I'd spin this around and cast it as a challenge -- regular, forced interactions with coworkers is minimally sufficient and retards some people from pursuing social activities outside the home.
There are already a number of options in even the smallest town. I expect that will increase as more people move to WFH and seek social outlets.
And at the end of the day "interacting with coworkers in the break room" is a pretty low quality bar for an alternative to surmount. Maybe your work conversations are more fascinating than mine, but I get more value elsewhere.
>I'd spin this around and cast it as a challenge -- regular, forced interactions with coworkers is minimally sufficient and retards some people from pursuing social activities outside the home.
Absolutely. Additionally, even getting to that set of regular, forced interactions necessarily consumes the limited time those people would have to pursue those social activities outside the home. That is, it's hard to have a strong social life when you commute, at best, 5 hours a week. And that's if you're lucky.
All of this benefits corporations. Especially, insidiously, the notion that your job can and should double as your social life.
What concerns me, today, is that that we're in this middle stage where things could tip either way. For this reason, I think it's important for us to bang the drum loudly that we won't spend 40-50 hours in the office. Hybrid is a sufficient compromise.
Not strictly all. You still have more time on the days you work from home, which you could use to be social.
But yeah, if everyone is "hybrid", then the pressure on the housing market is unlikely to go down enough, which means that many people may find themselves in living conditions poor for remote work, which means they're more likely to go more often to the office, which means they're back to where they started...
It just means "the employer" has to keep the office space for a lot of people who will only use it occasionally and all the costs associated with that. I doubt most employers would consider that an upside.
What is a sufficient compromise, in your view, that satisfies the need of some workers to have regular face to face interactions with coworkers and prevents corporations unprepared to manage a remote team from whipping back to full in-office?
I do not want to put words in your mouth, but since you offered so few of them, I am tempted to believe you are one of the few lucky workers who has sufficient leverage to wholesale refuse to work in an office. If that is you, or if you the reader are such a person: consider the path we must take to bring flexible work to more people.
With that goal and those prerequisites in mind, what is a sufficient compromise?
Assuming the word "hybrid" is being used to mean that an individual employee has to go into the office for at least some amount of time per week/month/whatever:
Here's the issue I have with the main argument I see against remote work, or rather the main argument I see in favor of forcing people to commute to an office ("satisfies the need of some workers to have regular face to face interactions with coworkers"):
I want to be at home, and I am fine being at home. Why should I need to go to an office because of a coworker's need for social interaction? I don't need that social interaction. To me, the argument always seems very self-centered from the point of view of pro-office people. Let the people who need that social interaction go to the office, and let everyone else stay home if they want. There's no reason that someone should be forced to go to an office because of the needs of other people, especially when those needs have nothing to do with work.
This is like arguing that I should be wearing a certain color of clothing because some people like to (or need to?) see that color. That's not my problem to solve for them.
I get plenty of social interaction outside of work hours. There should be zero expectation for me to spend more time, energy, and/or money (getting ready, preparing or buying lunch, commuting both ways, etc.) so that people who aren't my friends get to look at/talk to me in 3D.
I would be happy to socialize only with people who opt in. That’s how it is already, no one forced you to go to the lunch table or tag along for drinks.
To the extent that we collaborate on work, though, having to Zoom with you instead of having a normal free-flowing conversation forms an imposition on me. It becomes an extreme imposition when I am also prohibited from having normal free flowing conversations with other people in the office, out of a sense of “inclusivity” or “leveling the playing field” for you.
I am curious how this does not present an opposite extreme: forcing me to stop my work to have an unnecessary conversation instead of discussing in asynchronous issue tracker makes me have to remember what happened, have to write down whatever I remember, deal with not being able to get my stories done while this is happening, instead of being able to look it up and have it in writing along with other people not available at the time to discuss or leave notes and changes on.
I agree, it is very bad to do things synchronously and in formal meetings that could have been async and offline. That's another reason to resent remote work. Number of meetings, duration of meetings, size of attendee lists, and % of calendar covered in meetings are all way up since the transition to remote. There's a meme on HN that remote means written async communication, but the objective measured reality at my company is the opposite.
A sufficient compromise would be to allow the people that want regular face to face interactions with coworkers to go to the office and do just that. Not sure what the culture is in your place but at my place everyone has their video on in calls, so there's always face-to-face communication (exceptions can apply of course in some circumstances but that is the general rule) that way. People that want that do go to the office from time to time and do just that. But they do it with like minded people.
What is not a sufficient compromise is to force people that don't need face-to-face in person interaction into the office again when we have found out that remote works perfectly well.
This is the main problem I see with your compromise. The self-sorting will create or enforce existing silos. The compromise is not only between you and your employer, but also between you and your coworkers. You might derive no value from face to face interaction, but your coworkers certainly do — and that includes you.
I suspect that this self-sorting will result in a very loud cohort of in-office workers demanding everyone come back, which spoils the whole deal.
Definite +1 to my sibling about coming in and keeping the head down.
Not sure which kinds of silos you are talking about. If it's silos as in social circles, that exists with 100% in-office as well. You know, the people that always sit together at lunch, always go out together for lunch or coffee, that meet after work at the pub and the people that eat lunch at their desk or off to the side, drink office-coffee only and don't go to the pub but go home to their family instead.
If you're talking about departmental or team silos those existed with 100% in-office as well. Marketing not talking to Product or Dev? Nothing really changed here I would argue. If anything it might have gotten better because everyone thought it would get worse and very actively tried to do something about it.
Face to face communication works very well over video and I derive enormous value from it. Only using written communication or audio only would suck big time. Especially when first getting to know someone that you've never met in person. But I don't have to sit in the same room with them or be 12 floors away from them for most of the day except for the meeting at three, when we both take the elevator, them 3 floors down, me 9 floors up to talk about something.
I agree that there will probably be a loud cohort of in-office workers that demand others to come back and if they succeed it will spoil the whole deal. But that doesn't get better with a 2-day in-office hybrid compromise either. If anything they would have much more pull already when they demand we go back to 5 days a week "because obviously 3 days of remote work are bad, we only get anything done ever in the 2 forced in-office days".
Oh, on my experience person to person interaction got much easier more common, because you don't have to get up and go to a different floor, or to the other end of your floor, or to another city.
We have some processes with high interaction on our development, and when people were considering going back to the office (in the end, we didn't) we met and decided how we would do then now. The remote option worked so much better than in person that there wasn't any discussion.
But if I'm forced to come in for two days I'm going to go in, keep my head down, and get out, which is what I did 5 days a week before. The loud people have always and will always dominate those conversations.
2 million people a year are permanently injured from car accidents and 38,000 people die a year. I'm not willing any more to put myself at those kinds of risks for my employer.
And that's before we engage with the climate impacts, the waste of time, the idiotic open office plans, the interruptions, etc.
I'm not interested in compromise, I'm not buying anything about the entire concept.
We're going to split into different kinds of workplaces, and remote-only employees are going to go to remote-only/remote-first workplaces.
Large tech employers who want offices are going to have to deal with the fact that they're not going to be able to hire a group of tech workers that have those demands. Those employers would probably do well to consider spinning off remote-first divisions. That isn't my problem at all though, and "hybrid" is a hard no for me, and a lot of other people.
People are making decisions about their life. This isn't something that you compromise with them over, you don't actually have a negotiating position.
It does look like the people who want everyone else back to the office are now entering into the 3rd stage of Grief though (Bargaining).
This is really how it ought to go. Once a quarter, we all descend on one city for one week. We make big plans, we revel in each other’s company, and we see a new part of the world or see a familiar part of the world in a new way with colleagues. Then we go back.
> That is, it's hard to have a strong social life when you commute, at best, 5 hours a week. And that's if you're lucky.
"At best"? The average commute in the US is 27.6 minutes, according to the Census Bureau. My commute is a 10 minute bike ride. Luck had nothing to do with it, just a different set of priorities in life.
Something’s wrong with this stat. Almost nobody can get from chair at home to chair at work in that time.
My present office is 1.6 miles of which ~1 mile is Interstate, yet it’s at best 22 minutes house door to office door (not chair to chair) if I hit traffic lights, as low as 14 minutes if all greens. Google Maps and Apple Maps say it’s 6 - 8 minutes in off hours. Once car is on street, only greens, and before turning into parking, maybe that’s right.
This suggests two things: (a) maybe they mean time in vehicle in motion not chair-to-chair, (b) maybe they are computing address to address absent traffic.
I’m also suspicious of the word “average”. For instance, I can picture bi-modal commute times: a set that are 0 minutes (like Amazon support answering calls from ‘virtual call center’ at home), and a set that are long tail, as alluded to in this quote:
> The average American is traveling 26 minutes to their jobs — the longest commute time since the Census started tracking it in 1980, up 20 percent. Commutes longer than 45 minutes are up 12 percent in that time span, and 90-minute one-way commutes are 64 percent more common than in 1990.
With 90 minute one way commutes going on, maybe the average data is asking people who are in denial.
But the simplest explanation is also in that quote: travel time. It’s certainly not start stopwatch, get ready to commute, get to your transit, wait for your transit (e.g. warm up car or wait for bus), get in motion, travel, stop, dispense with transit (park car, lock bike), get from your transit to workplace, get situated, stop stopwatch.
// I’ve prioritized “least traffic lights” and ideally “walkability” since university. From 2017 to 2021 I paid a massive premium to be able to get chair-to-chair (including both elevator waits) in ~8 minutes on foot w/ no transit in midtown Manhattan. Commute times matter to me, I use tools to heatmap them when choosing work and residences, so just not buying average possibility of 26 mins.
------ BEGIN_EDIT ------
Yes, it was just travel time.
I found the US Census source, it’s a question Census said was asking people for ‘travel time’ and respondents probably in optimistic denial:
Question on Travel Time to Work from the American Community Survey 2019
Q.35: How many minutes did it usually take this person to get from home to work LAST WEEK?
Yes, it’s a touch bi-modal, with a valley in the 5 minute period that’s also the “average”. No, bicycle isn’t helping much, only shaves 6 mins on ‘average’. Ten percent are in the car over an hour.
Insofar as their data is travel time not total time chair-to-chair (time between being able to be doing something else at each end), and it’s self surveyed not measured, I buy it.
So for instance we selected our office to be at an Interstate off ramp and also at a commuter rail station, and I selected my residence to be two blocks up from one exit away against rush hour traffic, and another commuter rail station. Note that when there’s a train, if I don’t count waiting, the train is faster than the car. Unfortunately, trains “on average” make you wait for 1/2 the time between trains, and in the US, the train and the delay may not be predictable.
This is a great point and one I’d wish I’d considered more.
I’ve long given my just my wheels in motion time whenever asked how long my commute is. But that’s disingenuous because my if I were to have have a job I could do from home, all else being equal I would save $1000+/yr on food purchases alone. A further 2500 on gas and get at least 2 unpaid hours of quality time back in my life.
So I’d save at least $3.500 in reduced expenses. I would also be able to get of a car saving thousands more a year. Plus an extra 560 hours of free time a year at my hourly rate? I’m about to threaten my employer with my resignation over these expenses if they can’t better compensate me for my time they monopolize when I’m” off the clock “ but exclusively in their service.
I don't particularly enjoy the forced, stilted chatter but I do get a lot of value from:
a) Being obliged to put on clothes and leave the house.
b) Spending a large part of the day at a change of scenery.
c) Having other people there, around, ambiently.
Spending 23 hours a day alone in your room + 1 hour for outdoor exercise, with occasional weekend visitation, is among the worst punishments the state has at its disposal. It boggles the mind that people do this voluntarily.
You are viewing remote work through the particular circumstance of the pandemic. Remote work before covid was very different, and I expect in time we'll get back to a lot of that.
I worked remotely before the pandemic, and most days I still have ample opportunities to meet and talk to people. Most weeks I'd attend a meetup (I'm in a small city in the midwest and we still had plenty of events to cater to most any niche technical interest you'd care to name). A couple of times a month I'd meet up with other remote workers for lunch at a restaurant somewhere convenient to all of us. I regularly hosted, or attended, game nights with friends I met- mostly through the meetups.
I was never one for coworking spaces, and I don't even have a lot of non-development hobbies that had me meeting other people, and I still managed to have a pretty rich social life and meet people, make friends, and even got some of the sorts of creative boosts people claim only come from in-office working (because you talk to people about what problems they work on, or their interests, and it sparks ideas for how to apply those to your own work).
Things right now are still bleak because of the pandemic. It sucks, and it sucks worse knowing that this could have been over by now if the response hadn't been so universally mishandled, but a lot of what sucks about the pandemic will continue to suck- or suck differently but the same amount, if you go back to an office. Remote work isn't for everyone, and you really might still find that all things being equal the office just works best for you, and that's fine, but don't confuse "the pandemic sucks" for "remote work sucks".
Thanks for these comments -- this one and your reply to vkou. I started working out of college during the pandemic, and my current gig is remote-native, so I've been kind of dooming about remote work. This is some great advice for how to get past that + a good reminder that COVID is still affecting things -- I've been going with my partner to a board game group and swing classes, but the activation energy is definitely higher than before.
Curious -- have you found anything that (partially?) replaces those opportunities, either online or in-person? I joined a Discord server and gave a talk about JPEG at one of their events, which was fun, but not frequent for me to feel that it's a replacement for having in-person coworkers.
I'll admit it's pretty hard to replace the in-person events. I am in some slack and discord communities, and I've done a couple of online conferences. I really used to enjoy presenting at meetups and was very upset to have had to turn down an invitation to an in-person conference this fall because of covid. Virtual talks and meetups aren't really the same, but they are what I've made do with in the short term.
I'm not much for traditional online games, but I know some friends who have used that as a more natural way to do online socializing. I've done some online D&D and have found that is better than other kinds of online meetups for socializing, because it gives you enough space to have conversations and chat, but still gives you enough of a focus and it just feels less exhausting than other kinds of online meetups- the tools are really good these days too.
> started working out of college during the pandemic
* Caveat: remote-only, during the pandemic, right out of college would probably be the worst of all possible worlds
Most of the things that people like about WFH are contingent on being in a later stage of your career (college + 5 years?). Having a place with multiple rooms. Having something of a physical social network. Having self-confidence in your abilities, based on prior performance. Knowing how to navigate office politics.
Plus, most of the things you would be doing at that stage were interrupted: bars, clubs, etc.
Which is to say, you're absolutely right, and I agree with your perspective. But it does get better. But I'm sure that's cold comfort.
A more articulate, and less rageful version of my original post would probably have been "I believe we Americans are (and were!) doing badly at creating opportunities for adult friendships and socialization, and I would rather we aspire to improve things vs going back to the way they were."
> You are viewing remote work through the particular circumstance of the pandemic.
Those particular circumstances of the pandemic haven't been with us for almost a year, now, ever since mass vaccination started. I hated WFH in 2020, and I hated WFH in 2021, and I still hate WFH today. Despite having no pandemic restrictions on what I can do today.
And even prior to vaccination, if you wanted to go out and do stuff, most establishments/businesses/travel options/etc were open since late 2020.
As much as people want to pretend the pandemic is over, it isn't. The legal restrictions might have lifted in most places, but there's a big gap between that and things being back to how they were before- or how they'll be once we've actually hit the endemic part of covid and have a better understanding of what that looks like.
You can still go to a restaurant today, or travel, and co-working spaces might be open, but enough people are still reluctant to attend events that a lot of things aren't sustainable right now. I certainly wouldn't go meet someone at a restaurant for lunch right now, even though I can. Most of my friends feel the same way. Conferences are still happening, but a lot of conferences remain virtual, and a lot of people who might otherwise attend conferences aren't. Either because they are still concerned about covid today, or because they don't want to risk buying tickets, booking travel, and taking time off for a conference that might be canceled or rescheduled due to yet another surge. Tech meetups have almost entirely stopped. Nearly all meetups were hosted by companies, and while those companies might be talking about RTO for their employees, few of them are interested in hosting large groups of strangers after-hours right now. Even if you could find a venue- attendance would be quite low these days.
>
As much as people want to pretend the pandemic is over, it isn't.
No, it's not over, in fact we're at our worst rate of world-wide daily cases since November 2021. Believe me, I'm both a pessimist, and one of the more COVID-cautious people here.
But in my region/anywhere I'd like to go, I can, and currently feel comfortable doing just about anything I want[1] - and have been for most of the past year (Sans Omicron surge).
> You can still go to a restaurant today, or travel, and co-working spaces might be open, but enough people are still reluctant to attend events that a lot of things aren't sustainable right now. I certainly wouldn't go meet someone at a restaurant for lunch right now, even though I can.
Sure, you may feel that way - but I haven't felt that way. So, for me, there are no practical restrictions on what I, or my friends can do. Nothing that I liked doing three years ago is unavailable today.
... And yet, I vastly prefer going into work over WFH.
[1] I don't feel comfortable licking doorknobs or getting into a moshpit, but I didn't feel comfortable doing that pre-COVID, either.
> ... And yet, I vastly prefer going into work over WFH.
Could be just an imbalance between the pre-pandemic world and then two years of the pandemic world. It's quite possible if you had entered WFH when society was normal, there wouldn't be this sharp jolt.
Don't mix up pandemic restrictions with 100% remote work from home.
I put on clothes every day. I only wear a nice t-shirt though and otherwise wear my 'at home pants' that I would also put on as soon as I'd come home from the office. My nice pants last much longer now.
I really don't like the office scenery very much. I also do not like the scenery in between, i.e. a huge city that has no greenery, the commute is equally dull, boring and unappealing. Vs. my home where in summer I can actually sit outside on the deck all day and enjoy the scenery. It's lush and green and warm vs. the cold, dry AC air blowing in my face and forcing me to wear a jacket inside the office.
Depending on whether you have family and/or family that also works from home, people are even around 'ambiently' but at least they're only around ambiently without constantly distracting you. They're in a different room doing their own work most of the time.
After 8 hours of work I am free to do what I want. Go outside, take a walk, meet friends etc.
I do like my path to work. In fact, I go there once in a while, and come back just to get a long walk.
I do like my previous office. It happens that I had to improve my home when I got here, but after spending around 1/5 of my monthly salary, my home is now even a it more comfortable and I use it when not working too. If you have a minimum of space, that's quite doable, and if you don't, why don't you want to move into a cheaper place?
WFH don’t require working at home, you can work wherever you want.
Laptop + 5G means you can work outside for much of the year at a local park etc. You can do all that coworker social stuff with your friends rather than people you happen to work with.
Even if you do stay home skipping your commute and eating at home saves significant time and money every week you can use to again socialize with people you want to actually be around.
I assume you don't have any friends or family outside of work that live close to you?
My group of friends gets lunch together 3-4 days out of the workweek. We even sometimes do dinner with eachother during the week. Sometimes we do this with family instead - my wife's sister and parents live within 15 minutes of us.
In my whereabouts weekday evenings is where the fun social stuff goes (well, used to before pandemics). Group rides, group runs, orienteering events, bar trivia nights... You get most attendants on weekdays since on weekends many people are out of town (family, summerhouses, etc) and/or go to full-day events.
Theater performances or concerts are not uncommon on weekdays either. Touring artists just have to play on whatever day it turns out to be.
Also, once remote working with lax schedules become the norm, more opportunities will come up. E.g. I fondly remember times when my friends' and mine schedules would click and we could do quick morning rides.
I think the problem is, since working fully remote means spending about twice as much time in formally scheduled meetings, and those meetings are significantly more draining on Zoom than in person, both I and the people I might socialize with feel a lot more drained at the end of the work day and less interested in doing anything non-vegetative. Previously we would go for dinner or drinks after work pretty often.
Yes, it does. A bit late for the thread but here’s open source evidence from Microsoft. Our internal numbers are similar.
> “People have 250 percent more meetings every day than they did before the pandemic,” says Mary Czerwinski, the research manager of the Human Understanding and Empathy group at Microsoft.
i do all of those things while working from home. i wear my normal clothes, work from coffee shops or breweries if I need a change of scenery, and workout plenty during the day. no offense, but perhaps this is specific to how _you_ work from home?
> I'd spin this around and cast it as a challenge -- regular, forced interactions with coworkers is minimally sufficient and retards some people from pursuing social activities outside the home.
Or,it allows people with social anxiety or depression a room for social interactions with very well defined rules and in an environment where people generally interact positively with you. I like the convenience of WFH too but I do miss cooking with my colleagues and their families on Wednesdays.
This might sound weird to you but living alone and having had parents that made every meal either a screaming match or a barrage of passive aggressive comments I enjoyed those lunches with my much more reasonable colleagues a lot.
Being essentially alone most days certainly didn't help with my depression and that makes other social interactions harder.
I still won't go back though, wearing trouser being optional at work is a worthwhile tradeoff
Eh, I’m kinda implicated here but I see office interactions as some bare minimum of socialization that, yes, can lead to complacency but does not subtract from the ideal of finding meaningful relationship outside of work. If anything, face to face work helps energize me to be social, and not just with my coworkers. More like a daily practice against Cabin Fever. For some reason, for me, Cabin Fever self-perpetuates.
I still prefer WFH, but I go to a coffee shop most days of the week to work on a personal project. After a year+ my relationship with the other regulates and staff is like the best possible relationship you’d expect to have among coworkers - I’ve even grabbed a beer with the manager when then closed early one day - without the stresses of working for a common employer.
I'm approaching this from my own perspective of a fairly serious introvert, and I feel like the biggest skill I've picked up in life is pushing past the introvert wall.
Which is that thing that whispers "Going out will be a hassle. Why not just not?"
Work was one way of forcing past that, but I feel that's analogous to saying "Prison is one way of curing wanderlust." It feels more reasonable to treat the underlying issue than take a bargain that comes with serious negative consequences.
There are reasons people don't pursue activities outside of work because they only require a minimal amount of interaction with people or they don't have time for socialization outside of work. Conversations with clubmembers won't be appreciably more meaningful than conversations with coworkers.
A benefit is that your social circle exists independent of your job status but you've got to do it on your own time.
There are already a number of options in even the smallest town. I expect that will increase as more people move to WFH and seek social outlets.
And at the end of the day "interacting with coworkers in the break room" is a pretty low quality bar for an alternative to surmount. Maybe your work conversations are more fascinating than mine, but I get more value elsewhere.