Commuting sucks is enough! Commuting wastes 52 minutes a day, not counting gas station and maintenance trips. It is expensive, dangerous, and uses around 6-7% of your waking hours while polluting the environment.
Past that:
-If you have kids, you often can't easily get them if they have an emergency at school, or appointments
-WFO encourages buts-in-seats management vs. productivity based management
-Background noise
-Interruptions to your workflow that break creative "flow"
-Time spent packing lunch
-Money spent on cafeteria food
Whatever benefits WFO has, it needs to cover commuting costs, loss of life (car accidents), loss of time, loss of concentration, and for the company, the expense of renting and maintaining office space before it can break even in cost-benefit.
WFO nickels and dimes you on equipment. I can bill out 300k in hours a year but getting a company to spend $1,000 on monitors, chair, keyboard, etc. is like pulling teeth. They expect me to work on a 14" laptop and maybe an external monitor. At home I can use my setup.
If I'm WFH why should I spend my money and use my equipment to work? I have a large gaming monitor, why should my company expect everyone to make similar purchases to be able to work properly? In office even though companies are miserly, they do provide a baseline of equipment that is good enough for most people.
Commuting, (mostly) fixed hours, noise levels, personal space.
To expand a bit on the fixed hours, early-birds tend to be fine with getting to the office early, but night owls will either get kicked out or have to deal with people vacuuming floors around them.
Our workplace has a nice solution for this. Office timings are 8 to 5. Early birds can arrive at 8 and leave by 5. But this is not enforced. Many night owls only arrive by 11 or 12 and leave later or leave by 3 or 4 and continue work from home at their time. Leadership just needs to be flexible enough.
I've just gone back to WFO and here are the reasons it sucks for me:
- an extra hour per day getting ready and travelling which increases stress and is ~250 hours per year simply wasted - many people have to waste much more.
- my office has terrible facilities. there is no natural light, heating is inconsistent and it's dusty.
- my office is attached to a factory so i have to listen to lathes running for a full 8 hours per day while i'm trying to solve problems.
- no eating area so i pretty much sit in my car for my lunch break
- people are constantly interrupting me with trivial issues that have absolutely no priority
- i don't really socialise at work much anyway so what's the point? i'm the only developer so there's no benefit from being near a team
Instead I could sit in my office at home with a superior set up, superior comfort, relaxing environment. I can go and have a lie down whenver I want. I can start and finish work at odd times if necessary. I can go to the gym on my lunch break.
It's just no contest for me personally although I must admit the quality of my office environment is certainly below average.
You get sick more often, especially with an open office setup. Even pre-COVID, it was kinda common during flu and cold season to have a big chunk of your team sniffling or wheezing. Someone who should stay home inevitably shows up because of an important meeting or they don't want to use a sick day or whatever, and then half the office ends up sick.
I agree. I was seated next to a guy with a small kid, so naturally he got sick all the time. And then I got sick as well
I usually tell people to go home if they are sick, but some of them are too proud and say "I'm fine". Since I'm not the manager, I can't force them, but I think I'll switch to home office when those scenarios happen again
Any other suggestions how to deal with those situations?
I think the biggest issue is that you need to live near your office. This usually means you have to spend a lot more on housing than you would otherwise. This is why I went remote - we couldn't afford any houses near my workplace.
- Being tethered to a physical location means limited options for where you can live. You live where you have to, not necessarily where you want to.
- Commuting sucks, unless you live in a nice neighborhood and can walk to work or take a leisurely ride. This doesn't exist for most people. It's especially bad in the bay area if you need to take BART. Who wants to be packed inside a train like sardines with people smoking crack. Seriously, have you ever seen a train station during commuting hours? They're 10 rows deep of people waiting to get on. That's assuming it isn't shut down for some random reasons. I should also mention wasting around 2 hours a day that you could spend on more sleep or hobbies.
- Open offices suck and are a poor excuse that they increase collaboration. Constant disruptions (both sound and visual noise), can't have any personal conversations and need to find a meeting room or hide in the hallways. Not to mention, I don't need/want to see my coworkers on facebook all day while they complain that they don't have enough time to finish their tasks.
- WFH can contribute to a more flexible schedule. Most people cannot focus non-stop for hours on end. It's healthy to take breaks but you can't do much beyond walking around your office (if it's in a safe location) if you're tied to the office.
Past that:
-If you have kids, you often can't easily get them if they have an emergency at school, or appointments
-WFO encourages buts-in-seats management vs. productivity based management
-Background noise
-Interruptions to your workflow that break creative "flow"
-Time spent packing lunch
-Money spent on cafeteria food
Whatever benefits WFO has, it needs to cover commuting costs, loss of life (car accidents), loss of time, loss of concentration, and for the company, the expense of renting and maintaining office space before it can break even in cost-benefit.