[strig]

I really couldn't disagree more. While I understand the desire to work with your coworkers in person, the benefits of working from home are huge for me.

No commuting, which on its own is reason enough for WFH since it's such a massive waste of time. Commuting would add an extra 10 hours to my workweek, and I don't get paid for it. Add in things like control over your own workspace, no "open office" nonsense, access to your own kitchen/bathroom, together all outweighs the benefits of working from the office.

The ideal situation for me would be WFH by default, with the option to work from an office if you want to or for specific situations.

[GhostVII]

I think that is totally reasonable - for me the benefits of WFH don't outweigh the cost but for a significant percentage of developers I'm sure they do. I think where you get problems is cases where a company only has a minority of people WFH, or working in an office. Whenever you have a team that is primarily in an office, with only a couple of people remote, the people working remotely seem to miss out on a lot of important discussions and don't really feel as much a part of the team, at least in my experience. Ideally you would have both types of work fully supported, Stripe having their next engineering hub be remote [0] sounds like a good compromise to me. I'm interested in knowing how managers and PM's find working from home, to me it seems like being in management would magnify the problems you have with working remotely, but I've never been a manager so I don't really know.

[0] https://stripe.com/blog/remote-hub

[m3kw9]

You gonna seem tech apps that allow that type of discussion sooner than you think.

[peruvian]

Commuting is the big time saver, but you can also do chores you'd relegate to the weekend or after work while WFH. Not always of course, but chores like a quick grocery trip, laundry, cleaning, errands in your immediate neighborhood no longer crowd your weekend.

[julianeon]

Lol, found the guy who doesn't have kids.

I don't want this to come across as overly harsh. But a helpful rule of thumb to understand what life is like after having kids, is: there is no free time. None! It's like being in the military, where you wake up at 6am, shower until 6:30am, do calisthenics until 9:30am... and so on, with every single hour occupied, until bedtime, promptly at 9:00pm.

If you tell a person like that 'just watch a movie during your free time,' they'll look at you blankly and say, 'I don't have free time, not on my schedule.'

Why are things so different? Because not only do you have another person(s) making messes who do like 0% of the cleanup, they require much more care than adults. So free time trends to 0%. There's no 'weekend' in the sense of no work (there's always housework), in a sense there's no 'after work.' There's only work, as far as the eye can see.

So for example, with commuting, I don't have enough time to do housecleaning, so the house stays in a permanent state of ugly messiness. Without it, I can apply that time to cleaning, so it becomes only moderately, to slightly, messy. There's no big block of free time - nowhere - where I can do stuff to bring back the time that's lost by commuting.

[cpach]

Thank you for telling it like it is. Some parents tend to always tell the “peachy keen” version of parenthood.

I love my kids of course, but taking care of small kids can be very exhausting.

[nucleardog]

Can you clarify what exactly it is you're disagreeing with him about?

From my read, he's saying "no commute is good because you can do a few chores during the week and not have as many to do on the weekends".

You're saying "no commute is good because you can apply that time to cleaning and the house is cleaner; but also kids are exhausting".

?

[julianeon]

I can clarify the disagreement.

He is saying:

> Commuting is the big time saver, but you can also do chores you'd relegate to the weekend or after work while WFH

I am saying:

> If my commute time is removed, some amount of necessary chores cannot get done. I can't do chores in any time other than the commute time. There is no real 'weekend' or 'after work' time, when I can do them 'later'.

All time is accounted for, and removing time necessarily knocks some items (like 'morning/midday rooms cleaning') off the list permanently.

[kaishiro]

I'm now left even more confused. Are you saying that you do a certain number of chores during your commute, and that you wouldn't be able to do these chores if the commute time was removed?

[julianeon]

No, sorry.

What I mean is:

There is an hour of my morning and night, 2 hours a day, which I am calling 'commute time.'

I can commute during 'commute time'.

Or I can WFH and stay at home during 'commute time'.

If I don't commute, I can do chores during that time.

If I do commute, those chores are never done, and are permanently knocked off the to-do list. The house is just that much messier as a result.

I can clean during the weekend, but I would have cleaned during the weekend anyway.

During the week, the house looks trashed, because there isn't enough time for chores as it is; the time that is available will instead go to even higher-priority chores, like washing dishes and clothes.

Basically if 'commute time' goes towards trekking to the office and back, it comes out of the chore time budget, meaning a really, really messy house during the week.

I will just point out, in closing: 2 hours a day is a really big amount of time to subtract out of the time budget. It can't be recovered.

Even if I don't play games and don't do anything 'fun' - I don't, incidentally - there's no compensating for that loss.

[m3kw9]

Wait a sec, who takes care of your kid when you are away? Most ppl with kids would pay for day cares or they have school as well. I’m not understanding how your day can be occupied unless the kid is 0-1.

[sekai]

I mean kids do grow-up you know? Unless your 18 years olds still do nothing.

[danlugo92]

This is a recipe for disaster, at least in my experience, chores pile up and before you know it's 4pm and you still short on hours worked/output emitted..

[peruvian]

Not in my experience. I'm not saying disappear from work for 3 hours to clean the whole house.

When I'm in the office, I often take breaks - 20-30 mins. Sometimes a longer walk during lunch time. I'm simply doing the same here but instead of being on my phone I'm maybe doing a quick vacuum sweep, trip to the bodega for some hand soap, or dropping off my laundry somewhere.

I do have friends that work for companies that expect them to be "online" all the time so this may not work for them.

[DJHenk]

Do you have so many chores that you spend every day until 4pm doing them? Of course not. Because when you worked at an office, you also did not spend that much time on them. I love to mix chores with work, because your mind gets a break and you're still doing something useful. And most of the time, in the back of your head you're unconsciously still solving the problem that you were working on. So when you get back at your keyboard, you can continue right away. How can anyone not like this enormous productivity boost?

I think that working from home will stay and that some kind of work discipline will be a skill people are just required to have. You know, like being able to communicate professionally and to keep promises.

[strig]

Exactly. Instead of going out for lunch I can pop over to the grocery store for a few things and grab a sandwich while I'm there.

[SwiftyBug]

To me commuting is a huge source of stress. I'm often mentally exausted by wednsday.

[johnghanks]

I actually can't believe how many people are crying because they miss talking with their coworkers. Sounds to me like they're the office distractions ruining everyone else's productivity.

You may like your office conversations, I like not having to commute to work, not being distracted, and making my work space mine.

Try picking up a phone or hop on Slack instead of attempting to sabotage WFH because you're a social butterfly.