have a long list of pros and cons here.
A while back I was thinking about what college may look like in 20 year. I was thinking of my experience in a California UC and how useless I found the lectures and but how incredibly helpful I found the office hours and studying with peers. I was thinking a distributed satellite model could be ideal. The lectures or base instruction could be remote, or even AI based, with small "campuses" or even just glorified rooms somewhere (library, strip mall) where small groups of students can meet in groups of 5,10,15 and learn together.
I wonder if something could be done for work as well. If larger corporations could maintain lots of tiny office spaces, near where people want to, or could live and require teams to be co-located. I truly think that if the commute was just a few minutes, and the hours in office were only required to be 6 hours or something, that the working in office would not be a huge burden.
Ditto. Hybrid is a hat trick to lure those who categorically reject on-site roles. Once in, there are dozens of ways to justify needing you in most often.
They shouldn't forget that the office is no longer as productive. We used to have our own desks before the pandemic but now we have a half broken booking system for the hotdesks. Half the people ignore it so I often have to fight work colleagues.
Also I'm no longer near the people who I actually work with but mindless sales drones instead, barking loudly on the phone all day. I really hate the office now. I go as little as possible even though HR demands we come 2 days a week. But screw them.
> Also I'm no longer near the people who I actually work with
I think herein lies the divide between people who find the office valuable vs those who don't (or at least part of it). Back in the pre-pandemic days, I worked for large Megacorp1234, and my team was distributed throughout the country. Most people in my immediate office vicinity were not the people I needed to collaborate with to do my job. We were essentially a remotely operating team, who nevertheless all had to have a butt in cubicle for some reason. Being able to occasionally work from home (each specific instance had to be approved though!) improved productivity dramatically.
Fast-forward to today, and I work for a small company. My team and I work next to one and another in a nice, quiet office space, with breakout rooms with whiteboards for noisy collaboration. Team cohesion is good, and we all actually know each other beyond a profile picture on a computer screen. In this environment (which I'm beginning to learn is quite rare), you simply cannot beat the benefits of in-person collaboration. The office does actually provide a real benefit, and I do actually enjoy coming in. As do my colleagues. We all have the option of working remote, yet most of choose to come in more often than not. However let's not understate that being hybrid is a big part of what makes this whole thing work. Pretty hard to beat the flexibility that provides.
So I guess my point is if businesses want people to come back to the office, they need to provide real tangible benefits to actually coming back. I've worked in an office like yours, and if I still did, my stance on the matter would be the same as yours.
I actually do prefer hybrid, except hybrid meetings.
I worked remotely for years before the pandemic too, so I am not a newbie to remote work who just doesn't get it.
I get value from the office being a good social space, and a good space to focus if I am noticing my self-dicipline drift. There really is some good adhoc discussions that happen in person that just don't occur online as well.
I would never give up WFH though, it is what allows me to handle the whole week in general. Fewer distractions, no commute means more rest, means better thoughts. If I were a perfect worker robot it wouldn't matter where you put me, but I am a human so my needs fluctuate. Having options lets me be where I can work best and be happiest on any given day.
I've just about given up trying with remote work tbh. I've found it just about impossible to collaborate with people since it seems everyone is out walking their dog otherwise unresponsive for most of the day. Occasionally I've attempted to start the day with a good attitude and try to get as much work done as possible but found that I still can't get much done since I'll have 5 in progress tasks all blocked by various people who never respond.
Occasionally work rents out a meeting room for the day and then we can actually get a full days work in where everyone is available and communication flows freely.
Job hunting to see if it's better at the next place but I'm not too hopeful since the last places have been so poor at remote work. Haven't been able to find anything which has an office these days.
>I'll have 5 in progress tasks all blocked by various people who never respond.
Slackers are ruining WFH for everyone but if the company tolerates them slacking off like that it means that that's the company culture and getting stuff done doesn't matter.
I've had the same issue as a junior. Stagnated at a job where the team was WFH and full of slackers who wouldn't respond.
A lot of companies haven't built a system of properly mentoring juniors remotely and accountability where people WFH can also be trusted to do their job and not masquerade at doing work.
This is part of the problem I suppose. Top talent likes to get things done, will do it anywhere. There's always a group that gets nothing done, they're less visible when they WFH. But for the middle, how much productivity do they gain or lose by going remote? Also, the mix of "stars" is probably different on site or remote. Some people who really were crushed by commuting and working in a distracting office are shining at home, others who need that routine and comraderie are struggling to be as effective.
Voluntary office work probably helps, but friends of mine who liked being in the office talk about going to work to sit in an empty bullpen and do the same zoom/slack teamwork they'd do at home.
For me, I don't have the experience as I have a job that needs to be on site.
Do you really have 5 in-progress tasks a day... that are all blocked due to other people? I've never experienced that in software engineering/dev. I've experienced 5+ tasks per day as a code monkey; but never have I been completely and utterly blocked from doing any work at all -- because there's always something else I could be doing (see: backlog). And if I were still in the 5+ task per day camp, I would take my sweet time answering Slacks/etc.; because I'm already inundated with work, and breaking out of my flow to spend 15 minutes on a text chat that could have been 2 minutes through voice, is not something I'm going to do.
I do not understand it at all. Are you a junior/working on simple one-off tasks with inane deadlines everyday/not in engineering?
From past threads, I thought your problem was that you're depressed about not seeing people in the office. Now it's people walking their dogs too much? ;p
That sounds like an issue with the people blocking you. Someone who needs to be forced into an office to do the work, or even respond to urgent comms, sounds unreliable. If returning to office fixes that, my concern would be that same organization being unreliable for other reasons.
It sounds like a problem of organization (your tasks are too easy to block, maybe you lack autonomy or authority) and of communication and perspective (the colleagues who "never respond" have, or think they have, something more important to do, and you aren't able to convince them that helping you is useful) with far deeper roots than work from home.
If "communication flows freely" only when you put everyone in a meeting room, your team needs meetings: why don't you have virtual ones over video chat?
> Having options lets me be where I can work best and be happiest on any given day.
You are lucky if that is really an _option_ for you. Hybrid work usually means that "team" (i.e. the boss) decides which N days a week everyone must come to the office and compliance is not really optional.
Speak for yourself. As evidenced in each thread like this, there are workers who prefer working in the office or hybrid and wouldn’t want to be fully remote.
WFH is just deeply ingrained in some people and corporate cultures. Some corporations seem to be too apathetic or stubborn to walk away from their huge office leases. I'm glad my employer did.
Of course, in the client I work for, all the middle-management and above all work from home 100%. It's only the peons and their immediate managers who have to go into the office. It's so blatant I can't believe the upper management can keep a straight face while talking about how great it is to see everyone together while they themselves are remote.
Having to go back to the office would now require me moving 3000 miles across the country, to a place that made me depressed every winter. To a place that had some of the most restrictive policies the last few years. And to a spot that has housing costs even higher and worse.
No thanks, I'd rather take contract work or figure out something else.
Most work is done by a tiny minority. This minority will perform well from home or from the office.
The majority will slack off in both places, but less visibly so in the office.
So mandating return to office for the whole company (don't really see a practical way to mandate it for some only) to make bad employees suck slightly less, is of course going to annoy the productive few the most.
The (unfortunate) reality is these shifts back to office are going to be easier to pull off if a company is willing to lose 10% of their staff (or whatever the percentage ends up being) because the job market right now is very loose with a lot of people out of work, making replacements are easy (and quick) to find.
Some companies may even like the idea of shedding some of their top talent (who also tend to be paid a lot) if they feel they're still overstaffed from the covid hiring boom.
Source: I'm a hiring manager at a remote company. I've talked to candidates who are leaving their companies because they tried to negotiate 100% remote but their companies are refusing, so they're looking to land at a permanent fully remote position.
Edit: comment above is in the context of tech companies
For large companies, they'll use this as an opportunity to push salaries down.
This happened in banks in London over the 90s and 00s. At each 'crisis' (IR35, LTCM, credit crunch, etc.), they made staff redundant, and reduced new salary offers across the board, you could argue, almost like a cartel.
