I've said similar things, but it's very important to note I'm saying that OTHERS should not force ME into the office to fulfill THEIR social needs. I'm happy working from home, and if push comes to shove, I'm saying that people's social needs should not be a consideration when deciding whether we all work from an office or from home.

I think it's great for people to fulfill their social needs at work, but I have a problem if their social needs become the reason I'm force to set aside my own needs and go to the office.

We don’t have to be best friends, but yes, showing up is part of the “teammate” package. You don’t get to withdraw that part and still demand all the same things from me.

… but they arn't.

The person who has meaningful and deep relationships outside work isn't demanding all the same things from you.

Most work are in dense cities and cities are inherently expensive. For the commute to be meaningful, everyone in your team has to be within a short distance of these dense cities.

The “teammate” package you propose is pretty expensive all things considered. You might not realize nor care about the expense but the teammates might.

In the end, the company cares about productive output. Mercenary or not, companies that have the most productive output that makes the customers happy are going to win.

My money are on companies that go remote, keep costs down and pass on those savings internally (employees) and externally (customers).

My money is not on companies that are forced to hire people within driving distance of some arbitrary office.

I think both our preferences are legitimate and people should be able to sort themselves into teams that suit their preferences.

I understand people are distressed about commuting and the office. I’m also distressed about the prospect of spending the majority of my waking hours over the next 30 years on Zoom. If that’s the way things are shaping up I need to go be a farmer or something.

The teams are going to be companies, in my opinion. There are going to be 'remote' companies and 'in person' companies. That's the only way this type of self-sorting will work, people won't join a company not knowing for sure whether they're committing to an in-person or remote working experience.

Thinking about it more, I guess you're right. There will always be sectors within organisations where it's considered that face-to-face meetings and working physically in the presence of other team members is necessary to make effective progress.

If a company stays remote because you do not personally need social interaction at the office, what has just happened?

Your personal needs have been put above the personal needs of other employees.

There's a difference between "just let me work the way I want" and "just make them work the way I want".

Ideally, those who want to work from an office could, while others on the same team could work from home, and everyone would be considerate enough to make it work. This is working well enough at my current company.

Again, this is putting the personal preferences of one group above those of another group. What you describe is only ideal if the office people don't mind working with the at-home people and vice versa. You don't have to be considerate of someone else's preferences if you're willing to leave for another job.

Personally, the next job I have will be office only with 0 off-site employees. It's my preference and hopefully I'll find a company whose preference aligns with my own.

Every decision a company makes treats people differently. The goal should be treating everyone fairly. If a person disagrees that they are being treated fairly, they can make their case and try to get something to change or they can get a new job.

(IMO companies stay this way because it’s simply cheaper and the hiring pool is bigger, but that’s not important in this discussion)

It just happens to benefit those whose prefer to stay at home.

In the US, this is only a benefit to bigger businesses or businesses with a presence in multiple states already (or those willing to take on quite a bit of new administrative work).

I work for a 15-person remote company based in a single state and the additional overhead required to understand taxation, labor laws, and other issues in even neighboring states is higher than you might think. We're putting it off and just hiring locally for now.

I’m in Portland, OR and pre-pandemic, we’d have no issue hiring someone in Vancouver, WA, because they’d drive 15 minutes to our Portland office. Now, we choose to turn them away because of the bureaucracy and worry that we’re going to do something wrong. One day we’ll have to cross that (metaphorical/physical) bridge, but we’re not there quite yet.

It’s really easy for big businesses that have big HR departments and/or already have a physical presence in another state. But for 15 people, one doing HR part-time, it’s just not worth it right now.

Also there are probably a number of firms that specialize in dealing with that kind of situation so you can get outside help affordably.

Is this something you entertain as an actual possibility or shudder to think about?

After a certain age, you realize you can only form certain kinds of friendships by spending a lot of time with people struggling on similar problems. Granted, last year I attempted to start a company full remote and I was able to build sort of similar bonds, but it's way too hard to gauge people. Those efforts sort of faded after one of our founders turned out to be too emotionally unstable. But yeah.

edit - but maybe at 27 this is really just me realizing I'm not that social, don't really like people and should maybe just move on from some kind of idealized social life...

Right now I’m assuming you’re the CEO of Metaversal, a fictional metaverse startup that wants to compete with Facebook via a subscription only model (open source code tho, ofc). Best of luck in your endeavors

Go do it. Now. Spend your free time chatting on the chairlifts and the whitewater parks and backcountry campsites.

Covid lays bare like any other major tramaua to ones life would. 10yrs ago i did my back in; that was my kick start. I said if i could ever feel normal again, i would use that to go explore. and i did. Listen to your covid trauma, if its telling you that you have spent too much time chasing the rat-race, and lost the opportunity to nurture those life connections. dont wait. go connect.

The meaning of life to me is love. No matter how much money you have, without love (of a thing, a friend, a person, a stranger) you have nothing.

To me this was a major benefit of remote. We went from a place with informal rules and influence to one that is more formal and thus easier for me to understand. The motivations of mercenaries are nice and simple and straightforward.

So what started as a way for a team to gauge the abilities of the candidate and more importantly if the candidate will play well in the team is now an examination with right/wrong answers supplemented by a half-assed "behavioral" interview with some canned questions.

Everything else hinged on the leetcode/Java or Python trivia.

I understand why the 100% remote gang don't like hybrid either because it still forces you to stay close to work. But if you want to be a digital nomad, you might as well freelance and not do full time. My opinion.

Shameless plug: We are hiring in South Jersey/Philadelphia region for my edtech startup and if you are interested, hit me up. Various roles. Hybrid would be awesome.

I've already been working remote for the last ~5 years, and it hasn't killed my network because work wasn't really my primary means of networking, professionally or personally. I networked by attending meetups and conventions. Admittedly, it was more or less easier to get to know people IRL when I worked in corporate offices.

What really put a damper on my networking was COVID. Every social activity I was interested remained closed for a long period of time, and even though I was (am?) a tech meetup host, I couldn't get enough people to show up so I stopped hosting them. Many groups in my area haven't come back or were already in decline a few years before COVID. I do miss the ability to physically hang with other programmers. This idea that Zoom/Discord/Metaverse can replace physicality is bullshit. Certainly not yet, anyway.

The Future of Work as it currently appears isn't really bleak because of remote work itself. Many of us have not only been forced into remote work, but we've had flexibility in our lives removed. Every other discussion at work for the last 2 years has had to be tied to COVID in some way shape or form. Remote work had clear benefits when it represented freedom. Now the political situation across the world has made remote work out to feel more like solitary confinement.

It sounds like you want others to live near you and spend their time doing things for you. That’s fine, but you might not find many people who are willing to do that, especially if they are working to live.

Personally I think the future of work is looking great.

For the remote work class, sure it is. Some of us still have clean your shit at the wastewater treatment plant, run pipe and fiber to you so we can deliver you water and internet and so you can deliver us your excrement.

Less pollution, less traffic fatalities, less energy use, and more money flowing to remote areas (like where a lot of infrastructure is typically located). All good things for everybody, even if the benefits of working in your PJs are unevenly distributed.

You're on the wrong forum

Which space efficient septic tank do you have in mind?

I didn't say septics are uncommon. To ask you differently:

- How large was that plot (on which the septic system was installed)

- Was the septic system dedicated to your house or shared

- How large was that septic system

Nobody on HackerNews.

But you're right in that part of my dilemma here is figuring out what I want to do with my time while also optimizing for decent options going forward. Frankly, I'm leaning toward the being away from hoards of people in the woods ;) .

I'm pretty sure I'm getting PIPed this month. Can't really complain, I've barely been pushing code, most days I mindlessly browse slack all day and do no work.

I 100 percent blame it on the pandemic, and WFH.

I was thinking of going into finance or defence where you're still forced to go into an office every day.

I was in the military in my younger years and the people I worked with there are still my closest now. I worked in finance for a few after that and the nights spent working on difficult problems till the early hours of the morning were some of the most fulfilling one's I've had. Perhaps it's different in software land where everyone seems a bit more unsociable but as an EE I loved going into the lab and seeing what everyone is up to for the day. Even when we were just working at our computer desks, we were able to ask each other for help, advice, or just shoot the breeze. The office was never this political battleground where everyone turned up to work miserable that I've heard so much about. It was a place of camaraderie over joint hardships.

Now all I've got are these 4 walls to keep me company, while I try my hardest to keep attention for a mere 20 minutes of productivity before disappearing off to make a tea for the 12th time that day, or glaze over after the 5th teams meeting of the morning. I read these other HN posts and constantly think maybe I'm much more socially charged than I think, or everyone else is much less so than they think. All WFH has done is made me think I'm either depressed, suffering from ADHD, or both - when I felt like a normal, happy member of society before.

In English, please?

Just easier to meet people and do stuff. I haven't used an app in years ( had a very bad experience and I don't feel safe using them ), and aside from that I love going to concerts. Much easier to do if you can ride the train to one vs having to drive 2 hours

Remote work is amazing, for me I have to filter myself very heavily at work. I don't really care for workplace socializing.

We have bars for that.

Remote work is amazing for people who have mobility issues, as well as an array of other disabilities.

What if I want to socialize on my own terms. Forcing me back into the office so you can make small talk isn't fair.

Have you considered Chicago ?

It's the perfect city I'm terms of quality public transit and affordability. I lived on the Northside and never had any problems with crime.

Met my first long term girlfriend too !

What used to be a collaborative effort where we both take responsibility for making things better now feels confrontational because online code review is now often the only interaction we have with others.

It’s crucial to build trust and alignment with your colleagues. Otherwise you end up blaming all your problems — which, in fields like software engineering and site reliability, shower down upon us with the misty subtlety of a firehose — on the people who you only know by their Unix name / commit email / cat themed github avatar.

The die hard “work to live not live to work!” responses, here, don’t seem to be addressing that. It’s a much deeper problem than whether you should make friends in a bar versus by the water cooler.

Working in a team is social and you have to form social bonds. No one is saying they are the only social bonds you should form in your life. If you refuse to form any social bonds at work then you will not be as effective as someone who does.

I am in no way advocating for in-person code review. I’m saying that it’s much harder to do code review with someone you haven’t shared lunch with, chatted with in the pub, or had a non-work related phone call with for 9 months.

Your point about public GitHub is pretty much on point. Some of the least productive and most barbed back-and-forth you see on code reviews is the public FOSS ones where people don’t really know or trust each other that much.

Some of the best are where the reviewers clearly want to work together on something and not be confrontational.

(By the way: I don’t see this behaviour as openly confrontational in terms of deliberate aggression — more commonly it’s a reviewer subconsciously expressing their self-perceived lack of standing by criticising other’s work.)

code review was done async. and in all practical sense "remote" at all the dozen places I ever worked in an office.

How else do you scale code review on a team of more than 2 people. Get all 5+ people in a room to do code review for a 5 liner?

I meant that now we never hang out, we don’t trust each other any more, and code review has suffered as a result.

It’s especially hard for new people joining a team where baseline trust is basically equal to that of Internet stranger.

Huh. How's your hiring process like? Do you hire very young people?

The only time I've seen this happen is when the team used to work in a colocated manner, and then some members started to WFH. Eventually some of those people WFH got too tied into the "home" part of WFH and work suffered. Simultaneously other people in the office just started to treat those WFH as second class citizens as well. This really caused a mess.

If this is what you're seeing, the easiest solution is to just move to a remote only team.

If you want to stay, you need to have a good manager in place who understands these dynamics and can mitigate issues.

I don't form organic relationships all that easily. I am not at all relatable to most people and find interfacing with them to be a very mentally costly process, so I am happy that remote significantly cuts down on all that. I also like the need to schedule things far in advance as then I can plan my work around when I also plan to be mentally exhausted.

So remote has improved my network by dramatically reducing the expected cost of maintaining it. A few scheduled meetings/planned weeks in advance lunches over spontaneously running it them and them wanting to have lunch when I have deep work scheduled for that afternoon.

It is also why I focus my network on other cities. The distance makes in person meetings be the kind of thing planned months in advance. It manages itself in an orderly way. I need not try and impose order on it.

Sometimes it feels like my team performance is being gauged how much I talk through slack, in ways you'd usually just be expected to do so in person or more traditionally. When in reality, I just forget sometimes or suck at knowing how my writing comes off. Since I have an odd sense of humor / sometimes talk like a robot to make sure I'm being clear.

As for how I am perceived on Slack, I view my team as a single point of failure and make sure that I am always in a position to get other similar offers. Makes how I am perceived not really matter as I am not the kind to go for an internal promotion anyway as it is more complicated, and again, a single point of failure.

What might work for you is to set up a meetup/casual thing where someone gives a presentation on a technology people are mildly interested in, like Tailwind or somesuch. If there's demand for that kind of casual interaction (and I don't doubt there is), people will be falling over themselves to help you.

Personally I really like the work/casual divide in my socialization, where my social interaction and work aren't welded together, where work issues can't pollute your friendships and vice versa. This is especially good if you work at a place that appreciates your work but is very different culturally than you. I worked at an oil/gas company for several years, and while I liked some of the formal processes they had, I'm of a profoundly different culture than they are, despite looking like them.

With your social network and work network split off like this, you'll be much more flexible in both.

Good luck!

I agree that it doesn't look like it's coming back - in fact I'm not sure if my city is coming back (London).

The growth thing doesn't bother me, it's just that the job is now pointless to me. I don't care about shuffling pixels about, I care about actual people in the real world. Card games over lunch, pub at the end of the day, chatting shit, that was the point, the work was just a vehicle to give us the excuse and fund it. We are social animals, there is nothing more.

Something sticks in my mind though, which is that most software developers have a strong preference for just sitting inside. I was one, then I made money and I realised there was a world out there. But some of them just want that forever, and that's fine, it just means I can't work with them any more, that chapter of my life has closed, we part ways and so it goes.

It's like a partner or old friend that you just outgrew.

Eventually I'll give up on HN too I guess.

I agree, and feel that people in tech often forget what/who the technology was supposed to be built for in the first place: us, people, to hopefully make our lives better!

Not to make us more anti-social, separated, and zombie-like. Technology was supposed to be our tool, not the other way around.

I found that almost all "professional" structures immediately turned into some sort of schizophrenic "cus covid" nightmare and as far as I can tell they're still doing it.

I had no interest in that stuff so I just did my own thing. Self study, social meetup groups, travel, etc.

I was almost ten years in to my career in early 2020 so I can afford to not maximise income. I feel sorry for the new graduates that now just have yet another thing to hate the older generations for.

Even just small things. The university interview. Putting on a suit and tie and meeting _their people_ in a big hall for the first time. Life-defining.

In my last role I was on the football 5-aside team, got to sit around during breaks chatting with other people shooting the shit, went out for pints after work, made friendships with other engineers that were all very similar to me, and travelled around meeting new people in new places. Now I barely speak with anyone socially at work, if at all.

To add to that, as someone who's not very well financially endowed, meeting people outside of work is almost harder than in. Sure I can join the local Pokémon Go club free, but I care nothing for it and likely wouldn't share anything in common with the people there. I can join my local hiking or chess group and be paired up with a load of retirees, or coding club where I go a do something that I get enough of in my 9-5. Whereas, I want to train at my local rugby club? £300 a year, not including everything that goes with that like kit. Meet people at the climbing gym? £80 a month. Go for a drink on the weekend? Maybe £60 for the night, £40 if it was a cheap pub. Half my take home goes into rent, a quarter into bills/car/food, and I'm left with a final quarter to weasel some away into savings and perhaps see my friends on a weekend once a month, or go to a gig once a quarter. God forbid I want to travel anywhere exotic.

I spend most of my days at the moment considering whether I'm suffering from sunk-cost fallacy, and I should scrap the 8 years and £60k+ I've spent on education to go and become a bartender or garden landscaper. At least I'd get to talk to some people that aren't on a screen, and I'd see the sun every now and again.

Even aside from your difficulty in finding people, the whole argument that "well, you can make friends outside of work" is a non-sequitur. It's illogical for two reasons:

1) Outside of work hours is a different topic. My work hours used to be social and enjoyable, and then they became antisocial and not enjoyable. Outside of work remained similar.

2) The knock-on effect of mass WFH is that outside of work hours the city is less busy and there are generally less people in the cafes, bars, at meetup events and so on because the urban agglomeration effect is reduced.

The second one is probably going to get better over time as stuff like border controls are released and it hasn't really caused me any direct issues (I'm just sad that the buzz is gone). The first one isn't - by definition WFH is less social regardless of whether you do something after work or not.

I go out camping and jeeping with a group from work and have a network of friends outside of work too.

So it is certainly not given that remote working has to be some forlorn place. It is, as most areas of life, what you make of it.

What are you doing to afford food and rent? We see a lot of people foregoing work, such as yourself, but how are you people surviving? London is an expensive city - how does one survive without income there?

Money doesn't just disappear if you don't spend it, you need funds to live, not income.

> Money doesn't just disappear if you don't spend it, you need funds to live, not income.

It does. It's called inflation.

Don't be an asshole on the internet. There are bigger assholes on the internet and they can outwit your smart ass replies trying to belittle someone who hasn't been an asshole to you and was asking a genuine question.

Yep. Only hope is that the pandemic at least forced some change that will hopefully remain. I understand the OP grievances (okay, maybe I don't) but for some other people remote+zoom/email is just perfect.

You have a longer post and I want to make clear I’m only discussing one section here, but your emphasis on new is rubbing me the wrong way.

I’ve been doing software for about 2.5 years as long as you and looked for remote jobs, found a few, but couldn’t land them and was forced into in office roles they would take me. It seems like you are having more of a problem of the default job changing from in office to remote, and how the default isn’t your preferred option. Remote first has been a thing for years now and has worked out as a viable way to run a business

Keep on mind that your perception of what the office life will be is not what it will be. MOST people in IT are enjoying WFH and they will NOT want to be back there in the office with you.

As others mentioned, go to meetup and find a group you can socialize with off-hours. Best thing you can do for yourself as those days are over for many, and there's never going back to full time.

With the pandemic I started drinking a lot more because I was lonely.. The frequent moves, mostly due to visas, the pandemic lockdowns, contributed to the small networks I made in each country shutting down, losing old friends.. I am talking friends, not even business colleagues...

Often I go weeks, without talking to another human besides "No thanks I have my own bag" to the lady at the grocery store.. I am somewhere between outgoing and solitary but needing a group of friends is important. I am 36 years old and I wouldnt choose a different path but if you want to work remote, and live in other countries( there is no way I can afford to live in USA), you should figure out how to stay in just one country you like for a long time(legally). And develop that network. I always manage to date cool girls, fall in love, almost got married last year(also ruined from pandemic lockdowns), but I think having a group of bros/comraderie is detrimental to mental soundness

This contradicts the rest of your post, unless I'm misunderstanding.

Badly implemented remote working is bad... (but still better than the office!)

For the record, my non-work social life doesn’t usually cause those problems.

If you want to meet people otherwise you have to get out of your way to travel 1h+ in busy public transport (which already ruins my social mood) to some meetup full of randoms of any background. Most of them desperate guys looking for hookup and that's the case with most socials of this kind.

You could join some fitness classes but then you get an extra bill of £100+ just for the potential to meet people. I've heard of people making friends through hobbies but I really struggle to find 'social' hobbies.

That leaves you with office being the most convenient way of making friends even though it's far from perfect and once you leave the job you rarely meet them.

My network has grown much faster and I've met more interesting people than the old days of in office work and in person meetup, even in NYC.

I think younger people who want to progress and learn a ton through osmosis, and develop their professional networks should be in person.

I think the future needs to be all about flexibility, with well understood trade-offs.

The companies which offer this flexibility will attract the best talent.

(I’m hiring in person in Chicago if you feel like moving. Rails / Hotwire / React / beers on Fridays.)

What did she do?

> We know now* that Zuck isn't interested in (y)our mental health or making us better. Zuck isn't interested in bringing families together, preventing teen suicide, or even disseminating the truth. Zuck is a horrible person and I would happily kick him in the groin on behalf of humanity if given the opportunity so he could (if only for a moment) share humanities collective pain and perhaps even "feel something" akin to desiring compassion.

When did he ever claim to work toward these things?

I'm pretty sure that the US was closed to basically everyone not a US citizen during the pandemic.

I've never met someone I could remotely call a friend as an employee.

I made a few friends when I was in college, but absolutely none at work.