[jay-barronville]

I’m with you on this.

As much as I love the many benefits of working from home—especially as a dad—I find the work experience to be hit or miss, often feeling low-quality.

You used to be able to have real connections with colleagues, but now almost everything feels superficial at best, whether through Zoom calls or disconnected Slack messages.

One thing I especially miss is whiteboarding sessions with a couple of smart colleagues as we work on a difficult problem; you simply can’t replicate that feeling digitally.

[kkfx]

Personally I found just issues with people not understanding WFH, those with no home office room, those who work on a laptop, always at the same desk of course and so on. There are MANY, but that's not a WFH problem, is simply a problem of training people to something they do not already know even if they practiced it for some years.

The only who really do not work well from home anyway are those with "home issues" (familiar, of mere available space etc) and well, using the office as a way to leave their personal issue aside is not a good thing, nor the purpose of work.

Beside that I think it's totally absurd in 2024 wasting enormous resources to build big buildings used for less than 12h/day, to commute between them in order to consume services (from transportation to ready made food), get exposed to physical ads (shop windows, mega-screens and so on), participating in rituals pushing people to consume fast fashion and fast tech, augmenting the enormous pile of polluting rubbish we produce just to save the giants of capitalism who can't live without the big city Barnum circus... People just need to learn and stop consider the home the place to sleep, a whole home used for just few activities, whole buildings used for just few hours, only to keep people pastured in old rituals is really untenable.

[ywvcbk]

> People just need to learn and stop consider

Why?

> of training people to something they do not already know even if they practiced it for some years

You seem to be talking about something almost completely different than the comment you replied to was.

[kkfx]

People need to learn because resources are scarce, so we can't keep up using big buildings for less than 12h/day, to move between them, just to consume services (from collective transport to ready made food, wasting money in fast fashion, fast tech status symbols (like wearable smart devices) in the meantime only to get exposed to physical ads (from shop windows to maxi-screens). Long story short we can't keep up the office as we can't keep up the paper model behind the office.

You find the experience as a hit and miss because most companies and most people as well are not really ready to WFH, so the paradigm they follow it's dysfunctional. Zoom and Slack are good example of this dysfunctionality: chats are somewhat good in certain context to quickly ping someone, to pass a link, nothing more, chatrooms and co are waste of time from another era where VoIP was not possible for mere bandwidth availability. Video is almost never needed, screen sharing it's often needed, ability to sketch quickly is often needed and actually we do not have that much good tools for that but most people do not even realize they use bad tools and paradigm because they can't organize themselves for effective remote work.

Even if individually we might find a good way to work until the entire company have found a way anything is hard.

[ywvcbk]

> People need to learn because resources are scarce, so we can't keep up using big buildings for less than 12h/day, to move between them

Are they really scarce though? In cases they are it’s usually due to self imposed scarcity.

> example of this dysfunctionality: chats are somewhat good in certain context to quickly ping someone, to pass a link, nothing more, chatrooms and co are waste of time from another era where

No they are not. Text communication (especially async) is generally sufficient and less disruptive than the alternatives and saves a lot of time (when people do it properly).