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Comment by rubyfan | Hacker News Reader

i wish i could upvote more than once. the company i work for recently started surveying people about “return to office”. the company has been really good about work from home during COVID but they really haven’t taken into consideration a permanent distributed workforce. the survey results will speak for themselves. People are less stressed without a daily commute, see their families more and have more balance - oh and get the same amount of work or more.

i think any company that’s not seriously evaluating distributed teams permanently is going to lose talent.

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People like the change working from home for a few months. This is not socially sustainable though. People will begin to feel isolated and lonely (which is already an epidemic in itself). Working from home for years on end is something only a handful of people are really cut out for, and the problem is that most people don't realize they're not one of those people until they've been doing it for quite a while.

"This is not socially sustainable though"

Maybe it isn't for some, like you, but for many/most forced WFH I believe the outcome will in fact be lasting and socially fruitful.

(Personally, I've WFH 10+ years so not the best example because it was always my preference and had no cares about missing out on potential social interactions or relationships with co-workers)

But plenty of people I know about have been recently forced to WFH are finding various new hobbies and thus discovering and developing new social circles (Online & IRL) even w/ CV19 circumstances. Not to mention just going outside to do things and meeting others is happening a lot - at least where I live.

Between observing this and thinking through it more...I'm not convinced that coworkers are really the best types of relationships anyways. Indeed they can provide us with some superficial temporary social stimuli and primitive reinforcement, though not sure relationships by default/proximity are not built to last regardless. And they often come with the consummate 'shop talk' and 'office politics' or 'gossip' trade-offs - all childish stuff to be concerned with in or outside of work.

My hunch is that we're all better off getting to know people outside our own little bubbles :)

Right now, so many people's social outlets are work, which seems the bad part. Take that away and either now there's nothing, or norms change and people make more social outlets to meet people outside of work. I'm sure hoping for the latter, which I see as better than the status quo.

Before the lockdown, my company always provided the option of working from home if needed. Maybe you had childcare, maybe your car was in the garage. But the general default was to be in the office. How we worked reflected this - often we'd try to resolve problems or ask for advice face to face. Some people could get frustrated if others were frequently working from home on short notice.

With hindsight, I haven't felt many blocks to working remotely. Hardware issues, like a laptop charger failing, tend to be the more difficult things to get sorted. It's how things have to be, and people get on with it. What I do miss is the corridor conversations and find that I have a more narrow view of what's going on in the company because I'm simply not exposed to it.

Also, I neglected to invest in my home office setup because it wasn't a common thing to use. If working remotely does because more of a norm, that's where I'd spend some money going forward.

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