There is a whole dimension missing from this article, which is, "WFH has a huge difference in result depending on who you are, when you are (in your career), and where you are in the company".
-- For the budding young developer who can't wait to show ideas to teammates and demonstrate being a go-getter by asking random questions and finding unaddressed issues to innovate on, WFH might be terrible. You're going to schedule time to fortuitously run into the senior person who takes an interest in your idea?
-- For the working parent whose productivity has been slashed by 50% and stress has gone up by 50% due to parenting obligations, WFH might be terrible.
-- For the middle manager who can coast along and not need to move greatly in his/her career, WFH might be great.
-- For the developer who works by tickets on very concrete things and this is nothing new, WFH might be great.
-- For the small company CEO who relies on force of personality and everyone in the same room urgently working to get something done, WFH might be terrible.
There's a huge variability in what WFH means, depending on what you want from the situation.
For the person 20 years deep into their career who eats lunch at their desk every day rather than going with coworkers, WFH might be awesome!
Well said btw. I don’t know that I’ve seen anyone even attempt a comprehensive assessment of how work from home helps or hurts, just these narrow appeals to those in a similar situation.
I've saved money but do miss the various options close to work. Taking an hour to jump offsite with music or a coworker for lunch was great. Today's lunch break is a shower and quick lunch. Very exciting.
I'd say it depends a lot on the company and team. We've been all-remote for 10 years now, and I'm certainly biased, but I don't think evidence suggests it's been less than good for young, ambitious members of the team. Our lead front-end developer had no previous paid experience as a developer, but stood out in our interview process (which is based on a series of short, real-work-like assignments done asynchronously), and has continually impressed since then. If leadership is competent, I don't think it's necessary to have fortuitous in-person run-ins and such to demonstrate one's drive and ability.
This is so true. Those "fortuitous in-person run-ins" are also highly correlated with looking the part and having the same hobbies and friends as well-connected people.
I think there's a chance we're going to see all-remote employees be subconsciously judged on things like the quality of their lighting, audio, background, mute etiquette, etc. IMO that's a lot better than the current approach of judging based on similar appearance, hobbies, lunch schedules, golf club memberships, etc.
When I started working remotely I felt like I had to prove myself. I had to produce something useful every day.
Whereas when I was in the office I saw lot of people doing mostly nothing but hanging out in the lunch-room. I guess they felt like if they take the trouble to arrive in the office that's a lot of work already. And they did not make the choice they are just doing it because they were told to do it.
I agree there is value in talking to people in person and having wide-ranging conversations about everything but there has to be a balance. But all in all I thought me working from home gave the employer much more than if I had come to office every day, and hung around in the lunch room with others.
How is subconsciously judging based on lighting, audio etc. any better than whether or not you play golf? The only spot for me to put my desk means that, in video conferences I look like an anonymous whistle blower from a news report. How is being subconsciously ignored because of how my apartment is laid out any better than being ignored because I prefer to swim than play golf?
Based on your examples, all-remote isn't an equalizer, it's changing the rules by which you are judged.
Maybe, doesn't make the judgement criteria any less arbitrary though. And given how dark my corner of the room is, I suspect I'd need a pretty expensive lighting setup to make it any better :)
At the same time, it sucks for friends and coworkers around here in 1 bedroom apartments with both partners working from home or 3 kids and no yard and social events to structure around. My manager is going insane working and sleeping in the same (high cost) room while locked into a lease. I was lucky to move to a place with 2 bedrooms recently so 1 is the office and I'm so glad to not have kids.
If a person has parenting obligations than how is WFO better than WFH? Or are we talking about more than just WFH, such as a pandemic that reduces childcare options?
If only one parent is working they might get roped into helping out the parent who normally stays at home. At least that's how co-workers in that situation have described it to me; small children don't understand why daddy is home but can't play with them, plus you feel guilty not helping your spouse if they're having a rough day.
I myself have experienced those challenges. And IMO it is an opportunity to help with kids more and without becoming all consuming: on break, during would-be-commuting time, and during emergencies.
Spouses and kids--even young ones--can adapt if healthy boundaries and expectations are established. Office life is a modern phenomenon. Before that most families lived and worked together.
> small children don't understand why daddy is home but can't play with them
This is exactly correct.
My office did work from home Tuesdays / Thursdays even before the pandemic. My wife stays home with our three kids. I tried it precisely once. My kids were grumpy, my wife was grumpier. There is an unspoken expectation that if you are present you should be helping / interacting. I'm sure we could have worked it out, but it wasn't worth the effort.
Having the entire office (5 people, so nothing big) to myself twice a week was pretty nice though. And it set a great precedent so that I've been the only person going into the office the past four months.
We had our child in February. I took a planned two weeks off, then had planned on working from home two to three more weeks to help transition, then to go back to the office as I was required to do. By the time I was looking at going back to the office, I went in for about a week to onboard a new employee then pushed the office into WFH for everyone due to the pandemic.
My wife and I haven't had an issue at any point. She understands that the reason we're not homeless right now is because I spend all day on the computer. She doesn't come to my workspace and communicates with me as she would as if I was at an office (i.e., via IM). She will, very occasionally, shoot me a message and _ask_ if I can spare some time to give her a hand with something but there's no animosity if I say no and for the most part she will try and work it out herself, even if it's inconvenient (e.g., finding somewhere to safely park the baby for a few minutes while she throws a load of laundry in).
I think the only one in the house that doesn't understand "dad working != dad at home" is the dog so she sometimes has to be crated when I have important meetings.
And I wouldn't trade the extra 2-3 hours a day I get with my family or to spend on hobbies instead of sitting in bumper-to-bumper traffic for anything.
I'm just going to point out that if you kid was 2-3 years old, both you and your wife would be having a VERY different experience. A newborn mostly eats and sleeps. A toddler will tear your house appart, constantly interrupt you, call for you (usually lowdly), etc.
Those are not comparable experience, the month I spent at home when my kid was born was spend playing MMOs most of the day, now I cant have 5 minutes alone unless the TV is on 24/7 (wich is terrible, also).
I have done the WFH with a 2/3 years old, and my experience wasn't all that different than the comment you're responding to. Even children that young respond to boundaries.
> And I wouldn't trade the extra 2-3 hours a day I get with my family or to spend on hobbies instead of sitting in bumper-to-bumper traffic for anything.
This is the actual difference between our situations.
I have a ten minute commute. Avoiding ten minutes in the car isn't worth the hassle of working from home (we don't have space for me to have my own "office", so I'd just be in the living room with everyone else)
If I did have a multi-hour commute every day, I'd absolutely be working from home any chance I could.
And yeah, if I had a ten minute commute and had to work in my living room I'd probably be working out of my car in a parking lot somewhere to have a hope of getting anything done. :)
Wasn't trying to invalidate your situation or anything, just throwing more anecdata at the wall.
Personal circumstances vary of course, but for me, one of the perks of working from home is that I can help out when my spouse is having a rough day. Obviously, I don't spend all day helping with children, but I can occasionally take a break to comfort a crying child or help with something when my spouse's arms are full.
Also, after the first couple of weeks my young children had no problem understanding that when I'm in my office room I am working, and I can't play. But they do really enjoy seeing me at lunch, which didn't happen when I was WFO.
But again, that's just my experience and I'm sure it's different for other people.
Our 2-year old understands pretty well that he can't disturb me when I'm working. It's not like there's zero distraction, but it's no worse than random people stopping by to chat when I used to work in an office. I think it's very different when the kids know you work when you're in the home office vs random covid-wfh where there's no pattern.
I they're just talking about the ill equiped. As a father who has been WFH for a couple years now, having a dedicated office and establishing boundaries & expectations with my spouse has made a world of difference.
(Note: I know not everyone can have a dedicated office.)
People learn the hard way that kids in school/daycare are very different than kids at home. Even at an age when they can largely fend for themselves there’s a lot of difficulties that come from trying to focus on work while kids are around.
Then we're not comparing only WFH but rather pandemic-from-home. I've dropped off kids at daycare and worked from home. It was much quicker than daycare+commute to office.
I think laying out the various dimensions like this is the right approach. There are also factors such as, what about cracking jokes or otherwise having pleasant non work conversations at work. Zoom doesn't cut it. Slack surely not. Next, the outsourcability of our work may not be ideal for those in high rent, expensive real estate areas. We'll be competing with the cheap, or will need to move.
I don't think that was his point. His point is that it's hard to build relationships when no one ever sees each other. Relationships are extremely important in the business setting and it's something the Aspergers inclined tech crowd has a little bit of a difficult time grasping.
Relationships are really important outside the business setting too. Often much more important.
Something that a lot of people in the business setting don't seem to understand.
My work friends are just that... work friends. I have to hide large swaths of my personal life from them and they don't usually stick around outside work. Work relationships suck.
Sure. OTOH, you don’t have to be either an Aspie or a Business A-Player Career Superhero to give a pragmatic nod to the fact that work is where many people, perhaps most, spend their waking hours. It’s only natural and eminently human that for a lot of them, that’s where their friendships and relationships will form and play out.
In my opinion, it’s all the more so if they live in one of the many nondescript suburban places of which Middle America comprises. Having little to come home to or go out to, with our bankrupt concept of civic space and the public realm, it’s all the more likely many of us will unconsciously look to work as the locus of social possibility. It’s not because we want to, it’s just the shape of the situation.
Totally agree. In my previous job our project team (Program Manager + project engineer, me) flies out to our biggest vendor every month to discuss production issues and development updates. This face time is critical in building the strong relationships and has proven its worth when prioritization or escalation is needed but not covered explicitly in the contract.
You forget the conversation being responded to is a list of pros and cons of being in the office. I listed additional pros as having comraderie. It doesn't mean you need to be there. I just point out that for some of us, it makes working actually worth it, or at least feel a little more meaningful.
Ideally we WFH or come in as we see fit. If I'm the boss I'd say, aim to come in at least 3X a week if you don't live hours away. But some people just prefer to keep to themselves and simply purely work. More power to them, let that be an option too.
> There are also factors such as, what about cracking jokes or otherwise having pleasant non work conversations at work.
These things are mildly pleasant. But commuting is very unpleasant. Being interrupted all the time is unpleasant. Working with a dog on my lap is pleasant.
On the pleasant scale, remote wins hands down.
TBH, I do most of my "chat" through chat now anyway.
> -- For the small company CEO who relies on force of personality and everyone in the same room urgently working to get something done, WFH might be terrible.
Forgive me but the way you formulated it doesn't correspond to reality. What is really happening is that the 'small company CEO' suddenly has an idea and wants everyone to work on something but at the same time expect everyone to get their normal work done. This basically means people have to work overtime, and more often than not this overtime is unpaid. Moreover, instead of clear rules there are "expectations". Having to spell it out, especially in writing, makes it clear that this kind of behavior is abusive.
Don't depend on 'personality', just explain to your workers clearly what you expect from them, define priorites, and listen to their feedback.
You have a call with the team every few days where you have to describe what you've done and what you are going to do next. This helps keeping you in check.
Definitely agree with these points. You left out some of the more individual ones where personality and preferences come into play. I think that a lot of variability will come down to preferences.
Also, it's worth noting that for many people who have not worked from home much (or if at all), they won't really "know" whether or not it's a good setup for themselves until they actually do it for more than a few weeks to start drawing some observations about what works well and what doesn't.
I’m a lot closer to the end of my career than the beginning and am hoping to ride this WFH thing out as long as possible.
But if I were younger I personally would be kind of bummed out for a couple of reasons:
1. It’s just a totally different vibe working with close colleagues in person. Work was just a fun place to be when I was young (and single.)
2. Getting a feel for what else is going on in the company and who might be good to work with seems a lot more difficult. Just prior to the whole COVID shutdown I had been temporarily shifted to a team to work out some specific issues. That has changed and I’m sort of stuck on this team for a bit.
Working on a less interesting thing I feel less connection to my team and much more like a contractor.
Finding other opportunities within the same company, where you want to have a feel for the personalities involved just feels tougher.
It will be interesting to see how this shakes out if it keeps up for a lot longer. It just feels like some places will suffer from a lack of cross-pollination.
I've been self-employed working remotely from my clients since 2011 so I can hopefully answer some of these fears :D
1. It is a different vibe compared to working with co-workers, so instead you find collaborators who may not work for the same company, or perhaps you code with your friends that aren't working on the same project. I had a membership at a workspace filled with other go-getting, fun-loving entrepreneurial mostly young professionals and it was that same amazing social + work setting, but 100% divorced from my employment/client. If I lost a client that wonderful work community and environment wouldn't have gone anywhere.
2. It is harder to overhear things at the watercooler if there's no watercooler - if you're remote in a non-remote company you will be missing out, but in a remote-first company you're forced to find other ways to communicate. It's up to each person to open those channels and pursue it, but in 100% distributed teams this happens naturally (when there is no office). You do have to be a little proactive sending some emails though "So I hear you like cats" "So I heard in the meeting you're travelling to South America now, how is that?", etc.
I think what we'll see is the idea that your employer must get all your butts into chairs under the same roof is not the best way to do things for a few reasons:
- it's costly to the employer to shelter and provide for employees in real estate and so many other ways if they simply don't need to have a building
- it limits the talent pool they can hire from geographically for little good reason - a distributed team can hire anybody anywhere in the world and that definitely gives you a competitive advantage at finding talent!
After going this work-from-my-own-setting for almost a decade I feel like it's inevitable, and I think companies who don't use a 100% distributed model today will be competing harder than they need to and paying more than they should to do it.
I'm glad COVID has accelerated the schedule for all this happening, but I really hope most offices don't go back.
Here are some tips I've found for making the most of working from your own surroundings:
- DO customize the environment to your comfort: lights, sounds, smells, privacy, seating - if you could design the perfect environment for being at your best in that moment, take those liberties. It pays off in productivity
- DO get up and move around often throughout the day, or move from place to place. It seems sometimes you get into a funk and all you have to do to leave that dim cloud is just physically relocate and you'll be refreshed mentally. Get up and go make a coffee, go water the lawn as a break, go check the mail. These little breaks will help you keep up the pace and give you stamina.
- DO get out of the house (COVID-willing), if there are cafés or outdoor places with electricity and bathrooms and tables and chairs it can be good and here's a secret -> set goals when you leave the house for what you must accomplish before you return home. If a café has hours and closes down for the night you have tricked yourself with a very real deadline and sense of urgency that otherwise wouldn't be there. By setting goals for myself and using real time deadlines like this I can stay focused on what I'm supposed to be doing
In short, I envision that in 10+ years and for a long time we it will be normal for us to design offices at home, or share rent of work studios with our family and friends, and what used to be coworkers and office drama will just be the people you choose to live and work with, and you can get hired and lose your job and this social group of people you work around doesn't need to change. Overall I think it will be better!
All very good but we got to hope us all sitting at home popping out now and then. Provides enough of an economy to employ us all.
A lot of the people who consume and therefore pay for the work we do. Work in those facilities management, building security, shop worker, cafe and restaurant workers, public transportation etc.
If there is no demand or it dramatically reduces possibly a lot of us remote workers will find we also are no longer needed or far worse compensated.
We all need to look at the chain that feeds us.
What is going to replace the busy cities, airports, offices and all the infrastructure and it's supply chain?
overall is a positive thing to consume less and produce more with the time saved by transportation. We should not work jobs only to keep the GDP machine busy.
I agree. I'm also in the later stages of my career (30 years of work), but still have a way to go.
I like WFH a lot more than I like commuting and working in the office. As a youngster though I loved the cut and thrust of a metropolis. Especially the adventures after work.
I hope the current situation creates a permanent inflection in companies attitudes, which enables me to perhaps move out if this big city and find remote work for my last 10-15 years of work.
As someone who is part of this generation of young professionals, I don't think it's so clear cut. I've got a pretty active social life, my own circle of close friends, a robust professional network, and I live in an urban, walkable neighborhood in a large city. Yet I, and most of my friends, acquaintances, and classmates fresh out of college (< 5 years) have no interest in centering our lives around the workplace, and many (me included) have taken or been searching for fully/part-remote jobs (and not just in tech) even pre-covid.
I enjoy my colleagues and work environment (and wouldn't trade it for the world now that I'm mostly remote!), love to chat with them and keep in touch, but at the end of the day I already have my own friends with whom I have stronger bonds than the workplace, and I'd rather spend my free time with them rather than endless happy hours with work colleagues who are, in the grand scheme of things, really only present in my life for the duration of a job. Coincidentally, some of my favorite coworkers have this same outlook.
I concede this is all anecdotal, yes, but so is your generalization. I personally believe much of this youngest generation of professionals, of which I am part, already has relatively established social networks due to social media that someone even 10 years ago entering a new job in a new city would not have, hence the less need to rely on the workplace for a social life.
If you ask me, the future of the workplace isn't fully-remote or fully in-person, it's an office where everyone comes in 2-3 days a week, as necessary, and working remote or at-home the rest of the time.
> If you ask me, the future of the workplace isn't fully-remote or fully in-person, it's an office where everyone comes in 2-3 days a week, as necessary, and working remote or at-home the rest of the time.
I'm in the same boat as you, also early career but Please, NO. Being asked to go twice a week to the office is the worst trade-off. It means I still need to live in commuting distance of the office but I also need to rent an extra room to be my office where I'm expected to work for 3 days/week.
I favor a model in which once a quarter the whole team spends a week together as a "retreat". This gives you flexibility to really live where you want without that need to still go to the office. It also means the company doesn't even need to keep an office to start with.
I totally agree this is also a valid option, and one I’d personally love to explore more. To me, though, that’s still essentially near the extreme fully-remote, and I could understand if it’s not for everyone. I definitely hope and do think it will become more common in the future though, too.
EDIT: GitHub actually balances this beautifully, imo. They have offices in SF, NY, Austin, and Tokyo for those who want to go into an office every day or semi-regularly, though they also do a yearly company-wide retreat and quarterly team gatherings if you want to work fully remote.
This hit the nail on the head for me. I belong to the same generation and have felt pretty alienated by the expectancy to let my life revolve around work to the point where my company expect that I am going to hang out at work a couple of nights a month and hang out with co-workers inbetween that.
The world is so social, I have large circles of friends/aquaintences from my hobbies, from university, and from back home. I have my apetite of kind of, but not too close, friends more than satisfied, and would rather have alone time or time with the most important people of my life.
Everyone is different, but before I could work from home I stopped going to lunch because I just needed that time alone as the rest of the day was full of people. I'm not bragging, because I'm not sure if this really is better than "just" having your work and your few work-pals in life than the endless social circles and the hundreds of people you are strangely intimate with through FB, IG, snap updates.
But it is what is and I hope I never have to go back to office life, in that case I have to cut out some social media, some friends and/or a hobby from my life to survive.
An echo chamber? I find one of the more compelling reasons for being on HN is the strange cross-over and variety of posters (age, industry, geography, etc).
In my experience that's a less than frequent occurrence. I.e. I agree that there is a predominant voice here on HN (echo chamber) that lives to shut down (vote) other views
All social media is an echo chamber, and I'm confused people are confused by that. People search out for like minded groups/orgs/etc, it's just part of human nature. It's a rare breed (at least less common type) that seeks out a different point of view on a regular basis. Religious types seek out a congregation of similar beliefs, tech nerds seek fellow tech nerds, sports geeks seek other fans of their same team/sport/etc.
Speak for yourself. I'm very early career, and I love wfh. Moving to a smaller town to get cheaper rent and less traffic and more time surfing. No way do I want to be in an office with any regularity.
I'm 54. I still want to go to work. I still want to live and work in downtown cities. I still want to go to the office and mingle/work.
The caveat is of course I have to be working on something I'm interested in with good people. If work was full of bad people or I didn't care about the work then of course I wouldn't be excited to go to work.
A couple of other things though: I hate remote communication because it's so different to being in-person and I feel like WFH stifles your ability to communicate what you're working on with people outside of your team.
There are a number of people who want to get out of cities due to the current situation. If I hadn't signed a lease back in April, I'd be moving from my current city right now. Unless something significant happens to change my mind, I'll most likely leave in 2021.
Work is no longer a fun place to be. No jokes, no personal stories, no candid sharing of perspectives. Definitely no going for drinks with coworkers. One wrong word and you’re cancelled. The less time you have to spend in a coastal corporation with a modern HR department, the better.
Yeah, this just isn't true. Plenty of fun to be had, plenty of candid perspective sharing, plenty of drinking with coworkers. If your coastal corp doesn't have these things, get out of there.
And if you find yourself getting "cancelled" everywhere you go? Probably a personal problem.
>And if you find yourself getting "cancelled" everywhere you go? Probably a personal problem.
I'm not sure where you got the impression that the parent was constantly being canceled. The actual problem is that nobody wants to be canceled even once, so they're forced to be perpetually on their tippy toes. The recent cancellations[1] for (arguably) non-hateful behavior creates a chilling effect.
I'm not sure where you got the impression I got that impression. Simply pointing out the obvious: if you follow my advice to leave unhealthy work environments and find yourself facing repeated trouble, it's worth considering whether your own behavior is a factor.
>The actual problem is that nobody wants to be canceled even once, so they're always perpetually on their tippy toes.
This is how professional environments have always been and I don't agree that it's a problem. When a bunch of people with different beliefs get together its important for everyone to invest effort in keeping the peace so the focus can remain on work.
Thankfully there's still plenty of room for sharing personal beliefs with coworkers (even differing opinions) as long as you've put in the work to build a trusting relationship.
> The recent cancellations[1] for (arguably) non-hateful behavior creates a chilling effect.
I guess it might depend on what sorts of things you're used to saying. I haven't felt chilled at work, and haven't felt any need to adjust my behavior or the things I say in any way.
> One wrong word and you’re cancelled.
I think many of those words have always been wrong, and it's only now that people are correctly catching flack for it, because people are willing to go to HR with their complaints.
I think there's some truth in what you say, but as a counterpoint, consider this essay Paul Graham wrote a few weeks back: http://www.paulgraham.com/orth.html . Namely this part:
The more conventional-minded someone is, the more it seems to them that it's safe for everyone to express their opinions. It's safe for them to express their opinions, because the source of their opinions is whatever it's currently acceptable to believe. So it seems to them that it must be safe for everyone.
PG and the parent comment are saying the same thing. The problem is when the conventional-minded person becomes stuck in a convention that is no longer true. That doesn’t necessarily mean that said convention was _correct_, but that what _was_ conventional is no longer so.
It used to be _conventional_ to have scantily clad “booth babes” in pretty much every technical conference’s vendor room (worse at things like CES, but I remember going to a mid-2000s VMworld conference where there were some booth babes). At some point—in part because of pushback against the sexism of “booth babes”—it became embarrassing to have them. I remember discussions on various sites (IIRC, including HN) where people lamented “feminism” for the disappearance of booth babes. Ultimately, the people who lamented it couldn’t keep up with the changes in convention.
It used to be _conventional_ to be casually sexist or racist in the office. The convention changed. The people who are supposedly being “canceled” have been unable to keep up with the convention. It could be personal sexism and/or racism, or it could simply be systemic sexism and/or racism and they haven’t _quite_ caught the memo that the convention changed.
hmm maybe I've misunderstood the parent comment or the PG essay. I read them like this:
Parent comment: I haven't felt censored, therefore there is no problem.
PG essay: This isn't a good argument for the absence of censorship, since some people adopt their opinions wholesale from the dominant orthodoxy of their times, making it logically impossible for them to say anything heterodox. Such people would therefore never feel censored.
Anyway, that's my take. How do you you see them as saying the same thing? I think the PG essay does talk about conventions changing, which you did a very good job of illustrating with your booth babe example...though in the essay, he seems more interested in good opiions that run counter to current conventions rather than bad ones that convention endorses (like booth babes).
> I haven't felt chilled at work, and haven't felt any need to adjust my behavior or the things I say in any way.
I expect that's probably because you happen to be of a similar viewpoint as the majority of the folks you work with.
> I think many of those words have always been wrong
True, but many of them haven't. Over time, it's gotten to the point where expressing a liberal view at a workplace that mostly conservative, or vice versa, is likely to get your fired for being a bad person. The same is true of a lot of specific talking points. Talking politics at work has never been a great idea, but it's gotten to the point where talking about anything that politics talks about is a mine field.
The real issue is that the amount of stuff we can talk about is getting more and more limited. This also increases the chances of talking unknowingly/mistakenly about a touchy subject.
Indeed. I grew up in the USSR so I am pretty good with the whole "don't talk about this over the phone/in earshot of somebody you don't trust/outside your kitchen" game. However, the rules in the later USSR were clear as the forbidden topics have not changed every week. In the modern USA anything can become political in an instant and there is no way this is sustainable. If J.K. Rowling can get cancelled then nobody is safe. It's more resembling the early USSR, where people purging public enemies last week became the public enemies themselves this week and their accusers were purged the next week.
J.K. Rowling hasn’t been cancelled. She’s been told that her words are hurtful to a vulnerable group of people and that she’s repeating some well-refuted lies. She keeps doubling down on those lies and her hurtful comments.
But she’s still worth a stupid amount of money and she still has her publishing contracts. She’s received some pretty disgusting hateful comments _back_ (which is inexcusable), but most objections are specifically because she’s repeating toxic hate speech.
Being told that one’s words are hurtful is not the equivalent of being purged in the early USSR (such purges were quite often literal with use of bullets).
She has an opinion others don't like and she has all the money she will ever need. Same with TechLead (youtuber). So both of them are speaking out, and they can do so because they literally have more "Fuck You" money sitting in a bank than most of us can make over our lifetimes.
Her words are resonating with a lot of women, and more than that, there are many more women who are afraid to agree with her publicly. Brenden O'Neil does a great talk about Orthodoxy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BtWrljX9HRA
I'm not going to say what I think about her statements, but I do think she has a right to say them. Dismissing them outright is dismissing the many people who are genuinely worried about legislation changes that affect what we can and cannot say.
I have said nothing about her right to say her statements, as wrong-headed and ignorant as I think they are.
Her critics also have every right to express their disgust with her support for transphobic “thought-leaders”. The complaints about “cancel culture” are _mostly_ that people who have never had their opinions challenged are now being challenged and called out for hurtful statements.
I am sorry my message was not clear enough. I did not say that J.K.Rowling is broke or that being cancelled is as same as being sent to Siberia/executed in 1930s USSR.
All I said is that similarly to the 1930s USSR rules of what is "hate"/"counter-revolution" are changing so quickly and abruptly that even people who had been dedicated to the cause are routinely found guilty. E.g. just a couple months ago Rowling was an inspiration for women, an advocate for LGBT, feminism and other causes. Now she is being told that her words are hurtful. It's as same as some NKVD officer, who busted the counter-revolutionaries for criticizing the great ally of the USSR, Germany, get busted himself for being a German spy. And no, I don't mean that Rowling was busting somebody for criticizing Germany or is a German spy.
I don't think many people are worried they'll be told off or get into an argument, they're worried about getting fired in the middle of a joint recession/pandemic. J. K. Rowling has been getting herself into trouble supporting various people who got fired, for example.
It's also worth noting that trans people are a fraction of a percentage of the population. Most people won't know anyone personally. It's easier to hate a distant figure who you've never met, particularly when they only end up in the news for being near the Kardashians, leaking government secrets, or getting upset at a beloved children's author. Not a lot of people know who e.g. Lynn Conway is, and that's a shame.
Let’s be honest though, “liberal” workplaces are the most likely to be cancelling. A public school fired a teacher for simply tweeting that “Trump is our president.” Tweeting in support of Obama would rarely, if ever, result in any notice in most schools.
‘I live in a rather special world. I only know one person who voted for Nixon. Where they are I don’t know. They’re outside my ken. But sometimes when I’m in a theater I can feel them.'
While I generally think more telework is a great thing for numerous reasons, the state of discourse makes me worried about people spending so much time online. The social media "hate laser" effect is I think the main force behind things like the kind of histrionic leftism you describe as well as the alt-right and fellow traveler movements. Social media rewards that kind of extreme polarizing content as it drives "engagement," and everyone is losing their damn mind.
"Hate laser" is brilliant. It's a stimulated emission of hate.
To go one step further: For a laser to work requires some kind of pumping, in order to get the atoms in a state where they can emit. By analogy, what "pumps" the hate laser?
Trolls do. Nuff said on that topic; we've all seen it.
Foreign governments do. The point of "agitation propaganda" is to get the population in an agitated state, that is, a state where they are ready to lash out. I think there is sufficient evidence of Russia doing this, and I suspect that both China and Iran are doing so also.
Domestic political parties do. "The other side is not just wrong, they're evil. Here, look how evil they are! Look what horrible things they're doing! Send us money so that we can fight them!"
And the media do. Especially social media, but the regular media as well. Outrage drives clicks, clicks sell ads, ads make money. (Alternately, media could be thought of as turning up the gain on the other forms of pumping.)
Your opinions probably align with everyone's (see Paul Graham's recent post on Orthodoxy Privilege). I hate online happy hour because there's some person who's going to try to talk about politics and won't take the cues to shut that shit down.
It's incredibly dangerous to talk about anything remotely controversial at work right now, if you're in 100% remote/lockdown work. I've heard this from multiple non-work friends. I personally avoid it whenever possible.
Hell, it's not even work friends. I know people who have completely stopped texting each other over narrow political views.
Yes, because much of what trump is criticized for is objectively bad. I will shit on his actions and policies openly, knowing that (for example) the only people who were really invested in keeping confederate statues in place are hiding some deeply distasteful views and should be flushed out.
This strikes me as extremely simplistic. So you want to "flush out" about 50% of the American electorate? Don't you think there are some nuances there? You realize that there are non-coastal corporation that are the exact opposite and they believe as strongly as you that people like you must be "flushed out" ?
Support among the American electorate for Confederate flags and statues and government facility names referencing Confederate historical figures is much less than 50%.
#1 is irrelevant, nobody said that 50% of electorate voted for Trump so this looks like a straw man attack.
#2 is claiming that in the phrase "the only people who were really invested in keeping confederate statues in place are hiding some deeply distasteful views and should be flushed out" should be flushed out applies to views and not people. I am not a native English speaker but it does not appear a fact, much less a straightforward one. In the pattern "X is Y and should be Z" Z applies to X and not Y in my understanding.
The word "objectively" has a meaning so when you say "racism is bad" it has different meaning from when you say "racism is objectively bad".
Seeing that its meaning is in an objective rather than subjective or biased way : with a basis in observable facts rather than feelings or opinions and bad here is used as morally objectionable "objectively bad" comes out as an oxymoron.
I hear it not quite as an intensifier as an assertion that the same subjective conclusion would be frequently reached... and often implication about those who would (pretend to?) fail to reach those same conclusions.
Severity seems to play a role, but by that mechanism (it's severe so it should be obvious, it's severe so it's worse if you miss it, etc) more than apart from it.
It's not a... literal use of "objectively", but words are frequently put to other uses.
Sorry, I do not understand what you mean, moral status is a concept applied to living things, not abstract concepts[1]. And I have no idea what "ethical status" is.
But, I think we're kind of losing the thread here. Let's just pretend the post that kicked off our conversation said "Yes, because much of what trump is criticized for is bad" instead of " ... objectively bad", and carry on from there.
Because it's not about the use of the word "objectively". It's about the immoral and unethical (and probably illegal) behavior of the current President of the United States, and people who are dying because of how the current administration has mis-handled the Covid-19 pandemic. And white supremacy being a destructive force in U.S. culture, society, and politics.
Let's talk about those, instead of the proper use of the word "objectively".
If you look up thread, the post that kicked it is, paraphrasing, "Possibilities for social interactions at the workplace are diminishing due to the extreme partisan divide", let's call this "side A". And all the rebuttals for this were, again paraphrasing, "I dunno man, I can freely interact and if you cannot - something is wrong with you personally", let's call this "side B"
So far we have two opposite opinions. Neither is objective and both reflect the poster's experience if we assumed good faith, as we should.
Next step, the side A brings in evidence: allegedly you cannot openly support conservative views in many coastal firms. It's not some strong, factual evidence but hearsay. Nevertheless it is an argument. So what does the side B do in response? It proclaims that conservative views are inherently, objectively bad and thus cannot be possibly supported at workplaces.
If you drop "objectively" from it then it's not an argument at all. It would actually mean that side B agreed with the side A: yes, you cannot show your views because we don't like them, deal with it! It also fortifies the original argument about the partisan divide.
But no, the side B does not agree. The side B makes an argument that supporting one of the two major parties and/or a president of the USA is inherently bad so this is not a partisan issue at all. It's just a fact of life: water is wet, sky is blue, Trump is evil and so are you.
So you want to discuss why you think Trump is evil? I, honestly, don't care. Neither I want to explain why I think he is not. I can, however, discuss, why neither party is objectively good or evil.
Eh, I suggested talking about "... the immoral and unethical (and probably illegal) behavior of the current President of the United States ..".
But look man. A part of me wants to back you into a corner, rhetorically. But honestly this conversation really isn't helping anyone. We're both probably rage-posting at this point.
I think all this started with someone saying that "racism is objectively bad."
To circle back to that, it's my own belief that the killing of George Floyd was a terrible reminder of how white supremacy subtly functions in our society, and, of our responsibility as citizens to work to improve our Union and make a more just society.
I think that doing that would ultimately be to everyone's benefit, because I believe that an injustice done to one person is, eventually and ultimately, an injustice done to everyone. We're all from the same (human) family, at the end of the day.
My arguing with you probably didn't help either of us. That's my bad.
For my perspective of this whole argument I will try to make a non-partisan analogy (if such thing is even possible in modern times). Consider two mathematicians, Alice and Bob, solving the same equation f(x) = 0. Alice found the solution to be x = 1 but Bob found x = -1. Maybe Alice has made a mistake, maybe Bob has, maybe both, maybe neither and both 1 and -1 are roots for this equation - we don't know yet.
Now, imagine that instead of discussing their findings directly and arguing about them, both made some judgment about their answer and discussed just the result of that judgment. E.g. Alice asserts that the answer is positive and Bob insists that the answer is negative.
How well would they fare if one side, say Bob, insisted that the other side claims that -1 is positive and hence is completely nuts and objectively cannot perform as a mathematician due to inability to compare -1 to 0? And no, Bob does not think questioning correctness of his answer by Alice is feasible because people who do not understand that -1 is negative do not deserve a courtesy of an argument.
I posit that even if both agree on what numbers are positive and negative there is no discussion and no agreement possible unless both sides allow to discuss the roots of the equation.
I appreciate your intent but tbh I found this confusing. I think perhaps we want to talk about two different things and have been trying to squeeze that into one conversation.
All I am saying that you are challenging me to discuss judgments over your opinions in assumption that your opinions are facts. While I might agree with the same judgments over actual facts I do not agree with the opinions, which the judgments are based on so there is no possibility of discussion here.
But isn't it just your own opinion that that which I challenged you to discuss which you have definitively determined to be opinion on which the judgements we are attempting to logically calculate derive themselves from are in fact not actual fact but in fact merely opinions of me myself and therefore ineligible grounds for any determining judgements which might possibly instantiate any form of conversation in which we might converse? ;)
"The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink."
Putting kids in cages as policy is objectively bad (it’s also immoral and against international law, but if there’s anything that the Republicans and Trump have proven over the last four years/decades…they don’t actually care about obeying the law, just other people obeying _their_ laws).
It’s pretty damned easy to argue objectively bad. It’s lazy to argue that “bad” is merely an opinion when there’s some pretty clear examples that prove you wrong.
Would you prefer that we call Trump’s policies “evil” (which I believe that they are, but usually avoid that term because it typically has a metaphysical meaning people associate with it that I don’t mean as someone who doesn’t _do_ metaphysics of any sort)?
No kids were 'put in cages,' outside of normal detention processes that predated Trump and even some of the Obama era. If you only get your news from your "trusted source" you're going to get it wrong. The world media is horrifically bad; and nothing show it more than Portland.
No one is covering the violence. Not one ABC clip covers the rioters breaking fences or setting things on fire. The NY Times recent video places the blame on untrained DHS/US Marshalls while independent journalists like Andy Ngo show the constantly destruction every night.
Modern US journalism is yellow to its core. It's so limited, so one-directional, so divisive and so misleading that everyone should greatly question the narratives put before us and view every alternative before coming to a conclusion.
Sorry, I am not engaging in a political discussion way off the topic of working from home. If you really don't know - consider if your life will be any better after finding what some organizations supported by most big corporations state as their goals?
Fair. It is quite off-topic. Though, I am not the one who introduced it into the discussion ...
I am a bit confused though. Big corporations support all sorts of things - arts foundations, politicians who pass policies that will help the corporations make money, environmental groups, union-busting groups, groups against climate change legislation, children's sport's teams, etc.
That's because a lot of the things Trump does like tweeting his supporters screaming "white power" are objectively bad things which most conservatives and liberals would agree are reprehensible. Of course it's socially acceptable to condemn racism.
I can relate to this so much. I am so afraid that something I say could be misinterpreted that I prefer to talk only formally. English is not my native language. And my communication skills aren't the best, which makes me even more hesitant.
So I end up speaking more with co-workers from the same country I am from because it becomes easier. This ends up forming bubbles :(. I wish I was able to speak freely and make friends with people from other countries also. But the risk seems much more than the reward.
This is a pretty absurd take in my opinion. I've worked in "coastal corporations with a modern HR department" without issue. Of course I share jokes, personal stories, and perspectives. Well, with covid-induced lockdown now I go for drinks virtually instead of in-person.
If you can't be kind or professional enough to have an enjoyable working relationship to have drinks with your coworkers, I don't think it's the corporation or HR department that's to blame.
You don't have to be unprofessional to get in trouble. It might just be a misinterpretation of your joke by the quiet intern, or you react unexpectedly to some politically-charged story because your mind was elsewhere, or you forget about a sensitive demographic of people when proposing an idea. Not everyone can keep a professional demeanor all the time, and always say the right things on the spot, especially if you just spent 6 hours debugging a race condition or something. I think you're overgeneralizing perhaps your strong ability to do so.
> It might just be a misinterpretation of your joke by the quiet intern
> or you forget about a sensitive demographic of people when proposing an idea.
Both of those can be true, I imagine. I think the general idea is, though, in America, people who weren't white guys always have had to deal with those same concerns.
My privilege as white dude has included, until relatively recently, _not_ having to worry about those things because my "norm" was the norm society enforced over the norms of people different than myself.
I had an amazing few happy hours virtually last few months. Some great technical discussions with some young engineers, and they had more opportunity to ask questions, get context on the broader company, etc than they would normally.
This is an unnecessarily combative post and assumes words spoken by the original poster that do not exist. The OP correctly, in my opinion, identifies a hypersensitivity trend in modern companies.
Framing it as "hypersensitivity" really misses the point - if companies want the more diverse part of their workforce to feel respected at their workplace, its not out of "sensitivity".
It's basic decency and a given that a professional environment should be provided to employees.
Good points. I would have expected to hate remote work, because discussing technical decisions with coworkers is a part of the job I really enjoy.
However. When you take into account how hostile the modern office is to IC work, it turns out WFH is much better^. I'm not waiting for the open office to quiet down before getting real work done, and I can just focus whenever I want. 1:1 technical discussions are easier to have, because you just Zoom call the one person, and don't have to go around searching for a conference room. Modern offices are designed so poorly, with such a high level of distraction and low level of functionality, that even WFH without any preparation is much better.
^ Having to take on childcare or not having a private room to work in cancels out the benefits.
The childcare situation is most likely a pandemic related problem. In a more normal world you'd arrange school and childcare just as if you had to commute to work.
Having a private room, at least for me is always a very important aspect of getting stuff done from home. I make all the effort I can to make it not look or feel like a corporate office, though.
I don’t know the last time I took a shower. The days are blending into one another. My house is a disaster. Every day feels exactly the same. I work from home on my laptop which is next to my bed. I often don’t get out of bed to go downstairs until past noon. I take several naps throughout the day, but never feel well rested. My wife is losing her mind, my kids are acting like wild animals. I don’t know how this happened. I have no energy and just want to sleep. I wish I could go back to the office.
I was working from home about 2 or 3 days a week before the pandemic. I always found that the key to success is to maintain as much of my standard "going to the office" routine as possible.
- I wake up at the same time every day.
- I eat breakfast and have my morning coffee at the same time every day.
- I shower and dress the same way as if I were heading into the office every day.
- I have a dedicated place in my home that I work from every day.
- I stop working around the same time every day.
It is essential for me to do all of these things. Just because I'm not heading to an office doesn't mean that I can start my day any later. Just because I'm home and my work can be done from home doesn't mean that I should continue working any longer than I would in the office.
Maintain your schedule and routine to... maintain your schedule and routine.
Hey man.. you sound maybe depressed? There's a lot going on right now and I feel some similarity. It's not just remote work. Things closed, oh and a global pandemic to worry about.
I don't have any solutions except I try to get outside and I know I feel a bit better when we exercise, get enough sleep, or get out of the house and do something.
It is anecdotal and not everyone has same opportunities, but evening or morning bike rides worked for me and my family. We also decided to take a little more risk and get an Airbnb for a week at a pool property to get a vacation feel (even though we stayed indoors and worked a few days). Also, we started playing more board/card games at home and started a vegetable garden (just to keep busy).
I hope you find something that works and it gets better for you and your family.
I found that having a half an hour run first thing in the morning does wonders. Not only the benefits of a physical exercise but it actually puts a structure to your day, feels like going somewhere and you take shower after that. I would also change the route a bit everyday, so I would build memories of a different morning every day. Otherwise, as you said, the days bleed into another.
If your circumstances were more stable prior to the pandemic, I speculate you could be could be experiencing this due to...
1. seasonal affective disorder.
2. messed up sleep cycle (see also: circadian rhythm, pineal gland, melatonin).
3. vitamin D deficiency.
4. lack of physical activity.
1, 2 and 3 are often caused by lack of exposure to natural light. Try to get a vitamin D supplement and walk outside during the day every now and then.
Feel that. My job used to be 100-120 days/year on the road, now reduced to 3 so far since mid-March. My life was adapted to it with two kids and a wife, and now it's gone to hell. Having a very tough time adjusting and I see no return to normalcy in 2020.
This became clear to me every time I was hired or transferred into a new job where I had to sit at a desk removed from everyone else on the team. Think issues with not having an empty desk nearby when I walked in the door on Day One or something along those lines, but several times over.
Making yourself routinely, regularly, and frequently visible goes only so far when you're not cubicle neighbors with your direct coworkers or managers.
"Out of sight, out of mind" isn't just for working from home, it can be as easy as working from down the hall or in the next room over. I've done the satellite office thing too, and it's in the bag for this as well.
All this said, I am finally in a position where I -- for the first time ever for me -- can and am encouraged to work from home as much as possible. My boss and those I work with are all very active and proactive on making sure we become, are, and remain glued together as we all play ventriloquist on the job. I'm about to start my fourth week at this place so I'm trying not to have rose-colored eyeglasses during the honeymoon, but so far so good.
Yes. For this very reason I think that only the extremes (everyone is collocated or everyone is remote) work. Mixing of local and remote people doesn't (maybe except for external contractors, who know they are expendable (and adjust their daily rates to compensate)).
Agreed, it's not a 'remote work' thing, it's a 1-person-at-the-organization-is-invisible-at-the-office kind of thing.
I will only work on 100% distributed teams where the entire organization is communicating as though they're all remote, even on days when a couple of them may be meeting at the office or working from the same place by choice.
I've been remote for ~5 years, and I definitely think the remote==forgotten is true... but it's also plenty true for the in person crowd.
In the past year my team has lost ~4 people, and I don't think they've been discussed once, save for one or two long running projects that had some of their input, aka "we need to get access to $old_employee's OneDrive to get $document".
Even in person, a year later no one will remember that you were there; plan accordingly.
This is one thing where my managers have really stepped up their game during the pandemic; as we've all shifted remote. When we were IN the office, we had many different dev teams that really should NOT have been different. There was just such a resistance to "pointless meetings" that we were kind of stuck in these little stovepiped fiefdoms, with little interaction, communication, or coordination. We were terrible at planning.
With the change to full-remote, the managers have recognized that we can't have people who get "forgotten", or teams that are kept out of the loop for the top-level stuff. I've been very pleased to see these managers grow and change with the new demands, and we're gradually taking on more cross-team integration. It has demanded everybody attend a few extra meetings. Which we all hate, and know it breaks your velocity and productivity. But it's absolutely essential, towards getting all the cats herded.
For what it's worth - as a late-career professional, I've seen this "forgotten" syndrome happen, even with companies where they're merged from two formerly separate companies. Same with satellite offices. The people at the corporate headquarters ALWAYS get the best projects, the best resources, the most managerial attention. The workers at the remote offices get bupkus - and this translates into an eventual hiring-freeze, attrition, and shutdown of the remote office, along with mass-layoffs. It fucking sucks, and to be honest, I think it's really counterproductive for the goals of the larger company, and the industry, in general.
I've seen this happen at 3 different companies.
I think that with covid; managers are terrified of losing talent, and not being able to replace them. At least in a business like mine where demand is still very robust. So they are taking these efforts to do; basically what a manager's job SHOULD be: to make sure everyone is fully and appropriately engaged and tasked. (at these previous companies, I'd say that this toxic "forgotten" culture was really a facet of management, particularly UPPER management, being utterly delinquent and docile in the basic tasks of their jobs - to disastrous results).
At the end of the day, this former tendency for managers to neglect non-superstars, or lesser-known, (but still mission-critical) teams - was absolutely unnecessary, and stupid, in a world where we actually have the technology to make "location" obsolete. We've been working on doing that for the past 30 years. But still; we all feel compelled to relocate to Silicon Valley; because if you're not working there, you're working somewhere else that's going to be bought by Silicon Valley, and eventually forgotten, neglected, and shut down. It's terrible for your career to work anywhere else. And as a result, Silicon Valley is FULL. There's noplace to live, no room on the roads to commute, and shitty little 2 bedroom houses in tract neighborhoods are priced far out of the range of the best paid professionals to buy in, as a consequence of THE TECHNOLOGY INDUSTRY'S utter failure to use it's own technology to enable remote work.
And now: we don't have to fucking live in Silicon Valley anymore to do this job. We can be anywhere, connected to the network, and do THIS job, just as effectively. All we needed was a horrible viral plague.
None of these things compare in my mind to the absolute life-deranging daily pain that is 2 hours a day on public transport, dressing up in physically uncomfortable clothes for 10 hours a day, constantly being surveilled and judged by how busy I look, or (most importantly) trying to concentrate in a room with 100 people having random conversations around me.
There's a part of my brain that works with language, and I need it to write code. If somebody is talking near me (doesn't have to actually be to me), that part of my brain is listening, and I can't use it. It's not under my control, all I can do is try to block the sounds.
>>> There's a part of my brain that works with language, and I need it to write code. If somebody is talking near me (doesn't have to actually be to me), that part of my brain is listening, and I can't use it. It's not under my control, all I can do is try to block the sounds.
This is the best I've seen this explained. Thanks.
There are many good points here. Companies depend on in-person proximity for automatically communicating. The article identifies a few cases where remote structures fail, like in responding quickly to new circumstances but it's a more general problem.
Ideally, groups manage to articulate priorities in a planning process and share what people are working on. However, these processes sometimes do not exist, and when they do they rarely identify all the work. People are regularly drawn into unplanned work, e.g. helping other teams. Also, to excel as an knowledge worker (e.g. software engineer) you need to have a few experimental projects, too risky to fit into the planning process and which should not be discussed there. Getting help and mentorship on these can greatly accelerate career growth, and that's often what people do late at night in the office. This is definitely not inclusive, but is how people signal that they are going above and beyond.
Remote work exposes the gaps between official processes and the informal ones that spring up to enable human collaboration. Making these explicit would be valuable for fairness, to help people without experience understand what is really going on.
Doing that is very hard. If these informal power dynamics were documented, indubitably they would be improved; they are very often unfair. Another way of looking at it, is that the informal processes typically fill in gaps in poorly designed formal processes :) It would take extraordinary organisational maturity to be comfortable sharing this dirty laundry.
In summary, companies that go more remote will find ways to fill the gaps that are currently patched over by in person proximity, and this is for the best as it means tackling tough cultural painpoints
This is a great way of articulating this issue. A engineering group I interact with loathes to document or version their code, and they maintain this in-crowd mentality that I call Arms-Length development. It works great when everyone is in the know because they’re so close to one another but breaks down quickly, and will see increasing frustration with this attitude as we remain remote for longer and longer and forever, eventually. It seems like the engineering in one place as the rule rather than the exception is flip flopping.
The one comment I'd make is that lots of companies already have distributed teams and, in the case of open source software, are typically working with outside people distributed all over the place. So "in-crowd mentality" is pretty much an anti-pattern as soon as the butts-in-seat co-located assumption is broken for whatever reason.
- Working remotely adds 10s of micro-frictions (through chats and calls) every day that complicates or even break a sane flow of information, as well as focus. This is not some “technical issue” that will go away as technology improves: speaking to someone in person is as frictionless as it gets, and cannot be matched.
- The social component of work is completely erased, and that matters a lot.
- Private vs working space and time blend into each other, essentially making you “always on”
Work from home is nice when needed, and if the conditions at home allow it; on the other hand, imposing work from home on everyone may create a distinction between “efficient workers” (= with no children) vs “less efficient ones” (= with children)
I wouldn’t say in person communication is frictionless for everyone.
There are a lot of people who do not communicate at their best in person and both feel and represent themselves better in writing or with something of a “barrier” (for lack of a better word).
I generally disagree with this and most, if not all other, blanket statements.
I think, and hope, that the good that can come out of this isn’t some absolute decision over whether we have offices or not, but that we become yet more open and recognizing of differences and nuances. That kind of thing always seems to be a long, argumentative road, however.
Bear in mind that the pandemic presents a unique situation with respect to children being at home. Usually the kids are at school or childcare, and any impact to efficiency happens outside of working hours (which shouldn't be considered when measuring a worker's productivity).
I started working from home around 2006. My torturous commute was around 4 hours, assuming the train was on time, so working from home was a godsend. Also my kids were young and with my commute, time with them and time for fitness activities was truly compressed. Problem was, managers always acted like they were doing you a favor. My work day would go from 8-10 hours to 12 hours, easy, working from home. But it felt like there was always the suspicion by management I was quaffing down brewskis while watching Oprah.
Fast-forward to 2020 and finally, after 15 or so years, WFH is going mainstream. At least for the duration of the pandemic. The savings in air pollutants, gasoline burned and exhaust emitted, and most of all, time, is huge.
Now on my 40s, I love to work from home. It gives me the freedom to better distribute my workload through the day. I can surf early in the morning, work some hours, go to the supermarket, work again, sometimes cook with my wife when we have time, work late night.. I work more than 8 hours day and I produce much more, but I enjoy my life more too. However, it was really important for my professional development to have worked 15 years in an office before. Almost all points on this article are right, and I really see no possibility to grow as remote employee, BUT, I don't want to spend 8-10 hours in an office anymore, and I can really see, via video call, how it kills people mood
this sounds really good. my company wouldn't let me work like this (Japanese mid size, with no remote before covid). Just last week I left my phone charging while still coding (my manager could have seen my commits) in another room. When I checked slack again "he was afraid I had an accident" because I didn't send the "I'm back from lunch" message after taking my break.
wow, another level of micromanagement. We have our core working time, from 11 to 15, and we have to be accessible this time - we arrange our meetings around this time frame, and the rest of the day you use like you wish. Some people are early birds, others work late.. but in the end of the day, you have a sprint, you have tasks, and that's what matters..
"There is one consensus prediction that is emerging...[WFH]... good thing for workers and welcomed by all."
No such consensus is emerging where I am.
Our computer intensive workplace ran a survey and 90% liked WFH and 80% wanted to do it all or part of the week.
Top reasons for, were time saved commuting, saving $250/month parking fees and ability to deep dive for hours without interruptions. Top against, was young people missed social interaction and impromptu teaching/mentoring moments. (I've told them all I am happy to talk, just line up a time, most do)
The bosses are packing death; they signed a long lease on a building even deeper into the CBD of our city. Also they have to write an email detailing what work they actually want done, not walk over and reel off half a dozen brain farts leaving no evidence of what they asked for.
They've now pushing for everyone to come back to work before they move permanently to their holiday homes down the coast.
> Also they have to write an email detailing what work they actually want done, not walk over and reel off half a dozen brain farts leaving no evidence of what they asked for.
Oh, that is a very good way of putting it indeed. Since this is a weekly occurrence for me with customers, I’ll be stealing this for scolding them. Hope you don’t mind.
> they have to write an email detailing what work they actually want done, not walk over and reel off half a dozen brain farts leaving no evidence of what they asked for
This has still been happening where I work, instead of walking over they hop on the voice channel, same old.
You're at a desk during most of that call, right? Share a screen and start typing out bullet points as the PHB blabs and blabs, and then email it out. Then hold people to it.
I’ve flip-flopped back and forth between liking and hating remote work. Right now, the biggest issue I have with being remote is work life and home/family life bleeding into each other, resulting in a deterioration of both. I’m sure there are people who are better at compartmentalizing their lives, but there are probably others who struggle with it more than I do.
I don't know why people think that remote work means that you can hire from anywhere in the world. You still need to be able to be able to schedule meetings to have discussions/make decisions quickly and that really limits the spread of a single team to a couple timezones.
And you still need cultural proximity, which is a much larger issue than time zones imho. If you have a dev team from your cultural background that (fluently!) speaks your language, I don't believe it matters as much when they're eight hours away.
On the other hand, having a team a bike ride away that you cannot effectively communicate with and that works completely different culturally is setting yourself up for trouble.
Outsourcing is much easier for things that are very clear and don't require much communication. For development work, I've not seen much success with it, the cultural & communication barriers are too strong.
I've done US East to EU and it didn't work very well for us. You couldn't make decisions in a single day. You only overlap from 9am-noon US East time (assuming 9-5 working hours).
It is not a binary thing and that is the point of this article. There is a lot of noise especially lately that remote work is the future and the point is that it depends. Just like being in office has its pros and cons, remote work has its pros and cons.
I normally love working remotely, but only on something I find compelling and only if the rest of my lifestyle is viable. Prior to COVID I was working on a PDF sdk product in-office, which was sometimes rewarding, but mostly quite banal. After work I'd continue working remotely on another thing, then hit the gym, then go to the skatepark. When the office shutdown, so did everything else. When I'd normally work out of a cafe, I'd be sitting at my desk at home. When I'd normally go get exercise, I'd at best be able use some bands at home. Generally speaking my day consisted of waking up and spending 8 hours doing the meanial work of piecing together a next.js app, and then... nothing else except for media consumption and watching the rain. I seemingly burnt out, could persuade myself to type my render functions, and got fired from the highest paying gig I've had so far. Now I've spent 3 months basically doing nothing but skating, hiking, hitting the gym, and otherwise enjoying myself. It's hard to convince myself to even look at my computer for work purposes.
I wonder what the rest of the year will look like.
Remote work is great for consulting gigs ... nothing like remotely talking to clients and being objective about it . Much better tan spending cycled to take the client out to lunch to build “relationship”. Guess it’s up to each of us but as far as the writer of TFA is concerned it seems he is one of the kinds who just like to throw his weight around and influence everything that moves in his office. Too bad COVID has democratized the situation and he is now exposed for what he is. This is common problem where all the styles and coolness of hipsters are not mattering much any more :)
Yup, I think there is no one-size-fits-all with remote work. For some jobs, it's great. Like management consulting - if you're traveling anyways, who care if you work from home.
Other jobs? Not so much. I'm thinking the more creative work like advertising agencies where brainstorming over Zoom makes you want to gouge your eyes out.
The dehumanizing aspects of remote cuts both ways. For instance, it's more difficult for people who rely on exploiting human nature and politics to find cover while working remotely. Do you know someone who is attractive and very easy to get along with but doesn't really contribute valuable work? This person is having a really hard time right now and will not ever advocate remote work.
Although it will take effort for managers to maintain a human connection with subordinates, managers aren't necessarily empathizing less with remote. They may never have empathized to begin with.
Tech outsourcing has existed in various forms for many decades. It is demoralizing. People will always compete with you for a job, and if the market for talent is unrestricted by geography, there is valid cause for concern.
Yep, there are always trade-offs. The current remote work paradigm is benefitting folks who are more senior, more capable of getting more done with more focused time at the expense of younger, single folks who have a lot more to gain from having close-knit relationships in person with other coworkers.
The other side of the coin is as you mentioned: people who mainly rely on relationships and politics to get ahead without contributing concrete value are starting to feel the squeeze under this paradigm.
As is the case with everything though, I expect that the pendulum will swing back at some point. Nothing lasts forever.
Yeah, if I'm being honest, I'm quite senior as an IC, I've been at my current company for a long time, I've been skewing increasingly remote for an even longer time, and a lot of what I do is individual with relatively limited syncs and collaborations. Some aspects (mostly I miss travel to events) are lousy right now but otherwise everyone individually on video conferences is pretty good--though most of the teams I work with are pretty distributed anyway.
I think as a junior person more or less just out of school I'd find it pretty awful.
I thought most of my problems with work stem from working from an office, but in the end being forced to work on an schedule imposed on me by someone else was a much bigger problem.
I don't like having a boss, even if they let me work from home.
I think you need both. I find that working towards big real deadlines(not bs dates!) can really focus your attention on a critical path, but always operating in that mode is a straight path to burn out.
Odd that he didn’t mention the sort of first obvious reason, which is that remote work makes the worker responsible for the cost of the space/real estate in which they perform their work.
As I wrote on an earlier post on this topic, remote work is going to be a huge benefits cut for the top end of tech employees, and a massive cost-cutting measure for their employers.
I could set up my place to be both a home and an office, but it wouldn't be cheap (for starters, I'd want to rent something bigger). Considering taxes, this would be equivalent to at least a 20k pay cut due to costs being offloaded on me.
I totally see why employers love that.
Additionally, FAANG and startup tech offices often serve as more than an office - they tend to have a lot of shared amenities that are just not practical to have at home. I don't use a 3D printer often enough to own one, but there is one in the office. Gym? Office, and it has more than a pull-up bar. Post office? Office. Inbound packages? Post office. In the office. Grocery shopping? Happens much less often if you eat out. In the office. Why would I want to eat out of my own fridge and pantry (and have to prepare the food myself) when I can grab tasty food prepared by people who actually know what they're doing?
The benefit isn't just that the stuff is free; the benefit is that it's all right there. It's an incredible time saver.
If the office is just an office with no amenities, you have a sucky commute, or you have a family, then I can see why WfH would be attractive. However, if you're young and single, have a nice office, this is going to suck.
It's true the amenities at offices like that are very nice. But the reality is the vast majority of workers don't get them. So in the grand scheme of things, not sure it's a very strong argument in the WFH vs office debate.
> It’s baffling to me that American workers would cheer an acceleration of this trend that would place downward pressure on their wages.
I see shades of this in a lot of discourse - is it an alien idea to be for progress even if it means potentially more strife on your part?
Further, I'd say, not necessarily. People think that working from home is this grand new frontier, but cultures and subcultures have existed on the web for ages. It isn't going to be a wide open playing field. You're still going to have networks and self-selection into subgroups.
And finally, there's still a ton of money to be made by the few who are actually good at this. I hope everyone here is or has worked with someone of this type - where something they ship quickly actually leaves you speechless.
--
As to the rest of this article, it really doesn't resonate. A lot of the problems listed are problems even in the office. The long and short of it is that the world is changing, and so while we can cherry-pick examples of how companies are failing to adapt, rest assured there are organizations out there that are adapting.
I'd say - keep an open mind, and find ways to get what you need - the most important mental shift you can make right now is to be your own advocate, and be proactive.
People have been raising the bogeyman of "off-shoring" engineering jobs since the 90s. The reality is that it's always going to be incredibly hard to do collaborative work in an asynchronous fashion, and timezones are an immutable reality.
More remote work is much more likely to cause a diaspora of workers from large cities, causing downward pressure on salaries in major metros but lifting salaries elsewhere. Unless demand for software engineers stalls -- which seems awfully unlikely for the foreseeable future -- it seems more likely that the median salary for American engineers will increase.
In the late 90s my state moved from local property taxes funding local schools to paying into 1 state fund and paying back out per student, along with base funding for each district and what the district could levy in their county. It was a massive boost for most districts but a major loss for my district. We went from 2 art teachers, 2 music teachers, 2 PE teachers, and a guy who did ceramics across schools to 1 art teacher and 1 PE teacher. Since then, more cuts have dropped quality even further.
This is a warning as much as a boon. When re-allocating funding more equitably, be sure to not let the process stop there and call it success. Monitor and respond to outcomes like boosting funding to equip all schools with the right set of arts and opportunities for their students even if 1 school in town is artsy and the other technical but students can go to either. Be prepared (and have a community that is up) for raising taxes to cover these costs. Recognize that well educated and employed kids today will be paying your medicare and social security (if you or those programs make it far enough). When these kids are growing the stocks your retirement is invested into you'll want them to have had the opportunities your tax dollars can provide.
I like paying for schools because I don't like living in a national of stupid people and the more smart people out there able to leverage their talent and abilities via remote or on site work the better we will all be. Maybe that means the FAANG employee living in Iowa needs to make 95% of their downtown Seattle counterpart, maybe not. There is a balance to be found to increase opportunity without depressing existing and future talent too.
Requiring all work to be in person is no better. It causes brain drain from most places and real estate hyperinflation where the jobs are. "No jobs, unaffordable housing, pick one."
There are some good points here but I think it's partly because we are too used to how it was and have a hard time letting that go. We can't assess working from home in isolation as if everything else stays the same and only this changes. It'll have to be brought about alongside a mindset change.
While it might put one at risk of getting replaced due to outsourcing, it also opens up opportunities for them to get things outsourced to them which they couldn't due to the previous setup.
While not being in the office may hamper one's career progress may be true, we also over look the possibility of having to put up with socialising and other corporate bullshit to progress at work over actually doing your job. With this kind of setup, values and skills may get more focus over charisma and just good looks.
For me it's hard to say how this will turn out. I think it'll be as boring as most other changes that happen in life where the actual impact is not nearly as severe as it looks from where we are now. Either way, I think the prospect of having the option to work from home for those who are willing and able is a positive outcome. After all, life is about having options :)
There is a nugget there, but if you are the one working remotely with everybody else in the office - that is a situation to avoid.
But if everybody else is remote - somebody will progress their career, won't they?
That is beside the point - for me (again, NOT an American worker) this is unparalleled opportunity to get mentorship without uprooting my entire existence. I am a Team lead, and i also lead Americans.
This is a new situation, and is going to stay with us for a while, if not forever. Instead of complaining about "good old days" of water cooler culture, wouldn't it be better to take this as an opportunity to adapt, learn new tricks and enjoy the advantages, of which there are many? We'll have to anyway. Or else...
If you're referring to the WFH situation staying with us forever, it definitely will not. Things may change somewhat, but in discussing WFH with a variety of execs who employee tens of thousands of engineers collectively, there is a very strong majority of engineers who would come back to the office tomorrow if able.
Early 30s here and I hope WFH continues till the day I die. I hated going into work every day. Sure, it's nice every once in awhile but what a complete waste of resources it happened to be. Nothing lost from working at home. I save a lot more now.
It’s baffling to me that American workers would cheer an acceleration of this trend that would place downward pressure on their wages.
Will it though? Coming from a country(Poland) that is a rather popular target for outsourcing I can tell you that companies pay around $70k per annum(ballpark - don't quote me on this) for contractors over here(the contractors themselves receive 50-80% of that) and there's still plenty of work to go around.
Sure, that's not a lot, but it comes with the additional issue of having the person in a very different time zone, which is not ideal.
You are comparing outsourced contractors to salaried employees. The low end of typical contract rates here is, IME, ~$100/hr.
Also, as a rule of thumb, a salaried employee cost twice their salary after benefits and other costs are factored in. Given the median salary I recall from a recent placement company, this is in the region of $300k.
If the reduced physical presence of remote work reduces the value that salaried employees can bring, contracting out work will become more attractive.
3x is a wide margin. I remember seeing numbers at my last contract job that suggested it was close to 1.75x and was using that number in the process of getting hired directly. I knew the companies costs to hire could be under that 1.75x value but still be a pay bump for me especially as I didn't have any benefits through the contractor saving them costs with no return to me.
For the contracting agency the value of my labor to a third party is how they make money. Seemed simple enough to me but not a racket I wanted to bounce around in.
I've been working remotely for 10 years. Well before Covid.
The only reason I ever wanted to work remotely is so I could juggle my side businesses and work at the same time, without wasting any commute time or using company equipment. When I first started out, it was so I could travel around Asia for a couple of years.
Now, it allows me to spend more time with my family. I see my daughter all throughout the day and it's great.
The downsides are that you just don't get those close relationships with co-workers. If you need that social aspect of work, it will be very difficult (and possibly depressing).
These articles never explore the types of remote work at a company. You can be a contractor working a specific contract for a deliverable. The company might be geo dispersed so that only small groups of people are located together and your meetings need to be via Zoom. Your company is fully remote which means all meetings are via Zoom. You are one of the few remote people in the org so have no idea about what's really going on. Most of these are workable except the last. Don't do that gig.
I live in a very small (not USA) city classified as 'rural and remote'. There is no local opportunity to do the sort of work I'm interested in, so for a few years I just didn't (obviously not USA :)
WFH allows me to participate. For some years, it was a complicating liability, and I had to gently massage potential employers to seriously consider a fully remote config. But this year when hunting I found my years of remote experience recognised and valued.
My experience with wfh: I work in one of the audit companies' advisory arms (and I have only been in the workforce for around a year now), and for me WFH was a dream benefit that was only available to those in tech.
At first (i.e., around the first 2-3 weeks), I loved WFH - because I was very motivated to finish my work ASAP and spend time playing the guitar, or writing, or doing whatever the hell I wanted to do. And because the country wasn't in lockdown, I met friends for lunch/dinner every other day, so I was having fun.
The next 2-3 weeks, I began to hate it, because I hated not meeting people so much (because by this time the country had gone into lockdown), and I felt like shit tbh.
After that, I made it a rule to video call one of my friends/colleagues every day, which improved my life tremendously. Should have thought of this earlier, smh.
Around the same time, I fell into a bad habit. I started to think that I'm not really going anywhere, so why work so much? As a result, my work started to drag on after office hours, and I started to feel more tired. I had to actively tell myself that my work day ended at such-and-such a time, so that I wouldn't drag my my work to after office hours.
Once this entire period of around 2 months passed, I realised that I prefer WFH, and started to dread the day we'd be called back in to work, because of the following reasons:
1. I save an hour of travel time each day, so instead of waking up at 7 to be able to reach office at 9, I now wake up at 845.
2. I'm quite motivated to finish work early and then do whatever I want.
3. Because I'm so new to work, I don't really need to go around meeting people - hence there is no reason for me to be anywhere near office.
When you are in your office, are you even having verbal communication with a manager? Is the manager even in the same office? None of this is a given. When I was in an office I had a closed door and communicated mostly via chat and IM and I often reported to managers in different offices. My office was remote from my manager's office. When I moved to a home office, it made no difference to that manager.
> remote work makes you vulnerable to outsourcing, reduces your job to a metric, creates frustrating change-averse bureaucracies, and stifles your career growth.
None of these are on the worker, though. They're all on the company.
I personally am far more effective remotely. Simply having a perfectly quiet and controlled environment is such a big plus. Not commuting, such a huge plus. I had the best commutes for most of my non-remote life, I walked to work for years (quite a hike sometimes, but I love to walk - but it was still a drag.
I find the timeframes of remote better. When someone walks into your office, you need to respond intelligently right away. You lose focus.
So many of my bugs could be attributed to being interrupted and forgetting to some detail in the code!
Remotely, you can quickly triage interrupts and give an instant response with a time estimate ("On this, will report back within the hour"), finish what you are working on, and then take the time to really look into their question.
(I am very sympathetic to others who aren't. Considering the great savings in resources and time we get, is there some way we can make it up to you?)
I am one year out of college, been working as a software engineer at a non-tech company ever since. This article as me conflicted. I enjoy the benefits mentioned in the article, so much so that I am considering moving to a bigger city that has more tech jobs (while keeping my current job). Although I was working in the office before, the transition to remote has presented me with the opportunity to move to where I want to be. However, this article makes clear the risks now include missing out on career opportunities, mentors, and skills that could stunt my career growth - if my job doesn’t get outsourced first. As someone who’s still starting off in their career, I’m afraid of making a misstep - but also believe this time is the time to take risks and see how they play out.
Honestly I wouldn’t worry too much about it. This article vastly overstates the benefits of offices. Sitting in an office every day doesn’t magically make mentorship opportunities appear. You need to proactively seek those out no matter where you’re working - ask questions, ask for advice - and if someone is willing to talk in person they’re almost certainly willing to talk over video chat too.
> and if someone is willing to talk in person they’re almost certainly willing to talk over video chat too.
Strongly disagree. The culture is different. I didn't always love other people popping by, but they could just do it in a way that isn't really done with voice chat where I work. It was probably better for the team that they did. I definitely found myself doing this too.
Unless you work somewhere with a policy to avoid stopping by someone's desk at all costs, unless you were sure the other person wanted it (in advance), it's not like voice calls at all. If I just call someone, I'm being pushy. I have to ask first, and even then I feel like I'm inconveniencing them. I'm certainly not going to just call people out of the blue, even ones I'm friendly with just to chit chat. In the office, we'd "run into each other", though.
Oh, I didn't mean just calling someone out of the blue. I meant that people would be willing to get on a video call if you set up a time to talk. I would typically message or email people first.
Heck even if we're in the same office I'd often ping someone on text chat before walking over to their desk - it's just less rude and intrusive than forcing them to stop what they're working on and demanding to talk with them right then. A lot of teams I've worked on have communicated heavily by text chat even if we're all sitting just a few feet away from each other.
Do you find people less willing to send a message on Slack or whatever chat app you're using than they are to physically stop by someone's desk?
Full-time WFH makes it much easier to rear kids though. You get to help them with homework, have a dinner with them, and just in general be available. IMO it's fucked up that this isn't even a consideration in all these discussions. It's as if work is all there is to life.
When I was in home office (ridiculously am not any longer, although the virus is still out there and I can work perfectly fine from home) I saved 2h time every working day. It was an immense free time productivity boost. I also got a lot of personal stuff done, which simply did not happen when I came home 20:00 or similar, when there was no home office.
Make use of your time. Start some of Your own projects in that new found free time or finally get to work on things you should have done years ago.
Perhaps I am too used to staying at home and sitting at the computer, so that it does not affect me as much?
I for sure liked those extra 2h each workIng day. Sums up quickly.
and I’m glad to see some of these more global, psychological arguments about the larger role and meaning of work in the human experience are gaining currency. The current wave of uncontained euphoria about remote work in the business press, which began in earnest with Covid at the mass level, needs to be tempered with some blunt realism.
I think your mileage may vary. I've had bosses as you describe in your situation.
But as a counterpoint, I also had bosses who were definitely mentors and were growth oriented. Those were the workplaces were I felt I learned the most and perhaps not surprisingly those people are the 'former bosses' in my network that I still stay in touch with and that occasionally check-in to talk about life/work/family.
I've only really had two bosses/mentors like that in my career so I agree that they are statiscally much more scarce.
Remote work and remote work with people in different time zones is a totally different thing, I'm not sure why they get lumped together. I'm on East coast of United States and don't mind working with people on West coast but further than that would be a problem.I've had jobs where everyone went out to lunch together and it was fun,but I've had jobs where everyone just wants to eat lunch at their desk and go home.
I completely agree. I live on the US West coast and work with people from Israel to Australia and let me tell you - it's a challenge. It can be done but it requires a slower pace of decision making, a lot of flexibility, and a team that's dedicated to cross cultural communication.
I also used to work remotely with everyone in the same few time zones and, on reflection, it was basically like being in an office.
Everyone seems to think you either WFH or in office all the time. Personally I hope this new situation will enable me to work in office for 1 or 2 days a week and WFH the other days.
It would enable me to live farther from my office, and thus buy a bigger house for less money. It still allows me to meet (new) colleagues and clients in person.
Personally I think either 5 days WFH or 5 days Office would be the worst of any situation.
I love that there’s no open office anymore which I hated. It had nothing good to offer other than saving rent for my employer.
I hate that meetings have already started to spill into Saturdays, Sundays, and beyond 6pm and attendance in those meetings are now being subtly demanded which began as requests because someone’s calendar would be “full”.
I miss having the freedom to choose between being remote or in-office. I don't know if I can decide between which I prefer. I always rent near work, so commuting isn't a huge issue. If I owned a home and had to commute, I would definitely prefer being remote.
I have worked remote for about 8 years now. I used to have to spend 3+ hours in commute each day.
To put it bluntly, those that complain the loudest are those who's career rested on politicking and stealth deferrel of their actual productive work to others.
You aren't 'outsourced' offshore or otherwise because of WFH, you are because your type of job allowed for it. The current crisis might just have woken up the company to it sooner.
BTW, people that have only just now started WFH, don't confuse your current experience with WFH under normal circumstances. That commute time save normally allowed you to have an actual life outside work.
Finally, do not underestimate the huge lobbying going on currently to get us all 'back to the office' from what is called the 'lunch economy' sector. God forbid you would get used to not spending huge amounts on overpriced coffee and sandwiches or junkfood each day.
Considering ageism in the software industry Remote work feels like a boon. Not to mention the uninterrupted productive work you can do. Remote work is bad only for the middle managers who don't know how to account for their time.
In reality, remote work makes you vulnerable to outsourcing, reduces your job to a metric, creates frustrating change-averse bureaucracies, and stifles your career growth.
"We bemoan the loss of empathy and context created by solely getting our news and interacting via social media … and we then turn around and set up our working lives in their image."
I'd say ultimately it depends on the worker's manager, if they follow the Babbage style of management you're gonna have problems, wherever the worker is working from.
Hm, basic begginer problems. You need good connectivity, video conferencing gear, dedicated room and nanny. All that is affordable if you do not live in expensive city.
Society as a whole had a system that largely dealt with this called public school. Most had some version of 3-5pm after school care to allow working adults to have readable inexpensive childcare. With Covid we’re going through for most states the second school year / semester at least of closed physical space schools. It’s just a reality right now that the kids are going to interact with WFH adults during their workday until schools get reopened. Say nothing of the kids mental state after being isolated for so long.
It's probably way cheaper to soundproof* a home office, than to buy a larger house. Speaking from personal experience.
* "Soundproof" is the commonly used term, but obviously that's not realistic if taken literally. In this context, I use "soundproof" to mean virtually eliminating all psycho-acoustically relevant sounds from outside the room.
Sounds like a tough situation. I've had some success with my own house which is only slightly larger. I'm happy to DM if you want to bounce some ideas around.
Here's the simplified version, but I'm happy to give more detail.
Starting point:
- Raised ranch in New England, circa 1960's. (Not in an earthquake zone.)
- Electrical service: 200 amp service from road to house, but 100 amp panel.
- Semi-finished basement, not very compliant with current building code.
- Crappy basement corner office, about 12'x 12', with 1 egress window and the house's electrical panel.
- Basement occasionally got wet from heavy rains.
Preliminaries:
- Electrician friend upgrades electrical panel to 200 amp service: several hundred $ (USD).
- Hire company to add interior drain (under slab) in vicinity office corner, and add a sump well: $3k
- Hire contractor friend to install one more Lally column under the house's main beam, to satisfy building code requirements.
- Rent a storage pod for outside the house, to hold all the basement junk that would be in the way during construction.
- Building & electrical permits: < $100 (my town is awesome)
- Hire company to install Mitsubishi mini-split heater/cooler. 1 inverter in the office, 1 in another room. $7k. (This actually happened after the drywall was up.)
Major steps for the office soundproofing:
- Install subflooring over the basement concrete slab. I used 3/4" Advantech from Home Depot, and fixed it to the floors with 1/4"-diameter TapCon screws.
- Re-frame the office walls with double-framing.
- Install steel hat-channel on joists in ceiling. Ceiling drywall will hang from this.
- Install 14-2 NM wiring for wall- and ceiling-outlets.
- On walls and ceiling, drywall is two layers of 5/8" Type X drywall, with Greenglue sandwiched in between.
- For the window, I bought a pre-cut piece of plexiglass (I forget exact thickness, maybe 3/8"), and got clever with strips of neoprene rubber and some hardware to hold the plexiglass in place. Plexiglass was about $100 IIRC, but probably cheaper if it didn't get shipped from the West Coast.
- For the doors, I used pre-hung solid-core doors. There are two doorways: one for accessing the electrical panel, and one for leaving the room. Each doorway uses two doors, spaced about 8" from each other. I used various sheets of MDF and plywood to add mass to the doors, and Greenglue sandwiched in between. I also used various tricks with neoprene gaskets and strong magnets to get a good acoustic seal on each door.
- A soundproof room tends to be airtight as well, so you really need forced-air ventilation. I installed a 100 CFM inline fan, which I think was overkill.
- Airflow into / out of the room is provided by two "dead vents". Basically, air ducts with acoustically useful baffles. Surprisingly effective combination of high airflow but minimal sound transmission.
- I paid other people to tape the drywall and paint the office. But really they did the whole finished area in the basement, so I'm not sure what just the office would have cost.
Costs and other considerations:
- Rental of a storage pod can stretch out longer than you intended, because these projects can go slowly.
- At some point you'll estimate the number of fasteners you'll need (drywall screws, TapCon screws, etc.) You'll assume you made a math error because the number is 10x higher than your intuition suggests. The good news is you're correct; the bad news is that you'll actually use 20x more than your intuition says.
- Soundproofing an office may require a building permit, which may in turn require that you bring the construction area up to current building / electrical code.
- Having friends in the construction business is invaluable. They're your best source of unbiased advice.
- There's a ton of conflicting information about office soundproofing out there, and just as many gimmicky products. You'll need to do a lot of homework.
- Many building contractors optimize their techniques / designs for maximum speed and minimum cost. Good soundproofing requires somewhat different designs. You may need to do some construction steps yourself to make sure they're done right.
- Unless you already have construction tools, you'll probably end up buying some yourself, and you'll need somewhere to store them.
Once someone or a couple are in a house, there [ADDED: often] really isn't a big problem although I imagine some people might want to make changes to their house or even upgrade to the degree their situation changes long-term. The real problem I see (and that has numerous people I know moving) is that they had a relatively small (often expensive) city apartment that was mostly for relaxing in the evening and sleeping and now it's a 24-hour thing.
After I got married, we moved from my decent size house (3000 square feet) to a 1700 square foot apartment so we - my wife and two step children - could be in a better school system. I insisted on finding an apartment with a separate office. The office was small - built in desk and just enough room for chair, but I knew I would more than likely be working from home occasionally. We probably could have gotten some place a little cheaper if I didn’t insist on closed in office.
If you have two parents working from home it's possible to shift call schedules arround and work schedules if you are a developer. Won't cover 100% of the cases in which case your kids might walk on to a call while you are muted and off camera and you take them away and explain. If they are really small you have to have someone around either way. I've seen this pattern implemented by 4 guys with kids at our work - they shift their availability hours towards afternoon and evening because their wife works morning shift and isn't flexible. Nobody really has a problem with this or seeing kids interiort a meeting every once in a while.
I am a an engineering manager, my wife is a project manager. We both have many meetings, with many people attending, throughout the day.
We also have two small children (1 and 4).
We bought a smallish house (1500sqft) with a 10 minute commute to our work, because a short commute was more important to us than a bigger house (so we could spend more time with the kids).
Right now, with no daycare and quarantine, work is basically impossible. Just feeding the kids takes up almost two hours a day, not to mention setting up activities and supervising the one year old as he plays.
We don't have offices. We both have to work from the living room/kitchen. Even when one of us watches the kids while the other is in a meeting, you can hear the kids yelling and playing and having fun in the background.
Even if we had someone to watch the kids at the house, there is simply no room. You can hear the kids no matter which room they are in.
Our setup worked great when we went to the office and had daycare. It does not work at all for full time remote work, and trying to sell the house we just bought to move somewhere further away from the city (and away from our friends and support structure) doesn't seem like a smart option. If everyone is remote, why would someone else want to pay this much money for a house this small?
> We don't have offices. We both have to work from the living room/kitchen.
I don't understand this. Are the rooms giant, or does the 1500 square feet include the lawn? That is 140 m^2, basically two family-sized apartments put together.
It is a three bedroom house. My wife and I have the master bedroom, my 4 year old has her room, and my 1 year old has the other room. We have a decent size front room, a normal kitchen, and then a smaller family room connected to the kitchen. There are no doors on anything besides the bedroom.
yeah, my wife and I are empty nesters (kids grew up and moved to different states for work). After 6 weeks of sharing our 1600 sq ft house to WFH, and we put it up for sale to get a bigger house. Don't get me wrong. Two years prior, when our kids moved out, we downsized from 3000 sq ft. We were FINE in 1600; before we were WFH. The house we're moving into now is about 2300 sq ft, and we are hoping: just about right.
I don't know how people with small kids actually cope. I have a co worker who is at his wit's end with his 2 year old, who is requiring constant attention while we're on slack meetings.
Summary and comments on the points of this article:
* remote work widens the competitive playing field. Boo hoo. If you think non-remote work is somehow immune to offshoring, take a look at the last three decades for counterexamples.
* remote work enables you to be forgotten: sure, if your managers suck. Again, see gestures at the entire industry for examples of people getting "forgotten" at in-person offices.
* remote work breaks large companies: better phrasing - "remote work makes it plainly obvious that large companies are broken"
* remote work can stifle your career growth: again, sure - if your managers suck. They likely suck in person too, in that case.
* Conclusion: "what if instead of remote work companies just stopped acting like companies act"
As a content marketer, Sean is doing a great job of supporting a target customer persona: sucky bosses who are desperate to find a way to get back to an arrangement that makes it harder to spot how much they suck. I'm sure he'll get a lot of clicks.
Just because offshoring was happening before remote work doesn't mean remote work won't accelerate it's adoption. Part of the reason its not already ubiquitous is because we are still working out the best way to do remote work, the more that gets refined the more attractive offshoring looks. Americans will get priced out of the market and they should be concerned about that.
> Americans will get priced out of the market and they should be concerned about that.
It’s just good planning to have multiple potential forms of income. Programming might be the thing I do that can pay the highest, but I have plan B, plan C, and plan D ready to be put into action if I suddenly don’t have a career in software engineering, or I don’t want a career in software engineering.
Interestingly enough, having options also puts you in a stronger position when discussing salaries and benefits with your employer or perspective employer.
>... I have plan B, plan C, and plan D ready to be put into action if I suddenly don’t have a career in software engineering, or I don’t want a career in software engineering.
I would like to read more about that if you would care to share more details. I cannot imagine a career in anything but software, but this year has me very low on contract work and some backup plans are something I am trying to devise.
Very skeptical of this. The reality is that most professions shut people out unless they have very specific backgrounds, otherwise you'd see service workers routinely jump to something higher paying. A degree may be enough to get more of a foot in door somewhere, but it's very tough. Chances are you wind up doing something highly undesirable, unless you manage to go the self-employed "entrepreneur" route.
WTF are you talking about? That's not how careers work. If this whole profession of mine doesn't work out, it's not like I can just pivot to something else. There is no plan B, C, or D other than start begging for any job I can get.
Good communication skills and soft skills are even more important when you work remotely. I’m sure there are offshore teams that are really excellent at this, but unless the offshoring is for stand-alone teams the comms combined with the time zones are going to be brutal vs a more expensive domestic squad.
DevOps reports research seems to bear this out, but you never know if management will figure that out before they make the decision.
This virus has taught me that I absolutely loathe WFH. I don’t even like people or talking to them but I like having them around and I’ll drive an hour each way to make that happen.
-- For the budding young developer who can't wait to show ideas to teammates and demonstrate being a go-getter by asking random questions and finding unaddressed issues to innovate on, WFH might be terrible. You're going to schedule time to fortuitously run into the senior person who takes an interest in your idea?
-- For the working parent whose productivity has been slashed by 50% and stress has gone up by 50% due to parenting obligations, WFH might be terrible.
-- For the middle manager who can coast along and not need to move greatly in his/her career, WFH might be great.
-- For the developer who works by tickets on very concrete things and this is nothing new, WFH might be great.
-- For the small company CEO who relies on force of personality and everyone in the same room urgently working to get something done, WFH might be terrible.
There's a huge variability in what WFH means, depending on what you want from the situation.