How many people work from home?
nicholasdecker.substack.com
nicholasdecker.substack.com
It has been a mixed bag. Some random thoughts.
On good days, I get an enormous amount done. Long stretches of uninterrupted, focused work. On other days, I drift aimlessly.
I have always been somewhat disorganized (ADHD or whatever), but the office provided some structure. You had to show up, sit at your desk, and at least make a reasonable attempt at working. Remote work removes the external discipline.
It is not that I don't get things done. When something needs to happen, I can still pull myself together. Just last week I worked until 2 AM to meet some deliverables. But the chaos between those bouts of productivity has grown.
I always had a habit of using a Tuesday evening to speed-run whatever I had been putting off and occasionally sacrificing a weekend to catch up. But with remote work, the boundaries between work and leisure have become very fuzzy.
Maybe it was just the last 2 months of election season that were bad. I tried to fix it before but could not, but the last week since the elections got over has been magical :)
I miss the casual interactions that come from being around other people. But I think at least half that nostalgia is for an office that doesn't really exist. My actual work is with teams scattered across the world. Most of the people I would meet in the office are colleagues who report to my manager, rather than the people I collaborate with every day. But the ability to go out for lunch or coffee together, or meet at least the local people I work with, did count for something.
I can not really go back at this point in time due to continued family needs, but I wish I could.
I know this is not ask/tell HN, but a story about an article, so apologies for the digression.
For the last ~1/3 of my career I was a manager, and most of that time was in the office. Being remote as a manager was a lot harder for me. I found it so much easier to understand where someone's head was at when we could sit in a room or take a walk together. If I saw them fidgeting more than usual in a one-on-one, I could try to figure out if there was something they were having trouble bringing up, or if they just weren't feeling like spending time together that day. If I saw a different look on their face than usual when they were at their desks, I could use that as a trigger to check-in and see if there was anything I could help with. It was a lot harder when those little clues were missing, especially during a difficult time like the pandemic. I eventually learned to replace some of that with DMs ("Hi there, it's been a few days since we've chatted, so I wanted to check-in to see how you're doing. Anything I can do for you?"), but it was more like me polling than me getting notifications, so it felt more intrusive and less efficient.
That's all just me. I think the differences vary a lot by person, by role, and even by team/company. There were certainly periods where being able to grab lunch and/or a whiteboard was extremely valuable (and fun!).
After that team grew beyond a small handful of individuals who all knew each other and were used to working remotely (e.g. open source style of work) it got a lot harder.
The absolute best working situation for me was having an office everyone typically worked out of, but I was not required to work from. I found that I could balance my workload where I'd be in the office 2-3 days a week doing the "social" stuff like collaborating with my team on whiteboard level designs, meeting with other teams, catching up on e-mail, etc. Then I'd have 2-3 days of focus time at home to go head down and ignore the outside world to get more technical deep dive work done.
This only really worked for me though because everyone else worked from the office. I would wake up one morning, and simply decide to go in or not based on how I was feeling. If other folks were remote or hybrid it simply would have not been nearly as valuable.
I very much miss the office. I actually moved states and into the big city to be closer to it about 6 months before COVID hit. All the expense of bigy city living, none of the benefit! I am now fully remote like I was at the start of my career.
I started my whole programming career as a freelancer and worked fully remotely for 6 years before ever going to an office. But that's a bit different, because I advertised as a freelancer/consultant, and in that period I rarely worked in a team. And even when I worked in a team, my areas of responsibility were completely mine.
On one hand I vividly recall my last BigCo full time employment. I enrolled to a newly opened office, which at that point in time wasn't even an office but a few rented cubicles in WeWork-like space. My daily routine for first couple of months was to come to the office, get into my cubicle and login to the Skype call with the rest of the people I was working - in different offices. And for the rest of the day I sat there alone, occasionally hoping on other impromptu Skype calls.
I specifically asked couple of times if it would be possible for me to work from home, because I have zero personal interactions in the office, but over and over again I was told that WFH is strictly forbidden by the company policy.
That was pre-covid.
On the other hand, as someone who wore hats of leader/manager/director I have to admit - to this day - I find building teams, from ground up, in remote environment, almost impossible.
My very first office job had a very clever trick up their sleeve - we had a free lunch each day. Nobody skips a free lunch. Took me some time to realize how clever it was. To this day I have a draft of article in my desk titled "eat your scrum master".
Oh, and 20 years ago everyone was smoking. Between smoking, lunch, and bumping into each other at coffee desk - everyone knew everything. It's so simple - people like to talk, but eventually you'll run of small talk topics and start talking about the job.
I was recently diagnosed with celiac, so I'm pretty iffy around restaurant food in general
But even before I was diagnosed, I would much rather choose what I want for lunch than have whatever the office decided to buy.
Then again I've never really done well in office jobs, my career really never went anywhere until I started working remote and could stop trying to figure out the office politics bullshit
But this arrangement doesn't mean you only have one option. Most of the time you have a few. Sometimes - as was in my case mentioned in the post - you could specifically say what you want. And you could want anything you'd like, as long as it could be delivered. This wasn't Google, so we didn't had chef, but we had options.
The only time I saw the company took the decision was when I had my stint at CDPR, when they advertised free lunch. The part they didn't advertised was the part the lunch was arriving at 6pm. But still they were ordering for 2-3 different restaurants.
I think you took this quite a bit harsher than I was intending so sorry about that
But yeah, I think this is maybe a cultural or generational difference or something. I'm almost 40 now but I've never really been interested in work lunch stuff. For me, Lunch break is a break from work and coworkers and expectations not just a time to eat food. It's definitely not a time for team building activities, schedule those during working hours thanks.
I have much better focus at home, I get much more done. But what really improves my life is three things.
1. Working from home, for me, means I skip the hour of commute one way, freeing up two hours a day to do other things than waiting on a crowded train. This is time spent mainly with my kids.
2. When I need a break I just do some chores. This means when I turn off the PC for the day not only am I already home, most chores are done. I no longer feel I come home late drowning in stuff I need to do.
3. I'm home with my own things, with my beautiful garden. When I need to think I do so while tending to my greenhouse, sitting in the backyard, or strolling through the forest. At the office I used to struggle to find a peaceful corner of the office where I could think properly.
In 2020, when everyone was moving home - I was moving to that office. Much better focus than home - much better equipment than 99% of all former employers or clients.
It's not shared, I see no one all day - outside of 'meetings' (which are soooo much nicer with a giant screen, quality camera and microphone - the camera only gets used for the "getting-to-know-you" break-in period with a new client, then it's almost all audio-only) - and that is just the way I like it.
Heh - the biggest drawback of maintaining that space is that when I do work from home - it is at the dining room table - and none of my "stuff" is at home. (Uh, I also have an electronics/maker desk, 3d-printer)
We do what we can at my current place, but I still wish we had ways to get together. I've met a couple people that live(d) near me, and one has since moved.
If you have the option, don't be remote fully. At the very least be hybrid with a strict in office policy. You will not miss your at-home time.
And the explanations are always: "I have ADHD so I need someone to force discipline on me" or "My coworkers are the only ones I have to socialise with".
I really really want to treat these people with compassion and empathy but let's face it: these people force long commutes and a workplace that's full of distractions on the rest of us who don't have trouble being self-disciplined at home with a quiet place to do focused work.
There is also the matter of culture. If you don't intentionally set up a culture of being remote, it can be _really_ hard to implement it later, as COVID taught us. Some of the best teams I've ever worked for and the most productive engineering teams I've worked for were entirely remote.
As an aside, I also don't really "get it". If you work in a large enough org, you're going to eventually end up working with people who are at another site or whatever. You're effectively working with someone remotely in that case too, even if they're "on site" at another location. This is just as remote as a "real" remote job.
This has happened to me as well. I wish there could be a way to find a balance between living in a remote village and working for good money in a tech company with other colleagues in person.
You. I don't miss in-person.
Next year, we will be required to work from the office if we are within a 50 mile radius. Those that are outside the circle will not be eligible for promotions or changing jobs, unless they are somehow except or move.
Hard to say, but I think it's a good move. I tried going to the office before but it turned out no one was really there.
Plus there's the fuel cost and lost time, but this also might open new doors.
We wouldn't be doing any of this if it weren't for the customers. We cannot acquire these customers without physically meeting with most of them. Some are such a handful that we need to regularly meet indefinitely. Some we could have maybe acquired purely remotely in retrospect, but it's not worth the risk for rare B2B contracts.
The scene from office space about the customer and the engineer might be the most accurate thing ever. It took me a long time to get it. The engineers are actually really good at working with the customer up to a point. After which things get really messy really fast. The walls close in once the technical person learns that they are fighting political forces well beyond their understanding. Working remotely with an unaligned customer is a lawsuit factory. You need to get a representative on-site to sit down with the local warlords and negotiate terms.
One time I got a job at an open space office. I lasted a month. It was so distracting I couldn’t get anything done. I quit the job without having another job lined up.
My kids are 11 and 13, and I feel really lucky to be here when they ride their bikes home from school. I manage a team of engineers these days, and I do everything I can to make remote work enjoyable and productive for them.
I'm sure I'd enjoy being in an office again, but what I have right now is pretty great, and I appreciate it.
If I lived next door to the office it would be a no brainer for me, and I think for a lot of other people. I would go to the office. Unfortunately because the West is too scared to build homes and solve the housing crisis, we live further from work than we would like.
My commute in London when I do go to the office these days is a £16 round trip, and being crammed into a tin can with a bunch of imbeciles that can’t understand the concept of letting people off the train first or using headphones to listen to music. Nah, I’m good thanks.
Having a community of coworkers you see everyday and build relationships with is healthy for humans. Spending 40 hours a week in a room by yourself with only digital interaction, surprisingly, is not great for many people.
Different people need different things at the end of the day. The reason wfh people are more intense about it is because wfh jobs are less common than in-office and most companies are actively trying to drive all of us back into offices after so many of us finally got what worked better for us. It’s hard to be sympathetic to the in-office fans in this environment. Doesn’t mean we don’t know they exist in large numbers or don’t want them to work the way they want.
This is the ideal way too imo. Remote has many advantages but I also understand the disadvantages that it has and an approach like this feels like the right balance/tradeoff to me.
We are also not animals built out for isolation. Work still plays a significant role in our meaning to life given that we do it for such long streches of time and isolation within work can have some detrimental effects.
There might be some more logic to it as well. For how long work has ever been done, it was done in the frequents of 1-2 hours, break, 1-2 hours and so on. This is a really good video relating to how work got streched from this to a monotonous 8 hour time or even more.
I think that within pure office, you are unable to really toggle your brain off from work. It is a single strech of long period of time that you are at work. Because if you could tune out then you would've preferred to move back to home and relax. It is very hard to relax within the hours of job and our human body is strictly not built for such levels of stress and endurance at a prolonged period. We need a lot more breaks which most work offices don't give as they see it as a method to "optimize" their employees productivity.
Remote does offer some pushback against it but suffers from the isolation aspect of it.
Hybrid as is your case, can help in providing the balance of work and some form of connection while at it.
I also feel sometimes that this is true but for libraries when studying as perhaps the same principle applies. Though, there is still some laziness exerted in going to the library, I feel as if over the long term, the benefits of going to library might outweigh the costs and that over a long term, it might induce me more net stress not going to library.
Glad that you have found the proper approach to things and I agree with the last paragraph that the employer should be accomodating to all because even from a capitalist perspective, it can allow their employees to actually be on the path to their maximum value and a more happy workforce can be a good thing in general which pays a lot of dividends over a long term.
We probably shouldn't be getting all our socialization at work either. People with healthy active social lives outside of work will probably handle work from home a lot better. There are certain situations where working with others in person is actually better for productivity and that's fine, but when someone's needs as a social animal aren't being met unless they have to go into an office there's likely already something pretty unhealthy going on. It might be too many hours spent working, or a job that's too stressful or demanding, or soul crushing, but I'd be looking for a solution that isn't "lock me in a cage for 8-10 hours a day with a bunch of other trapped workers" first.
See? I honestly don't care about colleagues outside what we have to do together. If you are down for the divorce or sad that you found cigs in your daughter's backpack, it's all noise for me. I have friends outside the office and do not wish to make more inside. Please don't spam me with your life, I have no kids and do not care about your eldest's soccer results. I want to do what I am paid for, peacefully, then leave.
Now that the tides have turned the extroverts complain that they can't do their work properly but it's only fair that the introverted finally get their shot at working like they feel more natural.
As someone who has suffered for decades in a noisy and chaotic workplace, I am never going back.
Once they can tell the computer/slave what to do, what'll they need us for?
My advice is to relax: If there's no work, whatever companies remain better paying so much taxes that everybody can live like their council/town mayor/president, or the humans will be literally eating the rich.
Just try to love where you live and be good friends with your neighbours when it happens, and don't be one of the last people working/defending work.
In any event, I suspect AI could be still a long way off of that, despite the fact quite suddenly a lot more human beings can tell a computer what to do. You might feel differently, but I promise your job isn't representative of "most" people who work from home: You have no idea what the demographics of at-home workers are.
especially now
Even if LLMs could be capable managers, today out-of-the-box, they’re not.
This is pretty much the case for just about all jobs. AI, right now, sucks. I don't think there's any field or job title where AI has replaced all the human workers. The place I see it most in the wild are those useless AI chatbots on websites, and even there humans are still working in those positions (usually past the initial AI filter). AI is not fit to replace actual workers because it isn't "intelligent" enough to handle even the most basic and remedial jobs literal children perform. That's why there are still humans taking drive-thru orders, even after companies with billions of dollars to spend have tried to use AI to get rid of them all.
That could always change though, and by the time AI can understand "I want a #1 and a coke" well enough to replace all drive-thru order takers, AI good enough to replace a lot of mangers won't be very far behind. Depending on the quality of the manager anyway... I've had some managers who were good enough that I doubt AI will ever be good enough to do better, but I've also had managers who were so bad they probably could have already been effectively replaced by a complicated enough spreadsheet.
Out-of-the-box I think most humans are bad at nearly everything.
> Have you had AI manage anything?
I had perl scripts manage everything: The idea of software running a company is not even slightly far-fetched. What's new is if you actually know how the business works, you can absolutely tell a computer how to do it.
And that is important, because it means if you are struggling to get the AI to manage anything, I have to tell you that is a strong signal do not know what a manager does or should do.
Remote work, at an employer that embraces their employees, has resulted in excellent results instead of meandering around the office trying to bs your way through office politics.
Remote work highlights merit and office work highlights time and social integration. Both can get promotions, and I've of gotten promotions from both, but I think the former is healthier