One way to also think of it is that there used to be these separate spaces, “The Workplace” and “Home”. Not that it had always been that way, either, but in the era when a lot of us grew up, the separation existed. “Working from Home” means “We’re Not Doing That Separation”; I live in one environment, I live where I work. I work where I live. The parts I get paid for aren’t otherwise different from the parts I don’t get paid for, I’m living all of it pretty integrated, kind of like a medieval craftsman, weaving a pretty nice life from it.
Yup, 100%.
Most of us on my team are working on different projects and have different responsibilities. Sure we colaborate some, but there is zero reason that we can’t do it over zoom/teams. In fact that works better since screen share works very well. The option is to sit in a room and project it on a wall.
I’m kinda a special case since I’m hard of hearing. I love being able to CC a meeting over Teams/Zoom.
I feel that ship sailed 2007 with the rise of smartphones … before that - you’d close the door to your office in the evening and you were pretty much unavailable until next morning … (email, whatsapp et al didn’t even exist)
nowadays, not so much … even if you work 100% office … you still take your notifications, beeps and “4 new msg” back home.
I think this was when that dike broke - the silent work-revolution that few people give credit … yet that changed everything.
Also, before that IMHO pretty much everybody had a private and an office phone … today most people have ONE phone which completely blurs the line.
For me - having a sleep disorder - whatever disadvantages there may be in working from home are far outweighed by the fact that I don’t have to drive to and from work and I can sleep in an extra hour in the morning and also take a nap on a real bed midday whenever I have to. I think WFH has already spared me at least one serious car accident by now.
My personal phone is ported to my work number (I don’t have to carry two phones, no way I’m doing that). There are a lot of ways to contact me. I’m lucky though, nobody would text/email me after 5 and expect a response until the next day.
If it’s really important, call me. Not an email (that’s for more detailed info) not a msg in Teams (that works well for [OK, this is our channel for this project]).
If the building is burning down, feel free to call me. I will answer.
If a system goes down, I can put up a notice about unscheduled maintenance, and sort it out the next day. I love my job.
I did make a note above about having to sometimes working at 2am because of schedules and tech support from anywhere on the globe. So, of course I do that. But I don’t have to drive 45 minutes one way to take care of it. All I need to do is set an alarm and go to my home office just up the stairs in the loft. And ‘Just Do It’.
You’ll have to let us know when you become CEO.
I make little distinction between the “worker drone” and the “ambitious striver”. Most of the work of a corporation is mindless “drone work” and the main difference is the ambitious striver has an insufferable sense of the work and their role in it being much more important than it really is.
I think the question is really more about what is the nature of the work you are doing and what is the best environment to be doing it in? For the various banks and financial institutions I work at, there is absolutely no reason people need to be crammed in cubicle farms so they can email each other about the reports and spreadsheets they are putting together.
OTOH, there may be a valid reason to have all their traders working on a trading floor together.
Other jobs, particularly creative ones, there is a benefit from having a group in a big room together where they can share ideas and put things on the wall to review.
Much of the WFH debate is based off of corporate theatre of power and control. The senior executive wants to see his underdrones appear to be working away in their cubicle and wants to be seen in his big corner office to demonstrate his power. That doesn’t mean people are actually being productive.
I think maybe in the past, I felt the corporate office gave a sense of “place” where you felt like you were collaborating and there was some visibility between you and leadership. I recall one client I had, I used to joke that my main “value” to the project that as busy as he was, I could physically go by his office and he would wave me in to chat.
I think those days have passed. Most places I’ve worked (including my company’s offices, which IMHO make Bain’s look like a hobo sweat shop) everyone is so distributed across multiple locations and matrixed teams I feel like there’s no practical reason for me to be in the office and anyone else who happens to be there isn’t going to give a shit whether I’m there or not.
I have been working from home from spring 2020 until just a week ago (Now retired! Yippie!). My job was 98% sitting in front of a computer.
Pro:
- I saved a ton of money by not having to commute from home to office and back
- Eating lunch at home instead of the cafe near my office was cheaper and probably healthier
- I got to sleep in an extra hour in the morning.
Con:
- I missed being around people. While I don’t talk much it was nice to be around other people.
- Being at home nearly all the time was boring. Working in an office got me out of
the house. Lunch break in the cafe sometimes felt like a mini vacation. I missed the
drive to and from work a bit. - If I needed help trouble shooting my computer or with one of the projects, it was
was easier if I has someone beside me and we could look at the screen together.
Yes, using zoom or slack did get the job done but it was awkward. - The setup in my office was better than what I had a home. Had a good quality chair,
computer had two large screens. Home set up was just a laptop and a old second hand
office chair. - My utility bills went up because I was at home using more electricity and gas
- Any problem with my computer was my problem that I had to solve and fix. No IT person could come around and fix my machine.
If I had to do it again I would prefer working at the office.
I’ve had one or two software problems. IT calls me, takes remote control of my laptop and fixes things.
DocCathode:
I got laid off fall 2020 and picked up a new job late spring of 2021. The new company
was much smaller and did not have an IT person.
Back in the ~1980s so my age ~20s a reputable pollster came out with the somewhat surprising result that something like 75%-80% of all Americans expected to end up in the top 25% percentile of income or assets.
The actual numbers are fuzzy to me now, but it was well over half of everybody expecting to somehow end up in the much less than half that represent the upper crust. Now it’s quite obviously impossible for them all to be right about themselves. It was very striking to me at the time that easily 3 of 4 or maybe even 4 of 5 holding the “I’ma gonna be rich” POV were destined to disappointment but didn’t / couldn’t see it coming. At all.
IMO the people who really are in the driver’s seat have exploited the shit out of that widespread fantasy for 50 years now by holding illusory carrots in front of “ambitious strivers” ever since. And those folks have been chasing that carrot-illusion biting at air ever since.
ISTM the younger folks emerging from college now & recently have a more realistic impression of the percentages and their place in the overall trajectory. Some are still overestimating their own potential trajectories while some are probably underestimating. But the goal of the real upper crust to exploit that confusion / optimism continues unabated.
Correct. Less cars on the road this way too.
Yup
I get up earlier. I’m strange that way. My wife and I get up around 4am. I sleep when I want to sleep.
Jerry Seinfeld - “People? They’re the worst!”
Ehh… certainly don’t find it boring. I love my home. It’s why I live here. I’ve two dogs which do give me company and make me get out of the house every day for a walk down our road.
Much easier to just share a screen on Zoom or Teams. Looking over the shoulder sucks. This is a business process/training issue.
Sure. Agree that some folks don’t have a good set up. Or a good place to work at home which is very, very important. You should not be working on the kitchen table, at least not for very long.
When COVID struck, the boss of IS asked everyone to show their home workstations. It was a contest. One was on an air hocky table. Another had a stand up work station that was a 30 pack of PBR’s with a laptop on top of it. It was her stand up work station.
I already had a home office (It’s not grand at all but private. My desk is the top of a repurposed door). When COVID struck, I upgraded my stuff big time at home. I upgraded to Starlink. I bought climbing equipment to do it (I had plenty of climbing experience. But apparently my harness shrunk 
)
Yep. The folks I work for actually increased our pay to work from home because of this. But since we are not commuting, tomato, tomattoh. That little stipend has been removed. Whatever.
This really depends on the design of the work from home architecture. It’s very tricky. All of us remote into systems that are still located at ‘work’. ‘Work’ needs to deal with the work machine, servers etc. If the machine that you own and use to remote into your work machine goes ‘ummm no’ that’s on you.
The IS department is quite clear that we are not going to work on your personal machine (but give me a call, I’ll try to help).
We got some… I donno 250 people working from home in 2 weeks with a staff of 16. It can be done.
With all that said, I totally know that some don’t want to work from home. Whatever floats your boat. My Wife kinda prefers to do the face to face stuff. Every job is different. Every person is different.
We got snowed in for two days this winter, I could work, my wife could not. Feel a cold coming on? Well? if your are working from home, you might be able to at least check in and do a few things. Or work. TPTB need to understand that. And that people don’t get sick as much. That’s huge.
I felt a few things had to be in place to make WFH comfortable for me (notwithstanding the original stress and uncertainty from the beginning of the pandemic!)
I needed a dedicated office space. As we understood we were in a long term situation, I mentally couldn’t handle working at one end of the dining room table anymore. I had bought a desk chair (the dining chairs are awful after a while!) but I’d find myself getting up and basically sitting back down to eat supper at the other end, with work still in front of me. So we rearranged furniture, switched my son to the guest room (not much need for that!) and set up a proper desk in the smaller room. I love it. It’s comfortable and cozy and I don’t use the space for anything else, so I have that separation. I no longer lived at work.
I needed dedicated equipment, which fortunately my previous and current employer provided. I use my own mouse and keyboard that I just prefer, but one from the company is in a box in the closet. I have two monitors, docking station, all provided for. I refuse to use personal devices for work and vice versa. I also have a work cell phone. I leave it in the office on the weekends, so I still have that separation. Thankfully my industry largely respects 8-5ish business hours and any after-hours communication is usually stuff you know about ahead of time.
I never intend to accept a job that will oblige me to go into an office on someone else’s schedule. Fortunately, I’m decently confident that in my role and specialty, I can assure that or bounce to an employer that will support me.
I hadn’t had on-site IT assistance in decades. Our IT help was based on Northern Ireland for a while, then it moved to somewhere in the Midwest. If i got escalated to something the help desk couldn’t handle, it moved to someone in the northeast, but a few hours drive from me.
As for working with someone else on a project, when my underling sat next to me, we used to share our screens in Teams and talk over the cubical wall, rather than peer over each other’s shoulder at one of our screens. It worked better.
I do think that in-person better for meetings with more than… Maybe 4 or 5 participants. I think it’s better for a lot of non-technical discussions. It’s a lot better for lunch.
But for 95% of my day-to-day job, working from home was better.
That drives me nuts. I’m done with that. IF you need to point at the screen, use a pen, not the end that delivers ink though. Don’t use your finger. That’s rude, crude and just makes me have to clean my screen.
We had specific instructions for cleaning crews to not touch our screens.
Everything now is touch screen by default. I just bought my wife a nice HP laptop. We shall see if this dinosaur (me) gets used to it.
Fundamentally, I discovered that I just couldn’t get into a work frame of mind while at home.
75% of people thinking they can be in that top 25% can seem illusory, however, by most math wizards, 1/3 of them will end up there. I know a lot of people don’t like the mantra of “work hard and you can achieve it” and believe that it’s all about privilege that permits the top 25% of earners to be in that position, but I disagree. I made it, and I do my best to promote and reward people on my team that are contributing value creators. So not everyone is biting at air.
My Wife may be the same. But she works hard when working at home. As I do. I think she misses the social aspect which I do not. I worked from my second away from office (WFH) today (I have two different set ups, I bought them both). It’s fine. But I understand, it’s not for everyone.
I do not go into the ‘office’ anymore. It’s a wonderful thing.
I wouldn’t say I’m quite like that, but I hated being home all the time. We love, love, love our home, but I like the physical separation of work and home. Not saying I don’t work from home once I get home, because I often do, but it’s nice to not have to. Also, I do work better from my work office…less distractions.
I go into the office 95% of the time. I have the choice of working from home when I want to. I tend to work from home once a month.
I tried working from home for about a week during Covid. For many reasons I did not like it and returned to the office. We have the option to work from home a couple days a month but social work is not really a wfh profession.
With these big companies, I just don’t see any reason to ever go to the office. Maybe it’s also because I don’t really like my job. I mostly interact with all these various back office and IT executives and like 90% of them, I can’t figure out what, if anything, they do. So it’s a lot of meetings and planning sessions for future meetings, and follow up sessions to discuss the meeting we just had and figuring how the best way to track the meeting minutes in case we need to look at something someone said six months ago.
I don’t really care if that’s what they want me to do. But I don’t want to haul my ass into the city to do it.