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Comment by rosywoozlechan | Hacker News Reader

It's strange how we went from open offices to always work from home 100% remote teams. I like going to the office. As an engineer, I very much dislike open offices, they're noisy, hard to work in, the extra collaboration is mostly just unnecessary interruption that could have been brought up in Sack, and as we now know also a really great way transmit contagions around a team. I'd be happy if we just go back to offices or even cubicles. I miss my cubicles with my mini-whiteboard and my own little corner with a desk with drawers. In the bay area at least we've been crammed into ever-larger open spaces like workers in a meatpacking plant, with smaller desks and more noise and disruption.

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I will have to shamelessly try and sway you.

Get a large house, a swimming pool, a home office room with all the games and gadgets you ever wanted, a nice surround 5.1 system optically connected to a gaming pc, a nice couch to rest now and then and plan your code ahead.

See if you still miss your cubicle (nothing wrong with that, but just what i wrote a thought).

Thats my lifestyle since i starting working remotely. As summer is coming, trees are blossoming, fresh and clean air. My client is pretty impressed with my productivity and most of our e-meetings are held while we all sit in our gardens (most of the team is remote).

I may not like having a tiny desk crammed in a huge team in a loud noisy space, I do still like seeing my coworkers daily and attending meetings with them and going out to lunch with them. Working from home is isolating and lonely for me.

But this is only because you are now out of a sudden in such a situation. If you knew it was like this for ever and its up to you how much human contact you still get you can team up with some friends (or collegues that you especially like) instead of those collegues you got randomly assigned to. I have this that while my contract is running out right now and I am ready to work on something new, I kind of know that I will miss my old collegues and while I will certainly get to like new ones as well, there is something to it to keep up you old team for longer.

Or to put it short: Why do I have to switch my lunch group, just because I switch the employer. Remote does not mean you have to stay alone or with family all day.

I have everything you list above, and I'm not swayed.

I still looking forward to going back to normal. I've never been the social butterfly who sees tons of friends on a regular basis out of work, and yet I enjoy talking to others. Work gives me that, lunch at work gives me that too.

Some of my colleagues are razor smart. I can have lunch time discussions about rocketry or special video coding algorithms or War time cryptography, just random interesting stuff that I'd never have otherwise.

Working at home has some benefits, but how many times do you really use that swimming pool?

That is true - I miss this kinds of chats and interaction. But our team grew up in the IRC days and we are used to long chats about such topics over slack. Tho indeed remote work is a matter of choice - doesn't mean we all have to enjoy it.

Re pool, i occasionally jump in during breaks, just enough to refresh my mind and have a clear view over why that microservice is misbehaving. I only started working remote 1.5 years ago and it may be the excitement of something new, but i am loving it thus far!

We use our pool 3-4 times per week in the summer.

But we have kids, and it gets hot as hell here, so summer after-work activities usually involves something with water.

Is your answer: "try being rich"? People with what you have are rarely sitting in cubicles or open offices any way.

I’m far from rich, but see, remote work lets you own a property in a much nicer, cleaner, safer, area than in crowded cities for less money than a studio. A remote engineer doing work for a high paying company can be the richest outside crowded urban areas.

I can't count the number of times, my team has run into a complex issue, be it a production issue or a coming up with a complicated algorithm design that would've been a lot more difficult to do remotely. My current team has 2 members that are remote only and one person who comes in once a week, or every other week depending on circumstances.

I think there's a lot of day to day work that is more productive at home but in an ideal world, you could have the best of both worlds.

What makes you say that remote problem solving is more difficult? I've worked in places that were 100% distributed, and we were able to handle issues over conference calls without much issue.

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