[exhibitapp]

Won't comment directly on the strange rant.

But it highlights the reality that something has seriously changed since the pandemic. I have multiple employees that insist on staying home due to their dogs. The amount of discussion around employees' dogs is on another level now, partially due to the anxiety these dogs have when their owners go into the office.

It's all very different than prepandemic, I for one never heard "i need to work from home to stay with my dog" as something people used to say

[bentcorner]

> I for one never heard "i need to work from home to stay with my dog" as something people used to say

At least in my case it was "I'm not going to get a dog because I go into the office", so it never really came up in hallway conversations. I suspect a lot of people were in the same camp. With WFH they did get a dog, and now it's harder to go back into the office.

[JohnFen]

This. Literally the only reason I don't have a dog is because I'm not home for 50 hours per week.

[cableshaft]

When I worked in the office I drove home during lunch, let the dogs out, scarfed down food for ten minutes, then headed back to work. I know others that just cage their dogs for eight hours (which I would never do to my dogs) or took them to doggy daycare every day, which the average day-rate around me is $40/day per dog (and I have two dogs, so it would be $80/day, or $1600/month).

My new job is downtown and at least an hour drive away, so I couldn't feasibly drive home during lunch anymore. It would be a significant inconvenience for me to start going to work every day (or at least it would if my wife was also forced to go back to work, she currently works from home also).

It's also inconvenient for many other reasons, including a 2-3 hour commute, but yeah, having dogs complicates things, and pre-pandemic, there were very few remote jobs, so people just had to deal with it. But it still sucked.

[midoridensha]

Why not just not have a dog? Even kids aren't this much of a difficulty. Why do people want such an inconvenient and expensive pet? It seems like either virtue signaling or wealth signaling to me.

[meowfly]

Or... Perhaps people love and feel responsible for their pets?

This problem doesn't seem new to me. Startups letting people bring their dogs to work was a benefit before remote.

[midoridensha]

It wasn't a benefit to coworkers who were allergic to or uncomfortable around dogs.

Many people love and feel responsible for their elderly and incapacitated parents. Should companies allow workers to bring their parents (possibly with dementia) to work with them?

[meowfly]

I was never claiming pets should come to the office.

I am saying it's not signaling wealth or virtue to take care of your pet. Some people really love their animals, and are willing to part with their money for them. Using your example, I would never begrudge someone spending lots of money on their family either.

It seems you don't like pets, and that's OK. It's also OK for other people to love their pets even if it doesn't make sense. It doesn't have to be signaling.

[cableshaft]

> Even kids aren't this much of a difficulty.

That's assuming daycare, i.e. letting someone else take care of them at a significant price ("51% of parents say they spend more than 20% of their household income on child care"), or that they're old enough they can do things on their own, like get themselves to school and go to the bathroom on their own.

The main reason I went home is to not force my dogs to have to either pee in the house or go 9+ hours without going to the bathroom. They're not capable of using the toilet in my bathroom or letting themselves outside, unlike people.

And I don't want to force them to be outside the entire time I'm gone either, there's too much risk of bad things happening (one being the coyotes that are in the prairie beyond our fence, we have several hawks in the area so hawk attacks, which happened to our next door neighbor's dog, bad behavior from neighbors -- one neighbor was talking about kids that kept opening their gates and letting their dogs loose in the neighborhood for example, also prolonged exposure to heat, cold, or storms, etc)

[1]: https://www.care.com/c/how-much-does-child-care-cost/

> Why do people want such an inconvenient and expensive pet?

My dogs are much less expensive than children, yet people still have those. And I work from home so I don't have to pay for doggie daycare.

It wasn't inconvenient at all when we first got our dogs. I worked much closer to home (just a 7 minute drive), and my girlfriend (now wife) worked from home most days anyway (this was way back in like 2016, pre-pandemic). Times and circumstances change, but our love for our dogs have not. My job (software engineering) can be done fully remotely and I've proven that the past five years (my current job and previous job has been fully remote for longer than the pandemic also), so there's no reason to compromise on giving up a loved member of the family (and risk something terrible happening to them on top of that) just for the sake of a job.

The period of time where I had to make that long drive every day was only about 8 months, by the way. My wife also had to Uber home every day, costing about $500 extra per month, because we only had (and have) one car, and could only drop her off at work in the mornings, but we also did that for eight months, despite it also being inconvenient.

There was a story that blew up just this past week when a CEO in an all-hands meeting praised someone for giving up their dog to return to office, and the response by the general public has not been kind, to put it mildly. There are lots of people who love their pets and wouldn't give them up for anything (short of me being completely incapacitated and unable to care for them), I'm far from unique here.

[midoridensha]

>or that they're old enough they can do things on their own, like get themselves to school and go to the bathroom on their own.

Kids can do these things by the time they're 2-6 years old (bathroom earlier than school of course). Dogs never can: you're basically signing up to take care of an invalid for 12-15 years. And kids can use diapers before this age.

>And I work from home so I don't have to pay for doggie daycare.

Yeah, that's a luxury most working people don't have. So as I said, dogs are pets for rich people.

>My dogs are much less expensive than children

Children aren't pets; they're actual human beings and the next generation. Dogs are just animals and pets.

>My wife also had to Uber home every day, costing about $500 extra per month, because we only had (and have) one car, and could only drop her off at work in the mornings, but we also did that for eight months, despite it also being inconvenient.

This is what you get for living in a car-centric society with no public transit. Again, rich people problems.

>I'm far from unique here.

You're far from unique in modern America, but go back in time 30 years and people would laugh at you. It's pretty obvious why American society is so unproductive these days and unable to compete with China.

[jen20]

I suspect some are using it as a more reasonable-sounding proxy for “fuck being around coworkers who cannot shut up for 30 seconds in their open plan office, cannot correctly apply deodorant in the morning, want to talk non-stop to give the appearance of working, and want to commute to some shitty suburban business park with no facilities anywhere near by”.

I’d honestly rather work in a dog park than that kind of environment.

[jkaplowitz]

Dogs that grew up during the pandemic likely have a lot more separation anxiety than dogs which grew up pre-pandemic, and therefore so do their owners because the dogs aren't used to it.

Also, before the pandemic, workers probably didn't feel comfortable asking for or insisting on work from home, whereas it's been somewhat normalized now.

[pavon]

And dogs that had previously been used to their owners going into work got accustomed to them being home all day and needed time to adjust.

Before I was approved for permanent WFH, I was gradually increasing the amount of time I went into the office, in case I wasn't approved. It was clear after a few weeks that the one-month deadline we were given wasn't going to be enough time for the dogs to re-adjust. I think two months would have been enough if I kept it gradual, but then one day I got held up much longer than expected and my older dog had a freak-out and ripped the doggy door out of the door and then proceeded to rip off about 3 inches of (fiberglass shell, foam core) door surrounding the hole. It was almost a month after that incident until I could leave to do errands without her having anxiety.

I'm glad I didn't have to re-adjust her since she doesn't have much longer to live. I don't know what I'm going to do about the dog we adopted as a puppy during covid, who has never known anything else. I personally think hybrid is the worst of both worlds, but will start increasing my time in office once the older dog has passed so he can get used to me being gone for longer time stretches.

[jjulius]

>It's all very different than prepandemic, I for one never heard "i need to work from home to stay with my dog" as something people used to say

I have. I had a few employees who needed time off to tend to a dog who may have been sick, or needed surgery, or even took a couple of days to mourn when their dog had passed.

[tedivm]

Before the pandemic most of the startups I worked at allowed people to just bring their dogs in. I got bit by one of my coworkers dogs when I worked at Vicarious (that job really tried to kill me- while there I got electrocuted, bit by a dog, and food poisoning).

[jcutrell]

Fortunately workers can now say “I want to work from home because I like it better than your shitty office environment” and if the employer doesn’t like it they can go pound sand and find other workers.

Honestly this works as a very nice filter bubble for me. You want me to be on-site because you don’t trust me to be productive unless you can see me? Boy, I bet your Jira hygiene is a lot of fun to be subjected to.

I’ve made the permanent decision to not be forced to work in an office ever again. It will always be my personal choice where I am physically located: you probably aren’t paying me enough to control my location.

[EMM_386]

I've been remote for over 10 years, so pre-pandemic, and I'll never understand why they need software engineers, specifically, in an office.

Every single thing I do is logged and timestamped. Every line of code I check in, every PR request I approve, every work item that I close, every time I log into a server, every email, chatting in groups on Slack/Teams, etc.

They can never accuse me of slacking off, because it's all right there. They can easily see what I've been up to all day down to the millisecond.

I don't understand the accusations of people "quiet quitting" who aren't even logging in. If that's true then they should obviously be fired. I get my work done more efficiently working remote, without the distractions. And I can work when I feel the most productive.

[Turing_Machine]

> I'll never understand why they need software engineers, specifically, in an office.

Because the basic ape dominance drive that's very strong with many managerial types derives more satisfaction from the physical presence of a large group of subordinates who can be ordered about with impunity.

[dalyons]

They don’t want WFH taken away from them, the dog is just an excuse. I don’t blame them - employers reasons for forcing people back are typically equally as weak excuses.

[gedy]

I agree that some folks are a little weird about their pets, but after 3 years working from home, these animals do get trained to assume someone is around. Dogs shred stuff, etc.

[jcutrell]

Also, some people treat their inanimate cars with more loyalty and love than a pet, so it’s not really that weird.

[jen20]

Some people treat anthropomorphized _companies_ with that loyalty and love, so it doesn’t seem weird at all.

[thomasjb]

A car, treated right, will last upwards of 100 years, whereas pets have a more finite lifetime. And all they really need is to be stored and used right, with a little maintenance work. Either case is an irrational idolatry though

[arbitrage]

During the pandemic, my dog became accustomed to having a human around 24x7.

I cannot leave my dog for hours at a time without finding that he has thrown a tantrum -- urinating or defecating in places inside the house, or destroying something.

Because of this experience, I will likely never have a dog as a pet again. He didn't use to be this needy -- it's the constant presence of humans that made him this anxious when they are away. But until my dog passes, the situation is at a stalemate.

[Server6]

It's not the dog. It's the commute and not wanting to be in the office/micromanaged. The dog is just the excuse. I've been WFH since 2017 and will never go back, it's not worth it (at least for me).