[SilverRed]

It almost feels like there is a conspiracy brewing to talk down on WFH despite most employees loving it. I suspect that the commercial property owners and middle managers are behind this because they are the ones who have mostly lost out here.

The cat is out of the bag I think. Once people can work from home in a post covid world where they can socialize normally, I think many companies, and especially in software development will become very remote friendly.

[codingdave]

I feel like it is just the concept of the vocal minority. People who are seeing the world go their way tend to just enjoy the ride. People who don't like how it is going tend to be quite vocal about their displeasure. Minority opinions can be quite loud, in any aspect of our society.

Personally, I want to respect our differences. I support people figuring out where they want to work and finding companies who let them do so. We don't all have the same desires, and we should not expect everyone to want the same thing. I do believe that companies will have to support the desires of their workers more than they have in the past, and hopefully that will be well balanced with what people really want.

[swiley]

WFH is an instant 13-20% raise for most people because they're not compensated for the commute. The same economic effect that results in SWEs being paid well above minimum wage will also result in widespread remote work.

If you like socializing you can still do that, in fact you can do more of it since you're not spending an hour or two every day in a car, alone.

[darkwater]

I don't know where you live but you should also keep in mind that in many places of the world commuting is done within a metropolitan area, and usually with public transportation (trains, buses, subways etc) so while it still takes away time it's not that catastrophic on the environmental side. And there are people who likes to physically separate their personal life from their work life. And I'm a pre-pandemic remote worker who used to work in the office, and I can see the good and the bad sides of both positions. I don't really understand why WFH enthusiasts are usually so radical on this topic.

[zimpenfish]

> I don't really understand why WFH enthusiasts are usually so radical on this topic.

I venture that it's partially down to years of "NO, WFH would RUIN the business and CATASTROPHISE us into BANKRUPTCY!!!" from businesses when people requested it and ... it turned out to be bullshit, everything pretty much worked ok when everyone was WFH, and people are not minded to let business slip back into their previous bullshit without a fight.

[citizenpaul]

I was at one of those places. The owner,board,Upper mgmt would have a hissy fit (sometimes literally) when anyone requested any sort of work from home condition. Declaring (sometimes screaming) that the business would go under nothing would get done, ect,ect.. They couldn't manage things that way. Even though we would often go months without hearing from any of these aforementioned people.

Then the Thanos *snap happened and one day we all had to be WFH almost overnight. What changed? Literally nothing except better more humane working conditions. Everything got done business is still fine.

So are some of us bitter about it? Definitely.

[the_gipsy]

No, it's not WFH enthusiasts being radical, it's both sides. It's just an extremely polarizing topic.

Managers must understand this and simply work it out for both sides. It's not hard, really.

[TeMPOraL]

> I don't really understand why WFH enthusiasts are usually so radical on this topic.

WFH in general, now? Overton window. It's probably our one and only opportunity to shift it to include WFH as a standard practice in companies. Before, remote opportunities were very scarce, and were mostly tied around contracting. The pandemic briefly normalized WFH, but there's plenty of interests - powerful interests - gearing to get back to office work as soon as legally allowed. WFH enthusiasts try to counter that pressure, in a desperate attempt to make WFH stick.

> you should also keep in mind that in many places of the world commuting is done within a metropolitan area, and usually with public transportation (trains, buses, subways etc) so while it still takes away time it's not that catastrophic on the environmental side

Yeah, but even for the most environmentally conscious, personal time is still the most scarce commodity. Commuting by bus or bicycle is better than by car, but no commute at all is better than any of this. Public transport lets you make partial use of commute time; lack of commute gives you that time back.

And then not having to commute opens up geographical flexibility - you can suddenly work for a company in a different city, or in a different country. This is a well-covered topic, but there's another flip side to it, which makes some WFH people "radical": if their company pulls the plug on WFH now, it'll severely mess up their lives.

Personal example: I've been contracting remotely for a foreign company (started pre-pandemic), and due to various reasons, that contract got turned into FTE in a local company... with offices 400km from where I live. One which didn't, until pandemic, practice remote work. So I'm keenly tracking any and all discussions about work policies, because if they were to return to pre-pandemic policies, I'd have to uproot my life or change jobs. And I don't want to change my job, I really like the team and the work. So you can imagine I'm sensitive about this.

[swiley]

Sure that's the case in most of the world, but in the US you're spending an hour and a half alone in a car unless you've structured your life around avoiding that.

[andrei_says_]

Yes absolutely. Commuting does not automatically cause socializing.

Commuting causes back pain, exhaustion, pollution and lots of traffic. Oh, and traffic accidents. 100% of my 2 traffic accidents were during commuting.

[anthropodie]

Let people choose where they want to work from!

Now if people who want to work from office find themselves in empty office then they need to adapt to this new paradigm shift the same way rest of us adapted to loud open offices where anyone can walk up to anyone and interrupt the flow.

Some people adapt to whatever reality is while others force their responsibility of adaptation on their peers/environment.

[soco]

This is already an extreme view: why should the office be empty? Unless the company is 2 people, there's a good chance the socialite is not alone, and most people aren't 100% committed in either direction anyway. The solution could be actually trivial: poll the employees preferences, rent a smaller office space, use an online scheduler for office time, there we go.

[null_object]

> It almost feels like there is a conspiracy brewing to talk down on WFH despite most employees loving it

There are enormous economic forces whose interest lies in workers returning to offices and city-centers.

Thinking that journalists and media-sources are immune to this pressure is illusory - they will be talking to 'experts' who are effectively lobbyists, getting press-releases and generally being contacted in their networks by a lot of people who want to push this agenda, so that expensive offices are filled and city-center businesses can begin to sluice our cash again.

I have saved enormous amounts of money by WFH over the last year, enjoy it more than sitting at an office desk all day, had more family-time, private and hobby time, have eaten more healthily and gotten more exercise and (probably most importantly of all), worked with better focus and more effectively.

But I have no doubt that I'll be required to work at the office again at the end of the summer, because the combination of these immovable economic forces, together with the ingrained cultural prejudices of the management class (that prefer the buzz of the office environment), make it an inevitability.

[dougmwne]

For many, many people the cat is out of the bag. I went through this 5 years ago and couldn't stand being back in the office. I was the rat that escaped the maze. There was no going back for me.

Most people have never in their lives experienced the autonomy and self-direction of WFH. They have been running from obligation to obligation, expectation to expectation with no time to digest or consider if there's a better way. Now, for many people they have lived that better way and they will never go back.

[jolux]

It’s funny because I feel like I’ve been reading article after article recently about how working in offices is dumb and they can’t imagine why anyone would do it anymore unless they were zombified corporate stooges. My feeling is that working in an office makes it possible for me to separate work from the rest of my life, and my commute (about 30 minutes, soon to be fifteen or less via public transit once I move) nicely bookends it, separating it off from the rest of my day. I have been dying to go back to the office since April 2020.

[philliphaydon]

I saw a comment in the Apple thread where someone said people who don't like WFH hate their family, or themselves. Which was a shocking comment.

I love spending time with my family and daughter, but I get paid to work to support my family, and working from home makes me feel distracted.

I thought working from home would be the best part of a job, but losing the separation of work/life, going from avoiding meetings to looking forward to them for social interaction with my co-workers, missing the lunch time outings with co-workers, the chit-chat, asking for help or being asked for help.

I've come to really miss working in the office. I was WAY more productive, kept better hours, and coming home from work to family was great.

[thanatos519]

^ This. Going to the office was my social life, because I'm an expat and the office was full of other geeky expats. I even went to the office when the rest of my team was in another timezone, but I had lost all opportunities for pair programming. When 100% WFH hit, I was talking about maybe 2 days a week in the office being the right balance, but now I'm thinking I could WFH effectively a maximum of 1 day a week.

[Cthulhu_]

It's the first / second / third place theorem; first place is your home and family life, second place is the workplace, and third life is leisure and social activities like the pub.

It's a really mixed bag for me. I finally left my previous job, even though I could finally work at HQ (instead of being sent out to customers) after a few years, and it was a very cushy HQ office with really fun colleagues and all that. On the other hand, they didn't have the work that gave me the gratification I wanted from a job.

I got a different job where the work is pretty much perfect, but the office is bad (basic linoleum rent-an-office with bad chairs and ventilation, although I do have my own office). I've been working from home since march last year and I never really feel like I want to go to the office. I might again now that the temperatures are going up, they have AC.

Yeah there's more distractions from the family, but at the same time it means I can do a lot more to look after them - my girlfriend had an appointment yesterday but also a migraine, I was there to take her to it instead of her having to suffer driving or canceling it, for example.

[anthropodie]

I guess finally it comes down to individual choice.

Let people choose where they want to work from!

[flukus]

Problem is, many of the reasons people prefer in-office require the rest of us to be in the office. Some are manageable, if you like the social aspect there will be others like that and they can be social together. Others like "better collaboration" really require a decent chunk of your immediate team to be there.

[anthropodie]

I mentioned this in other comment thread.

If people who want to work from office find themselves in empty office then they need to adapt to this new paradigm shift the same way rest of us adapted to loud open offices where anyone can walk up to anyone and interrupt the flow.

Some people adapt to whatever reality is while others force their responsibility of adaptation on their peers/environment.

[weird-eye-issue]

It depends on company culture. Some places are "remote friendly" and some places are remote friendly.

[flukus]

> My feeling is that working in an office makes it possible for me to separate work from the rest of my life

This is seems to be pretty common, can you explain why it's so hard to separate?

Generally I start the work day by turning on the work computer, when I'm done I turn it off and anything beyond that is the sort of rare exception I would have logged in from home for even if I was working in the office. That and a couple of other little rituals like switching coffee mugs and wearing pants gives me all the separation I need.

[tehbeard]

Most of us don't have a separate room for an office, or might be stuck using our own equipment (pc, phone) for our job now, which blurs the lines on home/work.

[zimpenfish]

> which blurs the lines on home/work.

I set up a `work` account on my laptop which helps to give a distinction because it keeps all of "my" stuff away (although I will confess to logging into HN as me from the `work` account...)

Lacking a distinct room is tricky but I got a little folding desk that's designated as "work" - when it's up, it's work time. Otherwise it goes down the side of the couch/chair.

Not the same as commuting to an office but little things that give a slightly brighter edge between home/work.

[jolux]

Yeah, I have to work in the same room that I sleep in, and I only have one monitor and one desk.

[anthropodie]

I understand.

But if you could choose permanent work from home would you really work from the same room? In my case, I would ditch my apartment go back to my hometown build a home with a dedicated office.

[Ekaros]

Moved back to my hometown with above median wage. Still can't afford 3 rooms... So no office for me. Just not realistic in some parts of world. Unless I'm willing to move far away from the town itself(everything is relative, European distances for towns are short).

[jolux]

I wouldn’t choose it because I don’t like it. I’m not going to change a housing situation I like a lot just to make it easier to work from where I live. That’s the opposite of work-life balance, to me.

[lnenad]

I'm in the same boat, 15 mins to work. I like the separation aspect, and the social aspect as well. Can't wait to go back.

[DharmaPolice]

I don't think it's a conspiracy necessarily, there are people with vested interests in returning to "normal" working conditions and yes they will encourage the view that the economy/society will collapse if we don't all go back full time.

Even when it was plain that a second/third wave was going to hit the UK the government (and elements of the press) were insisting that we should all go back to the office for the good of the economy [0]. Two months later a new lockdown was announced to prevent a "medical and moral disaster".

0 - https://www.standard.co.uk/comment/comment/evening-standard-...

[DoingIsLearning]

Indeed I know we shouldn't instigate conspiracy shilling without evidence.

However it does feel that there is an agenda from the Savills of the world to justify office leases with a lot of these fragile reasoning articles coming out.

Of course remote meetings will not have the same 'feeling' as a live meeting the question is do you have the right tooling and processes to achieve the same outcome.

That is something companies need to adapt to, rather than force everyone back to the office.

[anthropodie]

> The right tooling and process to achieve the same outcome

Not to mention this is true even when working from office.

[lordnacho]

I think commercial property in the old form is screwed. Nearly every office job type firm is now offering reduced time in the office, with a few standouts still holding on to full time on site. That's my personal survey anyway, having talked to quite a number of them over the last few weeks. You can tell on some hiring managers that they'd really rather have people in the office, but they can see where the market is going.

The number of fully remote firms has gone up, but what's also interesting is that many old firms are allowing half remote. So two or three days in the office, the rest at home. A lot of these types of firms will change the space they need. More fun space, meeting rooms, because that's what you'll be doing on the days in, and less traditional floor.

The other big losers from this are the food and coffee shops in town centre. I went in to chat with some, and it's a bloodbath.

[soco]

I somehow believe the old firms will simply reduce their rented space, and let you have fun at home. I really feel bad for the coffee shops, it's just a mandatory office presence cannot be based on the interests of some other company :( feels guilty

[onion2k]

A lot of people say they enjoy working from home, but I suspect it's more the case that they enjoy things like not feeling watched by managers, or being interrupted as much, or fewer meetings, or being able to work with things like a television on or music with headphones. Those things could be achieved in an office environment with some thought and fewer open-plan spaces.

Even people saying they prefer WFH because they no longer have to commute could be solved with some (huge) infrastructure changes.

What remote working highlights is that there are big problems with offices and that the simplest solution is to work somewhere else. That doesn't mean working from your home the best solution.

[ppf]

A conspiracy? From the independent and free-thinking Guardian? If they have been infiltrated by money-grabbing property ownwers, then there is no hope!

Seriously though. I think that the Covid enforced WFH has shown many people that there are many benefits to at least some form of in-person, workplace-based interaction. Not everyone is a software developer who can just get on with the work with only a laptop.

[Bombthecat]

Yeah, the other thread, the guy most upvoted, talks about how amazing office is,while when asked: 86 percent reply they don't want to go back.

Upvote bots are active now on hackernews, its sad, but bound to happen.

[1_player]

It's not upvote bots, it's called a "vocal minority". It sounds really loud, because the majority don't have to shout to be heard.

[alliao]

the owners are mostly banks. And they aren't happy about the haircut for sure. but no matter, at the current rate of money printing everything's tolerable. Not happy, but tolerable hence these little random jabs gauging public opinion.