I've been 'remote' for... 12 years now, but do travel to offices sometimes, and do enjoy being able to do some face to face time with folks, even sometimes for multiple days or weeks at a stretch. The core matter is who decides when I need to be in an office. If it's me or mostly me, it's great. If it's solely at the discretion of others, that's where problems often are (regardless of whether it's full time or not).
Personally, I'm over 20 years WFH now and love it. The last 5 years have been working with people on other continents, and I actually had the choice of time zones to work (I usually work nights for this, as I'm a night owl and it lets me sleep during day time when Arizona summers get hot). I haven't had any of the issues people seem to encounter. I don't work to socialize, so I don't miss lunches and such. For programming or devops stuff, you can definately do 100% remote. I understand people have different tastes, so I find it funny how polarized people get about it. In-office to WFH is a spectrum - just pick the spot your comfortable on it.
> In-office to WFH is a spectrum - just pick the spot your comfortable on it.
Yep. It's the autonomy part that is the problem in nearly all cases. Choosing your own spot on that spectrum is the key part. And your spot may have to change over time, based on other parts of your life. Being forced to spot X is where all the contention comes in, it seems.
I did miss occasional lunches, dinners, break room chats with folks, but now run a coworking spot in town. I have most of the socialization aspects I missed, without them being tied to work (no office politics with these folks, just... socialization).
Luckily, I think the autonomy part is on the rise...At least for tech workers. I basically no longer entertain positions that aren't 90+% WFH (so companies do quarterly or yearly get togethers, which aren't so bad), and there seems to be more of them all the time. In an industry where working with 'offshore' dev. groups is fairly routine, it seems especially silly to require 'local' resources to come on-site.
I have worked with 50% remote people for decades. There are all sorts of ways this can be productive. The most obvious, which may or may not appeal to the majority of HN’s demographic, is people with families.
If you’re 50% WFH, you can structure your parental life around the remote days. It’s not that you work less on those days, but the time you would otherwise spend commuting is time you can spend on weekday family things.
Another scenario I’ve seen is people who want a "remote home.” Fed up with the prices for living in a major metropolitan area, or perhaps because they prefer a smaller town and/or living in a rural area, they buy a place with double their usual commute.
That can be brutal, but if you only do that a couple of days of the week, and can structure your F2F work on those days, the total number of hours commuting isn’t so bad.
If you're only coming in a few days a week, you don't need to live as close to the office. Like the difference between a 30 minute commute twice a day five days a week versus a 90 minute commute twice a day once a week.
It's certainly better than nothing. I agree that different people like WFH for different reasons. For my job, anything that lets me move farther from the Bay Area would be better. 1 day WFH per week doesn't let me do that, but maybe 3 days WFH per week would. My current commute is 4 hours, so maybe Id be willing to do an 8 hour commute if it was only twice a week. A week per month would be even better: I could move out of $tate and just fly to the South Bay once a month.
+1. I was surprised by myself when deciding between competing offers recently. Even after enduring a year of isolation, and beginning my search with the express goal of joining a team on-site, I chose the fully remote position. I found the on-site guys tended to be old-school (not meant as a compliment). Also, in such turbulent and uncertain times, I realized that mobility is a major benefit. If my city turns even more Mad Max this summer (the jobs aren't coming back, people are pissed...), it will be a relief to be able to "bug out" with zero ceremony.
It still allows employees to work uninterrupted while managing their own time on the other days, and allows the company to save roughly half the office space (unless everyone comes in at the same days). It also spares you a lot of commute.
Sure, it doesn't allow other things like working from a beach somewhere in Spain. But it's a compromise that keeps many benefits from both solutions.
