My work setup at home is on the same desk as my personal computer. As I type this on my personal computer, I’ve got my work computer open and I’m monitoring emails. This is a Friday, and my Fridays are generally slow. Once in a while I’m busy working with employees who have questions or issues, but most Friday afternoons are sloooow. I watch shows, listen to music, post on the Dope, etc., etc.
My WAG is that something about the standard office environment didn’t meet his needs. Could have been seating, lighting, specialized equipment, proximity to a bathroom, etc. - all things that he had readily to hand at home and the office did not. The office could have acquired the needed equipment, provided different seating, or whatever, but opted to have him work remotely instead because it was cheaper for them, and “easier” for the employee.
I don’t know about
@alphaboi867 , but I know a couple of people whose mental health drastically deteriorated when they started working at home in 2020. They would have absolutely requested to work in office as an accommodation but they didn’t need to because everyone at their job went back to the office eventually.
One of my sons (25) has a work requirement that they go in once a week; he on the other hand goes in at least four days a week, because he vastly prefers being around people. My other son (23) has no such requirement, and he’s somewhat misanthropic, so I think he maybe goes in once a quarter. Both of them seem pretty happy with the way things work.
It was for mental health reasons; WFH exacerbated my anxiety & depression worse, every coping strategy failed, and my therapist recommended I avoid WFH. When my company downsized to a smaller office they formally changed my department from hybrid due covid19 to 100% remote and I ended up fighting with a very confused HR.
This would have been pretty easy for us. We had plenty of space and so long as you followed the same rules as those who were still working in the office it wouldn’t have been a problem. Thanks for sharing.
I had been wanting to work from home for years. The COVID came and took care of that.
When we first got sent home, I bought a new computer and monitor (kind of needed it anyway). But I was ready and determined to continue to work from home. I got my way.
I’m very hard of hearing so it’s rather pointless to have discussions face to face. Text me or email me is best.
It’s great. I can take a break in the middle of the day to plow or walk my dogs. But I get my 8 hours in and then some. I’m a GIS Applications Engineer. But we all wear many hats. One of my jobs is to work on servers during maintenance windows (after hours). It’s great, I just pop into my home office and get it done.
The rest of the team mostly takes a hybrid approach. Some folks that work on hardware really can’t work remotely. One guy works a thousand miles away (he’s taking care of his elderly parents).
I have not seen any problems with productivity. If anything, it’s increased. But that’s because we take pride in what we do.
One thing I’ve noticed is less sick days. We aren’t passing bugs around. And for the occasional cold that you might not go into the office, it’s easy to work at least some at home.
I save about 1.5 hours a day since I’m not driving. That’s time that can be put to good use.
What’s off for me, is instead of sleeping in, I get up earlier. I can pop on my system and see what’s happened overnight. It’s mostly gonna be requests from the public. I can take care of that before other folks start clocking in. That way, they don’t have to mess with it.
I actually feel sort of semi-retired, even though I put my 40 hours in. Was kinda funny, my neighbor and buddy also works from home. I ran into him walking the dogs. And we both said, “I’m working so I should get back.”
My job has sort of become like George Clooney’s in Up in the Air after Anna Kendrick automated what they do with video conferencing.
Consultants used to be known for flying out to a client site 4 days a week. We show up in our fancy suits, camp out in some conference room they designated as our “war room” and do our work - a mix of preparing presentations and planning what steakhouse we were going to eat at that evening.
To a certain extent, I think that made the job more important, or at least more interesting.
These days, clients don’t want to pay for the travel and expenses. And even ten years ago or more, I’ve noticed that when I go out to client companies, the offices are often mostly empty.
The other thing is that I’m in a profession where we largely trust our people to be remote or distributed around. A lot of companies, particularly banks, still have an old fashioned culture where everything is about meetings and the solution to getting stuff done is more management oversight with more meetings. As if somehow they believe the reason the work isn’t getting done fast enough is because people are not doing it unless they are being watched like children.
Back in the days before the open-plan office, with my cubicle providing 3 directions of visual privacy, I enjoyed being in the office. I’d even get there early, since it was a good quiet time to get ahead. Commute was never an issue. I did take 1 per week remote, and sometimes 2, because occasionally it’s necessary.
Now everything’s different (at least in software). You sit at a bench table with 6-10 other people. No organizational boundaries, you’re in an open bay with maybe 20-40 other randos. Some are blaring a conference call on speakerphone, some are guffawing at each other’s jokes, some are hailing one another from 40 feet across the room, constant background noise of bleeps and bloops and ringtones. Oh, and the ping-ping table. Ping. Pong. Ping. Pong. Do that shit at home, please. People can be such pigs, I just don’t get it.
If they want me to come back to the office, this is incredibly simple, just give me the tiny scrap of personal space and privacy that existed circa 2000. I’ll come to work and put in the hours. But make me sit in the equivalent of a high school cafeteria? F* off with that.
This exactly describes the situation I was / am in. My company supported partial WFH, and some people did WFH part of the week, but despite my asking several times over a few year period, my manager for whatever reasons resisted allowing me to, until boom, Covid. Now our entire office is permanent WFH.
For the most part, I love it. I sleep in until 10 or 15 minutes before my start time, walk upstairs to my home office and fire up the computer. I found I was even more productive than in the office because pop-up meetings and other distractions were less frequent. I’m able to let in plumbers or run the occasional daytime errand. I set myself up with better monitors and other equipment I either couldn’t get in the office or had to cut through lots of red tape to obtain.
The only drawback, I find, is the social aspect. I’m mostly an introvert by nature, but as I got older I became more extroverted, and I enjoyed the occasional chat with my coworkers. Meetings, I think, are much easier in person than on Zoom- everybody seems to talk over each other in zoom meetings, and something’s lost when you don’t pick up non-verbal cues as easily from tiny thumbnail images. I also miss several restaurants I used to go to for lunch in the area.
Not two much of a problem with me and Teams/Zoom. But out meetings are just generally 4 of us, so I see the people well. What I wish though is if the other part of the group is together, they just plop down a laptop for the meetings. So it’s not just pointing at one person. Luckily I just turn on CC, and that works well.
If they do meetings from their own home, that’s fine.
I don’t understand why the hell they don’t get cameras and headsets. It’s inexpensive. That also makes it a lot easier to screen share with someone to look at work in progress.
Yeah, the lunch thing is different too. My wife and I just tend to make big batches of stuff that is easy to heat up. That’s how we like to do it. I can eat the same thing for a week, no problem.
I never had much of a desire to work from home, but after doing it for about four years, I’m kind of used to it at this point. During COVID, I always felt a little guilty about answering, “We’re doing great,” when people asked how my wife and I were doing. Both of us were working from home and it was effectively a raise for both of us. We saved money by not commuting, eating out for lunch, or having to purchase clothes for work and of course a lack of driving to and from work gave me some free time. By May 2020 I was hearing about the COVID 15, people gaining weight as they weren’t doing much outside the house, and I decided to lose 15 pounds and I ended up losing 60 pounds by 2021 and have kept most of it off.
During the COVID years, my daughter had to work from home. She works in accounts as a manager and her employer provided all the equipment she needed to convert a spare room into a home office. At the time, it was pretty convenient, as their young daughter’s nursery closed down as well.
She did not like it. “Zoom is not the same as collaborating in the office.” “Working alone gets lonely.” As things relaxed, she started going in a couple of days a week, but a co-worker quit, which meant she had to go back full time.
She has now started a new job and they offered WFH part time as an option - she declined.
I can do a lot of my research work and brief writing remotely, but there’s a lot of quick conversations that I need every day with co-workers, on my floor, on another floor, and occasionally on the big boss’s floor.
During Covid, all those quick conversations had to be done by e-mail. It was not good for my mental or physical health, because we were deluged with e-mails. Nor do I think we were as effective in dealing with those quick consults. What I could do by walking down to a co-worker’s office, chatting for a few minutes, and then going back to my own office, sometimes could take all morning or all day to get an answer, because co-workers might have been on a differentWFH schedule. And follow-up questions could also take longer. Talking about legal questions probably doesn’t adapt as well to questions about programming, which some of you have mentioned.
I empathize with @alphaboi867 and get it.
We did those over Teams. So I’d send an IM saying, “do you have a minute to talk about xyz?” And the response was either, “yes” or “give me 5 minutes”, and then we’d connect via video chat and have a quick conversation.
It helped that Teams shared whether we were in a meeting, on the phone, away from our desk, or just working at the computer. I usually only reached out when a team mate was “green” (working at their computer).
I had always worked mostly “at the office” before the pandemic, but i worked remote from my boss and teammates several times, starting in 1997. When we first got the “what’s my remote coworker’s status” indication it made an enormous difference. At first, when my boss installed the software before i did, it felt slightly invasive. But once i installed it, too, i realized that it didn’t give him any info he wouldn’t have naturally had if we were sitting nearby. (It might have been skype at the time. Lots of software packages can do the same thing.) And it made such an enormous difference in how “present” my remote teammates felt to me. I wouldn’t want to work from home without a tool like that.
But having that tool, i love working from home. And i hated the “hoteling” office structure my employer moved to before the pandemic. I am just more psychologically comfortable in “my own” space than i am in a space I’m just borrowing, and where I’m not supposed to leave my laptop and my box of Kleenex. Because of that, it’s hard for me to say if i would have preferred working in the office if, you know, I’d had an office. But the difference between working in a borrowed cube vs working in my den was huge to me. Enough that i gave my notice and retired when the company insisted i return to the office.
Huge difference in that now everyone has had experience with WFH owing to covid, and second that there are great tools for remote communication.
Around the turn of the century, I worked in China, which was remote from the US based HQ mothership. Man, did that suck. Not only time zones always meant outside of normal work hours if not middle of the night, but you had to call in on a conference call bridge. And then cross your fingers someone in the conference room actually activated the bridge as well. And then that both sides could hear each other. And then the people in the conference room made any attempt to keep you in the loop. And then fill you in on the whiteboarding that took place.
Now you can get on teams or zoom, raise your hand, see a presentation, and it works pretty well. Although, no substitute for in the room white boarding.
I just got moved into a neighborhood. I have an assigned desk because I come in more than the 40% threshold. And I’ve worked on investment banking sales floors (you had a phone, two monitors and an under the desk file cabinet along with about 20 other people and facing a similar row), cube farm for decades, open office for a decade, and my own office for about a decade. 99% of people want their own office.
Oh, I hate working from home full time. I’m okay to start at home or finish at home, but 24/7 at home sucks. That said, I have a 10 minute drive to the office.
The new college hires and others new to the company, really suffer if remote. And suffer almost as much because there hasn’t been a critical mass in the office since covid started. It’s hard enough for the “kids” to pick up soft skills if a full office with mentors and role models, it’s doubly difficult to figure that shit out 100% remote with zero real work experience.
33 years ago, we shared workstations. These where big Intergraph dual monitor stations with a digitizing board. The place was working 24/7. Three shifts. A chair or keyboard never got cold.
While incredibly high tech for it’s time, it sucked to share. Once one person got ill, everyone got ill. This was way before COVID sanitation practices became common.
I would never ‘hotel’. I would figure out how to have an early retirement. I must have my own space. My wife and I are looking for a new home in a couple of years. We are going to need our own space/offices. We have that now with a small loft for me, and a sort of multi-purpose room that my wife can use. That room can be quickly turned into a guest room using a blow up bed. I used it to recuperate from a hip replacement (no stairs to deal with) But other than that, it’s not really used. It does have it’s own outside entrance.
Some people need face to face communication. For a person that is hard of hearing, the written word works better. AND we have a record of what was said. That’s a bonus.
Could you explain why? Is it not being able to separate home/work life? I have co-workers do the hybrid approach. It may be that they can’t carve out a work space at home. I’m not sure. One is single, so it’s not because of interruptions.
I’m not a hermit, and enjoy traveling, but I also love being at home. The thought of traveling into work is a no go for me. For myself, it’s pointless. I don’t do things that have nothing but downsides. No benefit at all. Full Stop. Not gonna do it.
I’m retired now, but my previous job was for a software company. My first role there was customer support. Being in the office made sense so I could work with the pre-sales and professional services teams, plus train up the new customer support guys.
The office was in a big town about 20 miles from where I live. Traffic there is horrendous and driving could take up to an hour or more each way. Fortunately taking the train was an easy (if not cheap) option.
In about 2013 I switched roles to software development. I’m in the UK and the rest of the team was spread across the US and Canada. There was no point in staying in the office so I set up my home office. The company provided a laptop but I bought everything else myself including big monitors, a standing desk and a chair better than what was in the offices. I absolutely loved it. My role was mostly bug fixing which rarely required any interaction with team mates so I didn’t even have to work North American hours. My alarm would go off at 6:30, I’d be online by 7:00 and would shut down at 16:00.
I think there’s a lot of wisdom to this, and especially the last sentence.
I did software dev lead and product design as WFH from about 2010 to 2013, so long before COVID. It was one of the few jobs that at that time worked well for WFH.
We had been an in-person company that was bought by an inherently remote company. So as soon as they finished taking over most of our people went to part time WFH, and then when the lease ran on our office space a few months later everyone was full time WFH.
I had the home life and facilities where this was easy. Not everyone else did. The personal logistical convenience certainly cannot be beat.
The critical thing I noticed was that very quickly a whole host of organizational pathologies showed up. Folks who had been diligent became “phone it in” types. The process of onboarding newbies became far more difficult and slow, and newbies still felt lost or ignored or not quite full members of the team long after they’d have been fully integrated in the in-person version of our company.
We (the purchased company) were a small shop, about 30 workers of all flavors. So not a great deal of organizational inertia, and therefore the informal social wheels fell off quickly. Our buyers were about twice that size.
Major corps with large departments and especially those with relatively slow turnover can probably coast along for a few years on the informal organizational and social capital accrued pre-WFH.
But that momentum will run out. Successful businesses will have figured out a way to overcome that fading of conventional in-office momentum while still doing WFH. Less successful businesses will not. And will have severe disaffection and productivity problems as a result.
Business leaders are famous for shortsightedly assuming all sorts of exogenous things, like low cost energy or good uncrowded roads, are simply permanent features of Nature free for the taking. And are mightily surprised when those things turnout to be be consequences of decisions beyond their control.
I think many of them are assuming the existence of a permanent culture that they are actively dismantling completely unwittingly. They’re sitting on the branch they’re busily sawing away at.