I've long said that WFH is an easy win climate change solution that costs nothing, is well loved by everyone who participates (except management). Turns out in times like this, it's also an energy security measure.
In fact, I've added two days working outside of home instead of one because of the benefits. I think 3 days home/2 days office is the sweet spot.
I encourage people who are remote but want human contact to rent a desk once a week at a co-working space.
For me personally, I want to do my work as efficiently as possible, in as little time as possible, and then have my social time, which has very little in common with my work and/or colleagues.
I might be an exception, but I get up very, very early and work almost right away, and I don't want to be on a roll and then have to pack up, get in the car at a terrible traffic time where (some) people are driving like animals, hunt for parking and then find a desk. That's a huge _tax_ on my productivity.
But I don't expect or demand that the rest of the world do this.
As a side comment, I would agree with you though, that 2 in the office is better than one. But I also had a very effective pattern around 10 years ago, where I spent 2 days in the office per month, and that worked really well for me (though those days were far, far less productive than my at home work days).
Now, if the world adopted a 32 hour, 4-day work week I would probably be ok with the office 1 day a week.
I'm a software engineer in a Product Engineering team and it's about 75% hands-on engineering, 25% Slack/Teams interaction and alignments between people. I find being in the office helps to make connections with other staff in other teams (eg. bumping into people while making coffee in staff kitchen etc). I think thats important from a career perspective.
(no affiliation)
I work from a library on the other day, thats a 30 minute drive. I tend to leave before 0700 when the roads are peaceful. My car is pretty fuel efficient, i try to hypermile it and get ~50mpg.
If it is a sweet spot for you fine, I am happy you found it. But DO NOT FORCE all of US who have different sweet spots to meet you at yours.
I put my comment out there to trigger just this kind of discussion.
That tends to generate resistance
Ideally, we should not be put in a situation where we have to get necessary social health through our jobs. It should be through our hobbies, our passions, our friends, and our family. The people and things we choose to spend time with.
I'm not judging you either, because this is also the case for me. But, I think, if I was WFH, I would have a lot more free time. I could dedicate that to social interactions. Most people don't, but they could.
I am 100% more effective in person where I can dev and my desk and bounce ideas off if team mates around me verbally. This can be recreated in a remote environment by having things like a team Discord that folks sit on, but it can feel forced at times (just like communiting to the office I suppose).
My take might be heavily skewed though. I am in games and our environment is highly collaborative.
And half the staff was just WFH anyways, or remote, so the collaboration opportunities... diminished.
I even saw this happening at Google before I left there, which had formerly been a ... luxury office. Packing people in like sardines, forcing people to "reserve" desks. Bad parking and/or transit situations.
I get it when employers face financial or real estate crunches. But in the last 10-15 years (I've been working for 30) -- even pre-COVID -- I feel like some switch went off in tech industry leadership brains that is just outright disrespectful. Paying high salaries to engineers and then providing them with uncomfortable accommodations. Makes little sense to me.
I'm back to WFH and the isolation that comes with it. In part because the office environment was actually not what I was hoping for. Because the industry ruined it.
My kingdom for an office with a ceiling, lmao. The exposed ductwork cheap-ass offices are so awful.
I'd just like cubicles back.
>Oh no you don't understand I need a compress decompress cycle I TRIVE when I burn as much gas as possible
People's emotionally driven myopia on this topic never fails to impress me. "No point" in making such a ridiculously weak argument.
I work from home for the last 25 years (I am an independent vendor, design and develop business critical products for medium size businesses). I have no desire to socialize with employees of my clients and when I am in a mood I have real fiends to spend time with.
Can't imagine wasting my time in corporate cubicles or open concept offices
Can't you fucking do your homework beforehand, think your idea thoroughly, and then have at least a small written paragraphs about it before interrupting your colleagues.
Really, I am not a co-processor in a bus for you to dispatch a job to me and raise an interrupt line whenever the fuck you fancy doing it.
Game design is messy and some things can only really be talked through.
Also, nothing here implies that GP doesn't think through their thoughts before bouncing off ideas.
They never said they didn't.
> Really, I am not a co-processor in a bus for you to dispatch a job to me and raise an interrupt line whenever the fuck you fancy doing it.
I am! I'm perfectly capable of managing my own time and shoeing others away if needed. Please bother me! That's why I have a cell phone and a salary.
Almost certainly relevant: I work in manufacturing.
- first job, fully onsite. More traditional cubicle space
- second job, on-site until COVID came around. Literally a WeWork building as a sattellite office to HQ in San Fransico.
- third job, "0-100%" on site. There was an office and I could come into it never or all the time. More of an open office setup.
I will say it's nice to not need to spend 5 days commuting, and I really don't think we need to do that much collaboration to be productive. If you're local, I think a suggestion of 2-3 days in office would do wonders, reserved for "brainstorming" days or cross team syncs. for job 3, that was pretty much my schedule; typically come in TWTh, unless I was feeling sick (this was still the tail end of COVID).
But some camaraderie was nice. The games scene was really friendly for the most part (in my experience. I have heard second hand stories and don't want to discount those). There were community events, tribal wisdom you'd hear over water-cooler talk, impromptu group lunches, and seasonal parties. It was nice, being around other passionate people who had similar interests to you. I definitely miss that most.
Productivity-wise, I'm not sure I noticed much difference. I had enough space to setup a dedicated office room, so that's definitely one privilege I had. But I had on-off days in office and remote. Maybe my most productive days were in office, but that was usually over guidance from a lead.
I don't think everyone needs to be on-site per se. But I do see some situations where on-site is beneficial to have, at least in partial capacity.
1. Juniors definitely need some on-site guidance (and by that extension, leads need to be available those days). I really cannot imagine those early mentoring being as effective over a screen. There's so much "body language" style of knowledge gained that doesn't come up in zoom meetings (and while proposed, I really hate the idea of an "always on" chat-room)
2. brainstorming, architecturing , and conceptualizing felt much better in person. So some periods may need more in-office time than others where it's focused on development (which feels to have minimal impact, given the nature of "head down" work).
3. Office space might be a consideration depending on your living space. If you are in a small apartment with little desk space, I can see that having a huge impact to productivity.
And for many people WFH has other problems - if you're a dual-WFH couple in a small home, lack of home office space is a very real problem. (Although if WFH was a permanent thing, many people could choose less expensive places to live, and have more space)
Still, anything to eliminate a miserable and environmentally wasteful commute.
Gotta travel 20 miles to downtown for anything resembling night life.
Here's a line from my local library's site:
> Our auditoriums are provided as a public service for use by individuals, institutions, groups, organizations, and corporations for a small fee, when not being used for library-affiliated or sponsored activities.
Also if it would become really crowded they would probably think of prolonging opening hours.
A coworking space in every building != a WeWork. There's a big difference between these! You could implement the former by opening a million WeWorks but that doesn't sound good at all; residential apartment buildings already have common areas, free to residents, they would simply have to be reimagined slightly.
Sure I get meetings you need to go to separate rooms, but how is the rest is different from a regular open office? Oh no, my co-working space has the person I like to spend time with?
I'm not saying everyone must be WFH or that everyone must have a home office. I'm just having hard time imagining how two people cannot WFH in a 1-bedroom apartment. Unless both of them work in a call center.
I agree, and a lot of my 'participation' in these meetings these days is read the papers, write my opinion, attach it to the documents and tell people I'm not attending.
That said we're 5 years in to this thing and people haven't adapted.
But ya, probably best to just call it "traffic" then, and they might be more receptive.
However I do know people who really do not care. They may say they care but their actions and voting record show that in fact they don't care (or don't want to make it a real priority). But those same people get very upset when they're stuck in traffic
And this is a massive reversion too. In the mid 2000s republicans were openly advocating that we needed to do something about climate change and that it was a serious problem and then we opened the cash floodgates to American federal politics and would you look at that, oil companies have a lot of cash.
Keep in mind that the real cost of transitioning is very likely to be less than what we spent on the stupid oil wars of the 2000s. We can literally afford it now, let alone if we hadn't burned all that cash bombing the desert because of oil politics.
Oil companies themselves are fine to be "Energy" companies and invest in Solar and other renewables. They will be profitable just fine. Our country is tearing itself apart over a lie to ensure they remain more profitable.
For example: If you can sustainably and reliably source your daily necessities like having the ability to cook or maintain a decent home environment that support it, kudos. Thought the covid lockdowns showed us how fragile that system can be especially for those _essential people_ to be physically around to feed you or keep your shit running.
As a side note: how do you feel about being snookered by your local government's policy under the pretext that _essential work_ just gives your employers the ability to maintain the same minimum wage labor cycle just so you can feel giddy about how good this idea is?
Most of management hates it too. I manage a team where everyone is remote, yet I have to go to the office few days a week to sit on zoom, why? And up a level, my manager has an even longer commute and probably hates it more than I do.
This stuff is pushed down by HR, most of management hates it.
1. for other businesses and jobs though, people staying at home costs a lot. one can call it a polarizing option.
2. these kind of jobs are likely prime candidates for AI already.
This claim might be true but it’s simply not showing up in the data which suggests that even if true, the effect is probably minor.
But no, it won't ever be that level without major infrastructure change. Not all jobs can be wfh. We can get close by a major public transportation overhaul, but that will take decades (even without the inevitable pushback).
So? The only people who matter are shareholders and their proxies (management). To everyone else: you don't matter as much as you think you do, quit being selfish and be happy you get anything at all. The world doesn't revolve around you.
The world might not revolve around me, but thankfully, I do get a vote in who I chose to work for, and I chose an employer that lets me work remote.
You don't speak for me :)
I hate it.
The entire system is designed around making the numbers go up, not down
People bought bigger houses or renovated. They upgraded their PCs and were more likely to subscribe to broadband and less likely to cancel. Empty office buildings are ever so slowly being converted to housing. Professional clothing purchases dipped and then rebounded.
* A solved problem, btw.
Note, some people even think that would take even more energy in total per day, but that's not correct because a cooler house doesn't emit as much energy as a warmer one.
But these are stupid made up arguments. WFH or not both the homes with no one in them and the offices with no tenants are getting heated still to keep the pipes from bursting.
All arguments are made up.
>getting heated still to keep the pipes from bursting
If I work from home my home must be kept at 19°. If I go to the office, my house can go down to 14-16° no problem.