I'm the opposite. I used to think working from home would be great, and that the office was fairly irrelevant given all my work was on a computer anyway.
Six months in, the main thing that this experience has taught me is that I never want to work a remote job. It's miserable.
It's worth noting that this is NOT what remote working is really like. During regular times you can more easily go work in your local cafe for a few hours, more easily hang out with your friends after work to get socialization. If you're a social person this is a double-whammy, you lost socializing at work and socializing with friends at the same time. I'm not suggesting you would ever like normal remote work, I have no idea. I just wanted to say this isn't what remote work is really like.
Strange, I had the opposite experience - hated working remote in the past but been mostly OK with WFH during COVID - I think the main reason is that during COVID everyone else was also working from home, not just me. So the company had to come up with procedures that suit well remote workers, and I never felt "out of the loop" compared to others.
I find being "out of the loop" to be one of the best parts of being remote. Whatever small amount of useful things I'm out of the loop on is dwarfed by the benefit of being out of the loop on all the political/personal drama. Of course this is a very individual experience so everyone's mileage will vary greatly.
I suspect many people can't work at the local cafe as something might leak if a person took a picture of their screen.
And I know, just for me. On scale of 1 to 10 if for me WFH is a 3 then work from cafe is a 5 and work from office is a 10 (note: this is with cool people on cool stuff, those numbers and even order might changes of those 2 things were not true). I don't generally talk to anyone at a cafe so I don't get any social interaction quota. I can't bounce ideas off people at the cafe, they aren't generally fellow SWE. So while it feels less isolated than WFH it's not a substitute for me.
I have a mixed bag of feelings regarding WFH. I realize that the current situation at my employer is not comparable to a real remote (and asynchronously organized) setup. Way too many people try to emulate the office, while at home. I have meeting in meeting staring at a screen not getting any meaningful work done during the regular hours most people are active. To be able to deliver on deadlines I needed time in the very early mornings and late in the evenings. This led to massive overtime and also to the situation that my significant other and I weren't seeing each other nearly as much as before Corona while both working from home without a daily 1.5 - 2 hour commute.
Some small project teams got it right and reduced meetings and replaced them with asynchronous communication. This was a great experience. But sadly I got pushed into projects were this just wasn't the case.
So probably your experience is more of a Covid-19 experience than remote work.
When I switched from in-office to remote work a decade ago I had to make a conscious effort to increase my out-of-work socializing. I want to stress that I agree/understand remote work will never be for everyone and many people will prefer an office and I hope they get that option. At the same time everyone sort of got thrown into this by surprise and we've done a poor job of helping people make the most out of this transition. I'm a team lead and the last 6 months I've mostly been a therapist helping people cope with stress and transitioning to new ways of doing things. Mental health is so important and as a society we've failed to address that on all levels, not just remote/on-site work.
I'm noticing at our company those who are married and/or have kids seem to prefer remote working and those who miss the office tend to live alone.
There are obviously many factors that can affect a person's happiness and it's always good to hear people's perspectives. Why do you find it miserable?
As a childless person with a roommate, the current WFH situation has been not ideal.
I live in an apartment complex that normally features amenities and is located in a neighborhood with lots of shops, cafes, bars, gyms, etc. All of the third places are currently closed or under very heavy restrictions (e.g. in Seattle you can only dine indoors with members of your household), so now I'm stuck in a two-bedroom apartment. I can still go for walks but it's not quite the same.
There's also the issue of everybody else. On paper, I have gig internet. In practice, I don't think the fiber here was designed for everyone to be simultaneously working from home. And especially with kids staying at home instead of using up their energy at school or at the playground, apartment noise has become more significant.
Work from home would probably be nicer under less strenuous circumstances. Working from home or a coffee shop of your own volition is one thing, working from home because you have to is another. I'm onboarding to a new team and personally I've found it difficult to get the quick 30-second validation I need to see if I'm setting things up right or have the right assumptions, because it very easily snowballs into setting up formal meetings.
I'm the opposite. Married with 2 kids, but I had to rent a private office 10 minutes from home so I could focus.
I was setting a bad precedent for my sons when they would try to talk to me and I'd say "I'm working. not right now." Then it becomes ambiguous whether they can talk to me or not. Not good for kids IMO.
Now when I come home i get the biggest hugs you've ever seen and we start playing.
> they would try to talk to me and I'd say "I'm working. not right now." Then it becomes ambiguous whether they can talk to me or not. Not good for kids IMO.
Ugh, I do this all the time and didn't think about how bad it is. A gut punch, but glad I'm now conscious of it.
I'm honestly not sure why that's a gut punch? I grew up with a work from home parent. There was nothing particularly confusing about it and if anything, it taught me to respect the attention-space of others from an early age. Make sure to set up consistent visual signals of what working looks like such as a closed door and be consistent in explaining that you're in your work-zone. When work is done, then be present to your family and leave the laptop in the home office.
Some people feel the need to baby children when they are nearby, but are comfortable ignoring then when they are away, instead of actually being their all day or teaching the child a balance including self-reliance.
Exactly, I was thinking about how a visual sign could communicate the idea well. I have to work from my living room shared with a bunch of other individuals at home. It gets pretty nutty at times. I might repurpose some old desk nick-knack thing to be my now-working sign post.
That's a good idea. Maybe a desk lamp that gets turned on? Think about how you dress as well. Clothing is an excellent signaler. Consider rearranging the furniture to create a barrier between your desk and the rest of the room. Those folding standup room dividers are like $100 on Amazon in a variety of styles and you can hide it in the closet after hours if you are short on room.
Yah, that's what we wound up doing spontaneously today when something spilled in the kitchen this morning. We have a kitchen island on wheels, I wound up rolling it out of the kitchen out of the way and wound up just continuing on over and creating a side wing/short wall next to my seat and keyboard tray. So far so good.
I’m on paternity leave right now with my first kid. I worked a little bit before taking the leave and that was all the time I needed to determine that having a separate “office” is a must. We’re moving away from the Bay Area to be closer to family, and I’m seriously thinking about purchasing a cheap ($40-$60k) hut/cottage with a pretty view about ten minutes away from wherever home ends up being. I’ll set up a desk, couch, espresso machine, and treat that as “work”.
I was setting a bad precedent for my sons when they would try to talk to me and I'd say "I'm working. not right now." Then it becomes ambiguous whether they can talk to me or not. Not good for kids IMO.
No doors? Seems like there are many ways you could make the signal less ambiguous.
Yeah, this is a setup issue, not a work-from-home issue. If possible a separate office with closable door is ideal, then just be really strict that when your office door is closed, you're at work and not to be disturbed. It took me a few months to train my family to respect this but they're pretty good about it now.
Well in that case the problem isn't "working from home", its "working from this particular home which isn't setup in any way for success". Its not reasonable to expect everyone to have a living situation setup to accommodate working from home given the way the current situation was thrust upon them, but its just an unreasonable to judge the efficacy of working from home based on those same people's experiences. Its equivalent to removing all the desks and furniture from an office and then basing your assessment on the ensuing disaster.
As you alluded to, if you only judge something in its most optimal setting, then of course that thing seems very workable and successful. There are very few objective truths when it comes to WFH policies; there are only compromises that people are willing to make/accept. People always seem to make it about one-size-fits-all X is Good Y is Bad.
That's interesting. I also find it pretty miserable, mostly due to the isolation. I kind of feel like a microservice that takes JIRA tickets as input and outputs code these days.
My home office is great: nice desk, chair, good lighting, extra monitor, more than enough space. The literal work facilities are certainly better here for me than at the office. I just miss seeing coworkers, and I even miss my train ride a bit (that used to be my reading time).
And, yes, I live by myself (with my dog, fortunately).
I'm married with kids and, pandemic or no, I perpetually feel like a microservice that receives child demands and outputs dining and entertainment services.
Yep. Just like I don't want my life insurance to be dependent on my job, I also don't want my social life to be. It's not healthy, it works in favor of the employer by making people more attached to their jobs, and we shouldn't optimize for it.
I'm sorry this is happening to you. This isn't what remote work is really like. Before covid you could easily make the rounds to a few local cafes to work at from time to time and also you could hang out with friends after work. All of that was taken away at once and we won't fully understand the mental health ramifications for years, if ever.
> I kind of feel like a microservice that takes JIRA tickets as input and outputs code these days.
That sounds like a symptom of a deeper problem—insufficient autonomy? no "seat at the table"?—that is, at most, being exacerbated by remote work. What specifically about your culture makes you feel this way? What makes you feel this way more now than previously?
Well, that wasn't a literal description of my job. I was exaggerating a bit for effect, to emphasize the isolation bit.
Like many of us, I have wide latitude in exactly how I go about meeting the requirements of the project I'm on, and I have some amount of freedom in choosing those projects. My manager is not looking over my shoulder at how many LOC I commit.
What's causing me to feel this way is a combination of isolation, every fucking thing that's happened in 2020, and my deteriorating mental health as a result. I may not last another year in a remote work + COVID environment.
This seems to be lumping a lot of things into remote work that really shouldn't be. There is universal isolation now, for most of us. But post-COVID you presumably won't be so isolated, even if you were working from home.
- my spouse is stay at home, and therefore is supervising the kids while I work
- I have a study/office at home that allows me to close the door if necessary
- more of my daily time is spent programming than in meetings or interacting with people
If any one of those things wasn't true, I too would probably be struggling more with the WFH situation. As it stands, its a massive improvement as I can still work effectively, the lack of commute means I have more time for seeing my family, and the flexibility of my daily schedule now allows me to do things like take a break to hang out or have lunch with my kids.
This is not what working from home is normally like for parents with kids. In normal times, you would still have the kids in school/daycare or have a real stay at home spouse.
> those who are married and/or have kids seem to prefer remote working and those who miss the office tend to live alone
I would have thought to be the other way around - parents miss office as they have to supervise and educate their kids while also doing their regular job.
What it seems to be is that people prefer having people around for part of the day but not in their way while working. People with families but no office to get away from everyone struggle and people alone 24/7 struggle.
Personally I live with 4 other family members but have a dedicated room with a dual monitor setup so I find this to be ideal.
We have family watching the kids during the day, and if we didn't we would hire help. But even with help, it's just easier not having to commute, being able to do laundry / chores / etc. while taking meetings, etc. I am more productive overall.
Depends on the age of kid :) schools are already open but bay area in particular most schools are still doing remote education. Families voted it that way.
That's not quite what happened. Parents were asked to pick between a full year of distance learning or a hybrid option with partial classroom time. However most county education departments are still forcing classrooms to stay closed, so everyone is still on distance learning regardless of how they voted.
When I was younger I would have been less happy, but I was lucky enough to grow up near Boston, went to school in Boston, and have a software career in Boston, so all of my friends and family live around here and I never needed work to have a social life.
TBQH I think a lot of young people no longer know how to make friends outside of the rigid structures of school and work. All of the old structures of church and community fell without something to take its place, and for whatever reason it's progressive to discount prioritizing traditional values like family over career. If I hadn't grown up in Boston I probably would have stuck around where ever my family was located. I think the pandemic is forcing people to analyze their own lives and many are discovering things they don't like about themselves and their choices. Hanging out on social media all day is unhealthy and is not a replacement for true friends and family.
> All of the old structures of church and community fell without something to take its place, and for whatever reason it's progressive to discount prioritizing traditional values like family over career.
The economy grows faster when people sacrifice their personal lives for work.
Not saying I like it, but it seems obvious why incentives are aligned that way.
It's not obvious in the longer term. Economic growth, which is affected by technological and scientific advancement (among many other things), depends on insight and creativity, not just hard work.
Maybe the economy grows more in the longer term if the people working in it were raised as healthy, happy children in more of a "family values" sort of situation.
To clarify, I don't intend my comment to be read as suggesting "family values" automatically results in healthier, happier children or is superior in some way. Especially not "traditional" family values.
(Personally I hold much more of a progressive, pro-LGBT+-visibility, love-and-let-love type of position than what are sometimes called traditional family values.)
Rather, I want to suggest that long term economic growth almost certainly depends in some way not just on people sacrificing their personal lives for work now; but also qualities that future generations grow up with, i.e. how children are raised, schooled, looked after, the attitudes they are surrounded by and so on.
I'm not informed enough to know how personal life in the present affects multi-generational economic growth. But I'm sure it has an effect, and that everyone maximising work in the present at the cost of personal life is almost certainly not the path to maximum collective prosperity as measured by economic growth in the long term.
I think you bring up an important point that may be an uncomfortable truth about modern society. I personally have been weathering the pandemic/WFH situation well, in no small part because my spouse is a stay-at-home parent anyways. I don't need to juggle work and monitoring children much because they are available to do so. If anything, its been a boon to be able to "tag-team" occasionally, to give my wife a break/back her up, and also be a presence in my kids life more than just after work hours and on weekends.
For many friends and colleagues with children, however, its been a disaster, and it seems the largest culprit is that they both work, and therefore they struggle to do their jobs while also watch their children all day. I don't blame them for their situation. Society has made it so that having a stay at home parent is a luxury that many families simply can't afford, and it has also devalued the idea so much that even the families that can afford it are almost embarrassed to do so (my wife personally likes being a stay at home mom, but feels judgement from friends and former colleagues for quitting her job as a chemist to do so). Its good that we moved beyond expecting women to exclusively be the homemakers, as that is needlessly sexist, but it would have been far more healthy to replace that with normalizing one parent, gender-agnostic, devoted to child-care, rather than normalizing both parents working and relying on daycare/schooling to watch kids for most of the day.
IMHO biggest variable is company itself. If it’s not setup as remote & distributed-first, then you going to suffer. Same with what you actually do. Developing a product is much easier alone than a service in a consulting company.
To a lot of people it is the same thing. If you didn't have an active social life before then not much changed in your life except that you now work from home, and those are the ones the most hurt by being unable to go to an office.
Those are the ones hurt the least. Didn't socially interact before and now everyone is forced to do it. Feels like they have been traininng their lives for this.
same. I started a remote job in 2018 and was just looking to go back to onsite when covid hit.
I'm a very enthusiastic engineer and love bouncing ideas off others, whether they are in sales, marketing, or other engineers.
Remote has made "connecting" much less natural and makes it difficult to progress in my career.
If you're the type of engineer who likes to be given requirements and sit in your home office and code all day in silence then power to you. Not for me.
> I'm a very enthusiastic engineer and love bouncing ideas off others, whether they are in sales, marketing, or other engineers. Remote has made "connecting" much less natural and makes it difficult to progress in my career.
What's your strategy to counteract this if the people who you enjoy bouncing ideas off of prefer to and/or end up all staying remote?
I'm on your perspective but we are all too binary, black/white about this. It is a preference. Some people prefer home. Some people prefer in office around co-workers. Neither is wrong. Can we start discussing this as a preference instead of a fact?
For me it's mostly about ease of collaboration. I love hashing out math/design problems on a whiteboard. Even with good tools there's nothing that allows the same sort of natural, dynamic conversation. Meetings turn into a series of loosely connected speeches, especially when there's large numbers.
I also find that simple conversations take way longer, especially when there's disagreement.
Thirdly video calls are super draining.
It's also really difficult to get separation between work and life. I find myself doing home chores doing the day intertwined with work.
Unlike some commenter, the social aspect isn't that important to me, but there's definitely some camaraderie missing. In the office, I feel like part of a team that's working together to achieve something. At home I feel like one of a swarm of drones that occasionally communicate for information exchange. It's not very fulfilling.
> I find myself doing home chores doing the day intertwined with work.
This has been a HUGE PLUS for me! Just the ability to run a load of laundry while on a 90 minute call or water the plants when I have a gap between meetings has been a major quality of life increase. Now I can manage the house during the week and weekends are true relaxing and enjoyable weekends, no longer chorefests.
Working at an office is free social interactions. If you live alone and can't muster the energy to organize meeting people at least you still get to meet your colleagues every day. If instead you work from home it is pretty easy to get into a downward spiral where you don't socialize, get even more miserable making it even harder to socialize until you get depressed.
I’m married with one 18 year old son at home. I put 11 gallons of gas in my car early July and still had half a tank mid September. I realized that I only leave the house every two weeks to get a haircut. My older son who doesn’t live with us needed a car and I just gave it to him. I didn’t need it.
I had former coworkers/friends who I would meet up for lunch. But none of them are comfortable even eating outside. The married friends that we had, we don’t get together with anymore.
Working out? I had started going to spin class at the gym pre-Covid and was planning to maybe start back teaching fitness classes once or twice a week like a did almost a decade ago, but that’s cut. We have a gym at home that I use and my wife turned another room into a studio where she teaches online fitness classes.
I’ve really become a hermit. We are going to venture outside to eat out for the first time since March next week. Of course we are going to eat outdoors. We use to have date night at least every other week - dinner, movies, live music, etc.
We are still trying to figure out a nice, safe, drivable getaway.
> But none of them are comfortable even eating outside
They have good reason to be. A recent study from the CDC found that eating out, even if outdoors, was one of the largest risk factors for infection of the disease. They found that people with Covid were over twice as likely to have gone to a restaurant than the average for those without Covid.
The problem is corona - our social spaces are not "wrong" per se, they are rather unsafe to visit in times where about half the US population and a sizable chunk of every other country's population except Spain and Italy claim that mask mandates are restricting their freedom.
These anti-maskers are ruining our livelihood. How many months or years until we take justice into our own hands? I don't want to live like this forever. I'm ready to get some spikey 6 foot poles to start poking people with.
Not really. Even without corona it's hard to socialize when WFH. Suburban sprawl causes this, but if you try to solve that by going urban, then you lose the home office.
It is dangerous to rely on office relationships for your social needs. When you move on to your next role, those relationships go up in smoke. This should be a signal to cultivate stronger ties to friends and family.
Office does not provide for social needs but provides a baseline level of social activity 5 days a week. I don't expect to make any friends in office but I am certain to talk to a few colleagues, have lunch in a group and make small talk every day of the week.
There is not much friction in all this since you know you are going to leave this behind at the end of the day. My interactions with close friends, although longer and much more meaningful, are also very bursty. The "mid-range socializing" (regular and frequent but not very serious) that office provides, that WFH is mostly unable to replicate in my experience, is something I am missing and I think it makes all the difference.
> “I’m not good at making friends therefore no one is”
I think you have it backwards. People who are "good at making friends" can also make friends outside of work, and so aren't left without social ties when everyone is working from home. If the only people you are making friends with are people who you both are compelled/paid to be around each other for 8+ hours a day, you might not be that good at making friends.
I can understand this. For me its' very different as I have my family, so I really love WFH. I can get up early, go run, come back have breakfast with my kids, drop them off at school and sit down at my desk for 9am. Sometimes, I will take a few hours out of the day to my own thing (go trail running) and I just work a little later into the evening (which is no big deal as there is no commute).
However it would be quite different if I was just on my own the whole time.
I see "free social interactions" as neither a benefit nor something that can only be obtained on-site.
These "free social interactions" are often just distractions - taking you out of your context, making it difficult for you to be productive.
That's why I love remote + Slack. Slack is async. I can finish what I'm doing before addressing messages there. On-site, people rarely if ever warn of their intention to come talk to you - they just walk up and start talking.
On Slack or Zoom you can't take a walk around the office to clear your head/take a brief breather and inadvertently bump into a person who asks a question about your t-shirt or new Apple watch, which then leads to a longer convo, which leads to grabbing coffee in the kitchen, which leads to you hanging out with that person and their group of friends over the a weekend.
Lack of social interactions makes most people miserable, lack of productivity is irritating but you can live with it. And although you can fix social interactions without an office it demands effort, so isn't free unless you live with people like spouse or kids. At work they pay you to talk with people, so social interactions there are free since trading effort for money is the purpose of work and the social is just a side effect.
Six months in, the main thing that this experience has taught me is that I never want to work a remote job. It's miserable.