People who like WFH will never want to return to the office unless perhaps the office is a 5 minute walk from home (they may be forced to, but they won't want to). For many people the time and cost savings of avoiding a daily commute cannot be offset by a nicer office.
Those who are happy to return to the office in general are those who do not like WFH and prefer more contacts and a change of scenery.
A nicer office makes things better but it will not change people's minds on WFH.
My vaguely populist take is that the pandemic, WFH/remote and hybrid gave the mass white collar class a taste of what the C-suite has had for years.. flexibility.
Sure, these guys might go into the office but they do so from their pied-a-terre / 3rd home / whatever within a 5 minute chauffeured drive. They do this while maintaining a nearby suburban/exurban estate and maybe a lake/beach/ski houses where they spend the majority of their actual hours.
I was listening to a podcast and they observed that US commuters might have had a boiled frog scenario where you slowly just get used to having a worse & worse commute as you age.. and COVID snapped everyone out of it cold turkey. Now attempting to go back to it is revolting for many.
I suspect many people on HN have never had a proper office with a door.
While I do agree with your overall premise, having had offices at multiple roles over my career, it is a major improvement over cubicles and open office.
Having a space to work in complete, uninterrupted quiet is wonderful. The simple social signal of the door being opened or close implying availability to chat works great to balancing heads down time and chat with colleagues time. Have a white board of your own that you can stare at throughout the course of a project, that evolves with discussions has not be replicated yet either remote or in a shared space.
You can also get pretty wild with customizing an office for comfort. I used to know many people that brought their own lighting in, completely solving the problem of constant overhead fluorescence. And brewing your coffee the way you like it in your own space in the afternoon is very refreshing.
Even given all that I'm sure many people would still prefer remote work (I would at this point), but I can image a fairly large number of people that would be very interested in a set up like this. It also mean your home is completely work free again.
> People who like WFH will never want to return to the office unless perhaps the office is a 5 minute walk from home
At my current job, there's something ironic about that. The people who never come back to the office despite being allowed to are also the people who live the closest to the office. (We have a big office that allows people to come back but is totally optional. Hotel desks for the entire office basically.) I asked one of them why he doesn't come in and he told me, "The reason I moved so close to the office in the first place is so I can minimize my commute. Now that I don't have to, why would I do the commute at all?"
I think some people are just completely dead set against commuting or even working from an office. Another coworker told me, "Do you know how great this is? I can do my laundry in between meetings."
From my experience, my employer's current situation is probably the most accommodating policy. If you want to work in an office, you can. If you don't, you don't have to. I do have coworkers who are actually suffering a bit from lack of interaction with other people but I think those people are starting to trickle back into the office for no other reason than for the socialization and interaction.
Personally, the commute is secondary. I hate being at the office. The office could be right next door to me and I still wouldn't want to go. Offices are cold, sterile, mentally unstimulating environments of constant surveillance. I never want to go into another one ever again
I had a private office at a large tech firm for many years. It was perfect for me, I would probably go back to the office for that setup. I’ll never go work in an open floor plan.
See if I lived five minutes walk from work, I’d want to be in the office even less. Why sit there between meetings if I am five minutes from my home? Why bag a lunch when my kitchen is down the block? I’d probably show face at the obligate meetings then just go home for the day if I could.
It's not the commute that stops me- it's the "being on". At home I don't have to dress a certain way, sit a certain way, eat a certain way, etc
At home I'm either working or not working. I don't have to wear my public face. Wearing a public face is, if not tiring, at least irritating, like a mild itch you're not allowed to scratch, even though you could, but you shouldn't.
> unless perhaps the office is a 5 minute walk from home
WFH for 2012-2023 here.
With our first home purchase in 2018 being on the smaller size, and the introduction of our first child to the family in 2021, I started keeping an eye on nearby options.
In March of 2023, a perfect little spot opened up that could support me and another employee in the same town. Pitched it to our small company, and now I have a dedicated office that is a 4 minute walk away.
Cannot stress enough how impactful those few minutes are (or more, if I need to decompress more than normal) are for separation of concern between home life and work, especially with young children in the picture.
Still get to enjoy lunch with stay-at-home wife and kiddo almost everyday.
It also shares property with a great pizzeria and one of the best taproom/bottleshops in town, which is a great perk beyond my waistline and liver... looking forward to taking the new bike to the nearby bike trail when it isn't 110° everyday.
Respectfully, this is an example of rigid thinking that isn't productive or accurate.
Apply marginal thinking the way economists do. People's propensity to return to the office falls on a spectrum ranging from 0 ( the people who are already back in their cubicles ) to 9 ( "You'll need a SWAT team to get me back to the office" ).
A 5 on that scale is a marginal worker. Provide an incentive for them to return, like a nice office, and they become a 4 and return to the office. Now give a nice office to a population of 1000 workers who are distributed evenly over the above spectrum. They all move down by 1, and about 1/10th of them return to the office.
Saying "People who like WFH will never want to return to the office" is only true of the 8's and 9's, not of the marginal worker. They are the ones who respond to incentives.
I don't know, I worked in the 90s when I had a private office and it was very nice compared to the shitholes being offered now. To be sure salaries were like 25% of what they are now, but the thing I like about WFH, the ability to close the door and pace around and think, and also to start to research some topics and get a pile of articles and books, and then forget about them, and then come back in a few days with my former mental state roughly reflected in the physical arrangement of the documents, making it easier to weave things together in kicking ideas around/brainstormy kind of way, was very much present in the private office. It's not like people didn't wander around and chat and overhear what things were going on, but we had the ability to focus as needed. I think a nice office would be a good inducement.
For me a nicer office would change my mind and I have worked in that office before. Allow me to reminisce:
Was working in DC on Capitol Hill. Had a 30 minute bike ride to work right down the center of the national mall. Had a private office half the size of my apartment with a really comfy couch and a few well worn armchairs. Coworkers brought their dogs and one liked to sit on my feet under the desk. Office was chock full of interesting people, activists, authors, photographers, lawmakers wealthy folks, connected folks. After a few hours working on the databases and maybe getting roped into some tech support in the Capitol building, the CEO would grab a beer from the keg which was the signal for the rest of us that the afternoon had become wet. Then I would meet up with friends for some kickball on the Mall, then swing back through the office after a few hours at the bar for a nightcap. Very occasionally I slept over on the couch but there was a shower in the office and I kept a few changes of clothes there so it was all good.
yep, i don't care if they give me an entire palace. unless it's attached to my home, i am not going there. if my job requires me to be at the office, i will say "no" and then get another job.
I miss the commute that was my ~20m morning bike ride (now I have to motivate myself). I don’t really miss the commute that was 20m on transit but it was ok. I really don’t miss the commute that was 45-60m+ in traffic (even the times I was on a work shuttle).
I could do an office again though if it weren’t too far from home. Working from home can be strangely lonely, maybe I should just be better about organizing co-working with friends virtually or in person.
For me, the commute is a short bike or train ride. It’s actually enjoyable but I still don’t want to go into the office for exactly the reason given: cubicles suck. The distraction, poor lighting, noise, etc. are a poor fit for any sort of work which isn’t constantly talking to everyone in the same room.
I think the sweet spot is at most 2-3 people in a space. That could work well collaboratively if they do the same thing but not if there are going to be lots of conflicting meetings.
My data point: I live 10 minutes walk from my office, the campus has a cafeteria, and I have my own office. Still I don't want to be forced to come into office, simply because I feel more comfortable and relaxed at home. It is a quiet place, I don't want to random interruptions from colleagues, and I can take a nap on my comfortable bed if needed, none of which can be offered in the office. Having prepared food is nice but not as important.
The thing that kills it for me is that where I work, before COVID it was a massive faux pas to schedule a meeting before 10:00 AM, but now I typically have multiple invites side-by-side at 9:00. In the past I could get to my office, grab some coffee, catch up on email, etc. before the grind started, but everything's been pushed back an hour and it's not coming back. So if I was getting up at 6:00 to fit in my morning routine, now I have to get up at 5:00.
The other issue is that we're a lot more globally distributed now. The 9:00 I chose to go to today had nine other people in it. Three in India, one in the UK, one in BC, two in the midwest somewhere, and two permanent WFH. Meeting with these people is always going to mean putting on a headset and looking at a screen, no matter how diligent I am at getting in to the office every morning.
I'm massively in favor of WFH—but I think this is a bit of an absolutist take.
I can see plenty of people who are enjoying WFH, but would be willing to return to the office if they no longer had to work in a cube farm, but could have their own private office, that they could decorate to their taste, and where they could play their own music. And, perhaps most importantly, have a door that they could keep closed so that if anyone wants to interrupt them, they actually have to knock first.
As someone who has done a 30-minute commute to a cube farm, a 45-minute and a 5-minute commute to a private office, and WFH, there's basically no reasonable amount of money you could pay me to go back to a cube farm, but if I didn't have specific personal reasons for wanting to remain fully remote, I would be very willing to consider another job in a private office.
> A nicer office makes things better but it will not change people's minds on WFH.
I suggest you consider behavior on the margin. Despite the fact that there are lots of people vocal about how much they love/hate RTO, there are also people that are indifferent or slightly prefer one or the other. Improvements in office quality will meaningfully persuade some number of people on the margin.
It’s an open question how steep the curve is (ie how much office improvement required to persuade 1% of people to change their mind) but I think it’s myopic to just look at the partisans.
All that said, sure, there is a nontrivial percentage who you couldn’t change their minds with something like a dedicated office. But I think your claim is too strong that it’s binary and all WFH likers will not be persuaded by this proposal.
More to the point, The Office is in one place, whereas my workplace can by anywhere.
So no matter how nice a place it is, and how close to my house you put it, it's never going to be right on that good right point break in Oaxaca where I like to spend my winters and also at the AirBnB next to Green Lake where I can visit my friends and family in the summer.
It's also not in any of the other places I choose to set up shop at for a few months at a time to do my thing.
So it doesn't matter that it has free food, a masseuse, and is in a really cool neighborhood where I'd actually like to spend some time. I still don't want to commit to living there 50 weeks a year.
I've been WFH for 20 years. My family's life has been built around it including choice of schools, my wife's job, activities, etc. We own one car.
If I were to take a job downtown, my wife would have to get a different job, we'd have to pay for some level of child care, arrange transportation for school, drop various activities, buy a second car so I could drive to the train station (which comes with maintenance, insurance, registration, etc).
The amount of money that would make any of this worth it is not small. You'd have to cover the additional expenses and then write a big check on top to compensate for disrupting our way of life.
I'm not required to return to the office. Despite having a whole floor rented for us, I rarely go in. It's only 20 min via public transport so time is not a big deal for me. That minimal movement would be even healthy. My main issue is the dining in the area. Mostly office blocks and all options are rather poor in quality. Ordering is also something I don't want because I'm too cheap to pay the premium price.
So yeah, it's almost 6PM, I'm at home and starving still because I was lazy to cook.
I think the reason is my team is fully remote for me. Not having to worry about food would be nice :)
There is a lot of truth to what you are saying, but I don't entirely agree.
I think I would be more amenable to working at an office if the experience felt like more than being in a high school computer lab. "Just wear headphones", imo, is not an adequate response to complaints of the office being noisy. Want me to stay in the office longer? Uninstall that piece of shit kombucha tap or sparkling water dispenser (neither of which are even operational most of the time) and replace it with another fridge so I don't have to cram my food into the one fridge shared by the entire building. Make an adequate number of power outlets available. Don't provide free snacks and then eliminate them to cut costs. If I have a designated spot, do your best not to move me around every few months.
Yet every office I have worked in embodies various failures that diminish the experience, making it hard to deny that working at home can be a lot better for many people. How am I supposed to feel dignity in my line of work as a senior engineer when I don't even get my own cubicle; meanwhile, people I know who make a third of my salary get their own cubes! And these companies are wondering why their employees would rather build their own private office at home? Are you kidding me?
I don't even need a corner office with a door that closes and a personal secretary. Just give me something more than what I would get working out of a Starbucks, and allow me to feel like the professional I am, as opposed to a replaceable cog, which is everything the modern tech workplaces symbolizes.
> A nicer office makes things better but it will not change people's minds on WFH.
Disagree with caveats. A nice private office makes a world of difference. I'll do a lot (in time and/or money) to have a nice private office where I can actually work (which requires silence).
Working remotely is awesome but not literally from home. With a family, that's too distracting. Since the pandemic, I rent a small private office walking distance from home. It's a great arrangement, I'm very close to the house, can walk or bike there, private window office. But the downside is that it costs money (lease, utilities, internet). And for meetings I'm still stuck in a little zoom box.
If the company offered a nice private office, I'd take that. I'd save the costs and I could have a silent private space to work but still be able to step outside and have meetings in person. The tradeoff is a longer commute but as long as it's not too horrible, I'd take it.
If work gave me an office I would come in every day vs. the mandated twice a week we have.
I worked for a company that gave everyone an office. Just long hallways of offices with floor to ceiling windows and a door. It was a startup that grew to 200 people and was the best job I've had, a large part due to the atmosphere, and part of that was the office setup.
When my current workplace shutdown the office for covid, they sent out an email asking for suggestions for a new office setup. I told them to make everyone offices. We have a huge open floor and it wouldn't take much effort, just money. Money they are planning to spend anyway. Instead they raised the height of cubicle walls, added a ton of glass (disease spread fear I guess), and gave everyone whiteboards and motorized standup desks.
Now on my required days in the office I am annoyed by the constant chatter and noises around me which I cannot escape even with headphones.
It’s not just that. With a WFH policy I can work for companies in Munich living in a town in northern Germany. That’s the big deal of remote work for me. Being limited to the companies that are located in the same city you live is a huge downside.
I can't go back. I have family to care for who need me at home and will suffer if I'm away. And that's even before I reclaim all the time during the day when there was no work I could be doing.
I'm more productive, I find new ways to make myself valuable in some of that free time whereas in the office I'd just be bored out of my skull instead because I had to keep my butt in a seat to make someone happy.
Fortunately my management is looking into downsizing leases and recouping savings instead of forcing people into the office. They've waffled a little about pulling people back in but they just aren't that serious about it in general.
Yup. If I had a 10 minute or less commute and decent coffee at the office, I'd have no major objections. But I have a 45 minutes with zero traffic (1.5hr+ with traffic) commute and Seattle's Best essence of ashtray coffee.
Joel Spolesky has made this very point many times in the past: "Private offices with doors that close were absolutely required and not open to negotiation." I work on a Data Sci team that moved to an open floor plan in 2018. What happened? Anyone who needed to work intensively on a project would work from home instead of in the office.
People need to stop trying to make things return to the original office model.
Employees have realised we are equally as effective working from home and simply do not want to waste 2+ UNPAID hours of every day travelling to a corporate building for the sake of it.
Nor do people want to spend £10+ a day on food and drinks which they have in their fridge, at home.
Then there is also the social pressure of having to go for after work socials at the local boozer/cafe/restaurant, or be seen as the person who never joins the team for social stuff.
There are so many benefits to working from home which reach beyond personal and into society/the environment but very few benefits to going into an office. The one reason which supporters of the original office model tout is ‘collaboration’ but I call BS.
With today’s tech we can literally be collaborating in real-time with people from any corner of the planet from the comfort of our home office. How would that change in office?
Then you have the whole “oh, but, learning” as if it is simply impossible to part with knowledge via any medium other than a coworker’s breath hitting another’s eardrum.
Nope. My previous employer tried this in ~2021 with the intention of demanding a full RTO as soon as they possibly could after decades of being a cubicle farm. I immediately left for a company that adapted to remote-first and never looked back
My commute time has turned into workout and cooking time, (as expected I'm in the best shape of my life,) my only coworker is my spouse and best friend, I get to live closer to my family than ever before in a quiet, LCOL town, and the impact on my career and for the company has never been greater
You'll have to do a LOT better than my own closet to convince me that wasting my time commuting every day, from a place I don't want to live, to spend time in close proximity to people I might not care for would be a better proposition than the one I have now
How does the dual income effect never get mentioned? In these articles its like you work from home in a vacuum, and going from remote to back to the office should be as trivial as flipping a lightswitch. The vast majority of coupled these days are dual income. It is so much simpler to find a place to live when you both work remotely, than to try and find some middle ground that is as convenient as possible to both workplaces, but this hard sought convenience goes away with the snap of the fingers should one of your jobs change. Now you are back to square one trying to triangulate housing between two offices and perhaps a school or this that and the other thing.
Remote work just makes that entire concern irrelevant. You can now live in the same location all your working years if you wanted. I see people talk about things like not having to commute as being big factors, but this benefit of not having to uproot I think is even more significant. Moving is terrible.
At home, the benefits are extreme. Full office, private bath, private bed, private kitchen, garaged parking, asset security, and a 30 second commute. The next wave of office workers will want it better than this, or it simply won't work.
One efficiency of WFH that is underappreciated is the ability to match working hours to capacity. I can't count how many times I was in the office and 3 PM rolled around and I was completely spent. I knew that with a herculean effort I could probably squeeze a few more drops of productivity into my day, but it wasn't worth it.
But you can't just "go home" at 3 PM. So you check some emails. Look over your shoulder and pull open Reddit or – dare I say – Hacker News and you while away those final 90 minutes until you can walk out the door having said you worked a full 8 hour day. Neither you nor your employer really want those 90 minutes spent that way, but it happens, and it's demoralizing all around.
When working from home there is sooo much more flexibility to match productive hours with working hours. When I'm excited and energized and a project is in that flow state I might actually put in 10 hours. Other times at that 3 o'clock slump, I put headphones in and phone into a meeting (or listen to a recording) while doing random chores around the house. What time I check out of work is now a fuzzy mental calculation of how much energy I have, how productive I'd be, how much demand there is for my time, and, yes, a little bit of a simple desire to have life outside of work.
> If you want to watch your employees work, build glass walls.
I hope this is dark humor and not meant to be taken seriously. For me, about half the reason I prefer my home office is that I don't feel like I have to look productive. I can get my stuff done in my way, and as long as my boss is happy with the result it doesn't matter if my way "looked" right.
I mentioned this in another post but here's my take.
Background: I graduated from school in Spring 2020 and started at my first full time software in Aug 2020. I've began going to the office about 4 days a week since Feb 2023. Prior to that, I had only been in an office twice ever (excluding my 2019 internship).
Here's some points that make in office tough for me to enjoy.
* When I'm in office, stuck on a problem and need to just think, what can I do? I can stare at other people. I can hear other conversations, others typing, etc. When I'm at home, I can do basic home chores like fold laundry.
* When I'm in office, my lunch options are more limited. I either need to buy lunch, bring it, or select from what work has catered. Bringing a lunch limits options and takes time at home to prepare. When I'm at home, I can eat whatever, whenever. No pressure to sit with people I with with. No comments about why am I eating what I'm eating.
* I typically feel more isolated in the office than I do at home. In the office, I can see others walking around having conversations. I don't know anyone outside of my direct team. Even then, collaboration is very low. With no meetings, I'll talk for maybe 15-20 minutes in the day. At home, I am alone, but I'm not watching others actively socialize. This is more of a me problem than anything.
There are also things I don't like about being in the office in general. I don't like that others speak in languages I don't understand. The monitors, chairs and lighting are worse than at home. The office is in a not great area, and I walk so it's not a nice commute.
Overall, I've come to really enjoy and be excited for my work from home days.
I'm not going to endure an hour's commute and all the expense involved with that to just sit in another box where communication will just marginally improve.
Nah, I had a personal office and still quit in order to leave the Bay Area because commuting >30 minutes to mostly work with people in offices hours away when I don't love where I am doesn't make sense. Middle management at large companies spent years building distributed teams without the executives noticing, and now they're learning about it too late. Having hour long commutes to sit on video calls all day in one of the most expensive real estate markets in the country isn't a life.
It's been wild to see the amount of news stories that came out this summer all at the same time – this enormous back-to-office push that's not at all some kind of commercial real-estate PR campaign.
Anyway, one thing that gets thrown around a lot is the 'hallway conversation'. This idea that work is suffering because people aren't getting together spontaneously, or they're lacking the high-fidelity in-person exchanges, etc, etc.
But the funny thing is, over the years I've been in countless in-person intensive sprints. Week long exhaustive affairs where people are all in a room, brainstorming, planning.
Great ideas happen! But, how many of those sprints actually lead to action in the company? Once the herd-followers force everyone back into the panopticon, what then will they blame the lack of innovation on? Or are we simply pretending that prior to the pandemic every company in the world was truly operating at genius level, and it wasn't largely a by-product of a zero-interest-rate phenomenon?
My company recently did a forced 3-day return-to-office to "gain the immeasurable benefits of face-to-face collaboration" bullshit.
Except they used the pandemic to close down a site and merge two offices, so there aren't enough desks. So, everyone who isn't full time in the office has to use hotel cubes, so I had my cube taken away a few weeks ago.
I quickly found out that most of the hotel cubes are several floors away from my team, so its incredibly rare I actually see anyone on my team when I go in. I usually sit in silence on a different floor and interact with my team on zoom.
To the best of my knowledge no one is taking attendance yet, so I'm doing 1-2 days tops.
What companies today give software engineers offices? Microsoft's used to be fantastic in 00s and early 10s but they also were moving to open spaces when I left so not sure the state today.
My criteria - Is there a reason for me to be in the office on this specific day? Will my team be there? Is there an upcoming milestone where having everyone in a room together for most of the day will make us more productive? If the answer to all three questions is yes, then I want to be in the office that day. If it's just to go to a physical location where I will be on Zoom calls all day with team members all in offices in other locations, then hard pass on going into the office and it doesn't matter whether it's an actual office or a cube.
I love working from home as much as everyone else here (seemingly) but I don't think people are fully appreciating how damaging not talking to people in meat space is likely to be long-term. We are embodied/energetic creatures and that energy is not exchanging the same way online (sorry if that sounds woo but it's true!). More so for the younger people, let's not forgot some of whom have never worked with people much in person.
It's not about what the office looks or feels like or what the amenities are for me but about a lifestyle. Once I got a taste of this lifestyle I decided that, for the kind of work I'm doing right now, ordinary software development, I will never go back to the office unless absolutely necessary (recession, war, etc). I'd be happy to go work from my employer's building where the job requires it, where I need equipment I can't reasonably expect to have at home (factory) or where I have to work where the customers are (service), things like that.
The kind of software job I'm in though, it's absolutely possible with the right policies and technology to have the same kind of productivity as in the office, it's up to the employer to fix whatever they think is missing.
I am an outlier and minority here - WFH should have worked for me, but I realized the lack of control over snacking when at home, and a lack of discipline to take breaks between meetings to walk and be active. I gained 20 lbs over two years.
When I’m in the office, both these problems don’t exist; in fact 1:1s become ‘walking 1:1s’. I feel more healthier; the commute back allows me to disconnect from work and decline meetings.
This is not to say working from the office is better for everyone. I wish I had the discipline to be better at WFH.
Prior to COVID, I had made a reputation for myself as being quite difficult when it comes to Office space.
Mostly this was because I felt that I wasn't as effective working in the Open Office.
I was told time-and-time again how the open office is the standard, I figured the problem was me and looked inwardly at solutions (some of which I documented on my blog).
I later discovered I had many markers of ADHD, meaning that fighting myself was actually an unwinnable battle. -- and all those days of going home exhausted after having done nothing that day, only to pry open my laptop at home and finally accomplish everything required -- was something that was not a personal failing.
I envied people who had their own office, or even a shared office; I was told I couldn't work from home unless I was sick or unable to get to the office, and truthfully it was painful to do so anyway due to the corporate VPN being a shambles.
I'm so glad that we are collectively pushing back on this; we are told on one hand that rents are so expensive that it necessitates the open office push, but when that argument is invalidated (even lower rent if you don't need the space at all!) we are told to return to office anyway.
That said, there are advantages to being on-site if you have a nicer working environment, getting away from the house (and the mental context shift that follows) along with access to certain equipment that might make your life easier. It's just that the juice isn't worth the squeeze. And boy, have we been squeezed.
Years ago I worked for a company in a huge windowless, wall-less open plan building that was supposed to be fun because they put a slide in it. You had to have headphones on to think.
Looking back it seems so surreal like thinking about when people used to smoke on airplanes. I can’t imagine ever going back to that.
[+] [-] mytailorisrich|2 years ago|reply
Those who are happy to return to the office in general are those who do not like WFH and prefer more contacts and a change of scenery.
A nicer office makes things better but it will not change people's minds on WFH.
[+] [-] steveBK123|2 years ago|reply
Sure, these guys might go into the office but they do so from their pied-a-terre / 3rd home / whatever within a 5 minute chauffeured drive. They do this while maintaining a nearby suburban/exurban estate and maybe a lake/beach/ski houses where they spend the majority of their actual hours.
I was listening to a podcast and they observed that US commuters might have had a boiled frog scenario where you slowly just get used to having a worse & worse commute as you age.. and COVID snapped everyone out of it cold turkey. Now attempting to go back to it is revolting for many.
[+] [-] IKantRead|2 years ago|reply
While I do agree with your overall premise, having had offices at multiple roles over my career, it is a major improvement over cubicles and open office.
Having a space to work in complete, uninterrupted quiet is wonderful. The simple social signal of the door being opened or close implying availability to chat works great to balancing heads down time and chat with colleagues time. Have a white board of your own that you can stare at throughout the course of a project, that evolves with discussions has not be replicated yet either remote or in a shared space.
You can also get pretty wild with customizing an office for comfort. I used to know many people that brought their own lighting in, completely solving the problem of constant overhead fluorescence. And brewing your coffee the way you like it in your own space in the afternoon is very refreshing.
Even given all that I'm sure many people would still prefer remote work (I would at this point), but I can image a fairly large number of people that would be very interested in a set up like this. It also mean your home is completely work free again.
[+] [-] hangonhn|2 years ago|reply
At my current job, there's something ironic about that. The people who never come back to the office despite being allowed to are also the people who live the closest to the office. (We have a big office that allows people to come back but is totally optional. Hotel desks for the entire office basically.) I asked one of them why he doesn't come in and he told me, "The reason I moved so close to the office in the first place is so I can minimize my commute. Now that I don't have to, why would I do the commute at all?"
I think some people are just completely dead set against commuting or even working from an office. Another coworker told me, "Do you know how great this is? I can do my laundry in between meetings."
From my experience, my employer's current situation is probably the most accommodating policy. If you want to work in an office, you can. If you don't, you don't have to. I do have coworkers who are actually suffering a bit from lack of interaction with other people but I think those people are starting to trickle back into the office for no other reason than for the socialization and interaction.
[+] [-] shortrounddev2|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lokar|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kjkjadksj|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unsupp0rted|2 years ago|reply
At home I'm either working or not working. I don't have to wear my public face. Wearing a public face is, if not tiring, at least irritating, like a mild itch you're not allowed to scratch, even though you could, but you shouldn't.
[+] [-] awslattery|2 years ago|reply
WFH for 2012-2023 here.
With our first home purchase in 2018 being on the smaller size, and the introduction of our first child to the family in 2021, I started keeping an eye on nearby options.
In March of 2023, a perfect little spot opened up that could support me and another employee in the same town. Pitched it to our small company, and now I have a dedicated office that is a 4 minute walk away.
Cannot stress enough how impactful those few minutes are (or more, if I need to decompress more than normal) are for separation of concern between home life and work, especially with young children in the picture.
Still get to enjoy lunch with stay-at-home wife and kiddo almost everyday.
It also shares property with a great pizzeria and one of the best taproom/bottleshops in town, which is a great perk beyond my waistline and liver... looking forward to taking the new bike to the nearby bike trail when it isn't 110° everyday.
[+] [-] Brusco_RF|2 years ago|reply
Apply marginal thinking the way economists do. People's propensity to return to the office falls on a spectrum ranging from 0 ( the people who are already back in their cubicles ) to 9 ( "You'll need a SWAT team to get me back to the office" ).
A 5 on that scale is a marginal worker. Provide an incentive for them to return, like a nice office, and they become a 4 and return to the office. Now give a nice office to a population of 1000 workers who are distributed evenly over the above spectrum. They all move down by 1, and about 1/10th of them return to the office.
Saying "People who like WFH will never want to return to the office" is only true of the 8's and 9's, not of the marginal worker. They are the ones who respond to incentives.
[+] [-] lanstin|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dougmwne|2 years ago|reply
Was working in DC on Capitol Hill. Had a 30 minute bike ride to work right down the center of the national mall. Had a private office half the size of my apartment with a really comfy couch and a few well worn armchairs. Coworkers brought their dogs and one liked to sit on my feet under the desk. Office was chock full of interesting people, activists, authors, photographers, lawmakers wealthy folks, connected folks. After a few hours working on the databases and maybe getting roped into some tech support in the Capitol building, the CEO would grab a beer from the keg which was the signal for the rest of us that the afternoon had become wet. Then I would meet up with friends for some kickball on the Mall, then swing back through the office after a few hours at the bar for a nightcap. Very occasionally I slept over on the couch but there was a shower in the office and I kept a few changes of clothes there so it was all good.
[+] [-] cdme|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yungporko|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sh1mmer|2 years ago|reply
I could do an office again though if it weren’t too far from home. Working from home can be strangely lonely, maybe I should just be better about organizing co-working with friends virtually or in person.
[+] [-] acdha|2 years ago|reply
I think the sweet spot is at most 2-3 people in a space. That could work well collaboratively if they do the same thing but not if there are going to be lots of conflicting meetings.
[+] [-] o1y32|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 13of40|2 years ago|reply
The other issue is that we're a lot more globally distributed now. The 9:00 I chose to go to today had nine other people in it. Three in India, one in the UK, one in BC, two in the midwest somewhere, and two permanent WFH. Meeting with these people is always going to mean putting on a headset and looking at a screen, no matter how diligent I am at getting in to the office every morning.
[+] [-] danaris|2 years ago|reply
I can see plenty of people who are enjoying WFH, but would be willing to return to the office if they no longer had to work in a cube farm, but could have their own private office, that they could decorate to their taste, and where they could play their own music. And, perhaps most importantly, have a door that they could keep closed so that if anyone wants to interrupt them, they actually have to knock first.
As someone who has done a 30-minute commute to a cube farm, a 45-minute and a 5-minute commute to a private office, and WFH, there's basically no reasonable amount of money you could pay me to go back to a cube farm, but if I didn't have specific personal reasons for wanting to remain fully remote, I would be very willing to consider another job in a private office.
[+] [-] theptip|2 years ago|reply
I suggest you consider behavior on the margin. Despite the fact that there are lots of people vocal about how much they love/hate RTO, there are also people that are indifferent or slightly prefer one or the other. Improvements in office quality will meaningfully persuade some number of people on the margin.
It’s an open question how steep the curve is (ie how much office improvement required to persuade 1% of people to change their mind) but I think it’s myopic to just look at the partisans.
All that said, sure, there is a nontrivial percentage who you couldn’t change their minds with something like a dedicated office. But I think your claim is too strong that it’s binary and all WFH likers will not be persuaded by this proposal.
[+] [-] jasonkester|2 years ago|reply
So no matter how nice a place it is, and how close to my house you put it, it's never going to be right on that good right point break in Oaxaca where I like to spend my winters and also at the AirBnB next to Green Lake where I can visit my friends and family in the summer.
It's also not in any of the other places I choose to set up shop at for a few months at a time to do my thing.
So it doesn't matter that it has free food, a masseuse, and is in a really cool neighborhood where I'd actually like to spend some time. I still don't want to commit to living there 50 weeks a year.
That's why I'm remote.
[+] [-] nsxwolf|2 years ago|reply
If I were to take a job downtown, my wife would have to get a different job, we'd have to pay for some level of child care, arrange transportation for school, drop various activities, buy a second car so I could drive to the train station (which comes with maintenance, insurance, registration, etc).
The amount of money that would make any of this worth it is not small. You'd have to cover the additional expenses and then write a big check on top to compensate for disrupting our way of life.
[+] [-] tiborsaas|2 years ago|reply
So yeah, it's almost 6PM, I'm at home and starving still because I was lazy to cook.
I think the reason is my team is fully remote for me. Not having to worry about food would be nice :)
[+] [-] ravenstine|2 years ago|reply
I think I would be more amenable to working at an office if the experience felt like more than being in a high school computer lab. "Just wear headphones", imo, is not an adequate response to complaints of the office being noisy. Want me to stay in the office longer? Uninstall that piece of shit kombucha tap or sparkling water dispenser (neither of which are even operational most of the time) and replace it with another fridge so I don't have to cram my food into the one fridge shared by the entire building. Make an adequate number of power outlets available. Don't provide free snacks and then eliminate them to cut costs. If I have a designated spot, do your best not to move me around every few months.
Yet every office I have worked in embodies various failures that diminish the experience, making it hard to deny that working at home can be a lot better for many people. How am I supposed to feel dignity in my line of work as a senior engineer when I don't even get my own cubicle; meanwhile, people I know who make a third of my salary get their own cubes! And these companies are wondering why their employees would rather build their own private office at home? Are you kidding me?
I don't even need a corner office with a door that closes and a personal secretary. Just give me something more than what I would get working out of a Starbucks, and allow me to feel like the professional I am, as opposed to a replaceable cog, which is everything the modern tech workplaces symbolizes.
[+] [-] skramzy|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jjav|2 years ago|reply
Disagree with caveats. A nice private office makes a world of difference. I'll do a lot (in time and/or money) to have a nice private office where I can actually work (which requires silence).
Working remotely is awesome but not literally from home. With a family, that's too distracting. Since the pandemic, I rent a small private office walking distance from home. It's a great arrangement, I'm very close to the house, can walk or bike there, private window office. But the downside is that it costs money (lease, utilities, internet). And for meetings I'm still stuck in a little zoom box.
If the company offered a nice private office, I'd take that. I'd save the costs and I could have a silent private space to work but still be able to step outside and have meetings in person. The tradeoff is a longer commute but as long as it's not too horrible, I'd take it.
[+] [-] legohead|2 years ago|reply
I worked for a company that gave everyone an office. Just long hallways of offices with floor to ceiling windows and a door. It was a startup that grew to 200 people and was the best job I've had, a large part due to the atmosphere, and part of that was the office setup.
When my current workplace shutdown the office for covid, they sent out an email asking for suggestions for a new office setup. I told them to make everyone offices. We have a huge open floor and it wouldn't take much effort, just money. Money they are planning to spend anyway. Instead they raised the height of cubicle walls, added a ton of glass (disease spread fear I guess), and gave everyone whiteboards and motorized standup desks.
Now on my required days in the office I am annoyed by the constant chatter and noises around me which I cannot escape even with headphones.
[+] [-] tkiolp4|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Natsu|2 years ago|reply
I'm more productive, I find new ways to make myself valuable in some of that free time whereas in the office I'd just be bored out of my skull instead because I had to keep my butt in a seat to make someone happy.
Fortunately my management is looking into downsizing leases and recouping savings instead of forcing people into the office. They've waffled a little about pulling people back in but they just aren't that serious about it in general.
[+] [-] uberduper|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] welder|2 years ago|reply
Or those with distractions at home. They can WFS, but I can see them being ok returning to an official office.
[+] [-] AvAn12|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] makingstuffs|2 years ago|reply
Employees have realised we are equally as effective working from home and simply do not want to waste 2+ UNPAID hours of every day travelling to a corporate building for the sake of it.
Nor do people want to spend £10+ a day on food and drinks which they have in their fridge, at home.
Then there is also the social pressure of having to go for after work socials at the local boozer/cafe/restaurant, or be seen as the person who never joins the team for social stuff.
There are so many benefits to working from home which reach beyond personal and into society/the environment but very few benefits to going into an office. The one reason which supporters of the original office model tout is ‘collaboration’ but I call BS.
With today’s tech we can literally be collaborating in real-time with people from any corner of the planet from the comfort of our home office. How would that change in office?
Then you have the whole “oh, but, learning” as if it is simply impossible to part with knowledge via any medium other than a coworker’s breath hitting another’s eardrum.
[+] [-] spookieboogie|2 years ago|reply
My commute time has turned into workout and cooking time, (as expected I'm in the best shape of my life,) my only coworker is my spouse and best friend, I get to live closer to my family than ever before in a quiet, LCOL town, and the impact on my career and for the company has never been greater
You'll have to do a LOT better than my own closet to convince me that wasting my time commuting every day, from a place I don't want to live, to spend time in close proximity to people I might not care for would be a better proposition than the one I have now
[+] [-] kjkjadksj|2 years ago|reply
Remote work just makes that entire concern irrelevant. You can now live in the same location all your working years if you wanted. I see people talk about things like not having to commute as being big factors, but this benefit of not having to uproot I think is even more significant. Moving is terrible.
[+] [-] 1970-01-01|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] coryfklein|2 years ago|reply
But you can't just "go home" at 3 PM. So you check some emails. Look over your shoulder and pull open Reddit or – dare I say – Hacker News and you while away those final 90 minutes until you can walk out the door having said you worked a full 8 hour day. Neither you nor your employer really want those 90 minutes spent that way, but it happens, and it's demoralizing all around.
When working from home there is sooo much more flexibility to match productive hours with working hours. When I'm excited and energized and a project is in that flow state I might actually put in 10 hours. Other times at that 3 o'clock slump, I put headphones in and phone into a meeting (or listen to a recording) while doing random chores around the house. What time I check out of work is now a fuzzy mental calculation of how much energy I have, how productive I'd be, how much demand there is for my time, and, yes, a little bit of a simple desire to have life outside of work.
[+] [-] lolinder|2 years ago|reply
I hope this is dark humor and not meant to be taken seriously. For me, about half the reason I prefer my home office is that I don't feel like I have to look productive. I can get my stuff done in my way, and as long as my boss is happy with the result it doesn't matter if my way "looked" right.
[+] [-] Brystephor|2 years ago|reply
Background: I graduated from school in Spring 2020 and started at my first full time software in Aug 2020. I've began going to the office about 4 days a week since Feb 2023. Prior to that, I had only been in an office twice ever (excluding my 2019 internship).
Here's some points that make in office tough for me to enjoy.
* When I'm in office, stuck on a problem and need to just think, what can I do? I can stare at other people. I can hear other conversations, others typing, etc. When I'm at home, I can do basic home chores like fold laundry.
* When I'm in office, my lunch options are more limited. I either need to buy lunch, bring it, or select from what work has catered. Bringing a lunch limits options and takes time at home to prepare. When I'm at home, I can eat whatever, whenever. No pressure to sit with people I with with. No comments about why am I eating what I'm eating.
* I typically feel more isolated in the office than I do at home. In the office, I can see others walking around having conversations. I don't know anyone outside of my direct team. Even then, collaboration is very low. With no meetings, I'll talk for maybe 15-20 minutes in the day. At home, I am alone, but I'm not watching others actively socialize. This is more of a me problem than anything.
There are also things I don't like about being in the office in general. I don't like that others speak in languages I don't understand. The monitors, chairs and lighting are worse than at home. The office is in a not great area, and I walk so it's not a nice commute.
Overall, I've come to really enjoy and be excited for my work from home days.
[+] [-] Tokkemon|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DragonStrength|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gdubs|2 years ago|reply
Anyway, one thing that gets thrown around a lot is the 'hallway conversation'. This idea that work is suffering because people aren't getting together spontaneously, or they're lacking the high-fidelity in-person exchanges, etc, etc.
But the funny thing is, over the years I've been in countless in-person intensive sprints. Week long exhaustive affairs where people are all in a room, brainstorming, planning.
Great ideas happen! But, how many of those sprints actually lead to action in the company? Once the herd-followers force everyone back into the panopticon, what then will they blame the lack of innovation on? Or are we simply pretending that prior to the pandemic every company in the world was truly operating at genius level, and it wasn't largely a by-product of a zero-interest-rate phenomenon?
"Sorry – gotta go, someone else needs this room."
[+] [-] angry_moose|2 years ago|reply
Except they used the pandemic to close down a site and merge two offices, so there aren't enough desks. So, everyone who isn't full time in the office has to use hotel cubes, so I had my cube taken away a few weeks ago.
I quickly found out that most of the hotel cubes are several floors away from my team, so its incredibly rare I actually see anyone on my team when I go in. I usually sit in silence on a different floor and interact with my team on zoom.
To the best of my knowledge no one is taking attendance yet, so I'm doing 1-2 days tops.
[+] [-] SnowProblem|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DebtDeflation|2 years ago|reply
My criteria - Is there a reason for me to be in the office on this specific day? Will my team be there? Is there an upcoming milestone where having everyone in a room together for most of the day will make us more productive? If the answer to all three questions is yes, then I want to be in the office that day. If it's just to go to a physical location where I will be on Zoom calls all day with team members all in offices in other locations, then hard pass on going into the office and it doesn't matter whether it's an actual office or a cube.
[+] [-] heisnotanalien|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] barbazoo|2 years ago|reply
The kind of software job I'm in though, it's absolutely possible with the right policies and technology to have the same kind of productivity as in the office, it's up to the employer to fix whatever they think is missing.
[+] [-] feyman_r|2 years ago|reply
When I’m in the office, both these problems don’t exist; in fact 1:1s become ‘walking 1:1s’. I feel more healthier; the commute back allows me to disconnect from work and decline meetings.
This is not to say working from the office is better for everyone. I wish I had the discipline to be better at WFH.
[+] [-] dijit|2 years ago|reply
Mostly this was because I felt that I wasn't as effective working in the Open Office.
I was told time-and-time again how the open office is the standard, I figured the problem was me and looked inwardly at solutions (some of which I documented on my blog).
I later discovered I had many markers of ADHD, meaning that fighting myself was actually an unwinnable battle. -- and all those days of going home exhausted after having done nothing that day, only to pry open my laptop at home and finally accomplish everything required -- was something that was not a personal failing.
I envied people who had their own office, or even a shared office; I was told I couldn't work from home unless I was sick or unable to get to the office, and truthfully it was painful to do so anyway due to the corporate VPN being a shambles.
I'm so glad that we are collectively pushing back on this; we are told on one hand that rents are so expensive that it necessitates the open office push, but when that argument is invalidated (even lower rent if you don't need the space at all!) we are told to return to office anyway.
That said, there are advantages to being on-site if you have a nicer working environment, getting away from the house (and the mental context shift that follows) along with access to certain equipment that might make your life easier. It's just that the juice isn't worth the squeeze. And boy, have we been squeezed.
[+] [-] toddmorey|2 years ago|reply
Looking back it seems so surreal like thinking about when people used to smoke on airplanes. I can’t imagine ever going back to that.