A friend and I who have known each other for decades say we manage to stay friends because we only see each other a couple of times a year.
Why burden business relationships with forced several hours /week physical presence and face time when nobody would impose that on a customer or a vendor, and lockdowns have shown that even (especially) marriages aren't designed for people to be stuck together that long.
The only other situation you spend that amount of time with someone is a cellmate in prison, and the inevitable and necessary conseqeunce is micro-power struggles over the least significant things because in spending that much time together, you literally exhaust every other way to relate.
Show me someone who loves office life and being around people who are forced to be together, and I will show you someone with a perverse addiction to confict. When extroversion becomes immoderate, they become masochists who crave attention and interpersonal intensity. As a result, whenever someone tells me they are a "people person," I give them a wide berth because I remember the advice I was given as a young boy which was, "you are what you eat."
I can't imagine re-adapting to something so insane as an office ever again.
I know your way of thinking is quite popular here, but I will take my chances anyway. If your friend says that seriously, then friendship is not what you guys have, at least in the traditional sense, I see my friends often, I enjoy seeing them and having conversations, playing, etc... Saying people who are fine talking to other human beings face to face, are craving attention is ridiculous, that's how we have been doing things since the beginning. Also, no one is forced to be together, you can always find a remote gig, or do freelance work or another career altogether. Lots of people love to go to an office an interact with another human beings, you don't need to be extroverted. I do respect your perspective, and I think is totally fine, but trying to associate social people with some sort of masochism is ridiculous. I know , nowadays, being a regular social human , is not as cool as being introverted , or "in the spectrum" (in the spectrum myself), instead of lashing on other people, maybe you can get yourself a more comfy setup and a gig that allows you to not talk to others, and just code your way to the moon.
I think it's equally ridiculous to say that because someone's friendship is not like your, in person face to face interaction, friendship then its not real.
Friendship isn't about meeting someone. Friendship is about having trust and a connection. Who is the friendier friend: Someone whom you like and meet every day, but who will ghost you once you move a city over or someone whom you like and with whom you feel at home even after two years of not seeing each other?
I would take the latter over the former every day. My best friends are in that category, wven some who live in the same town
> Show me someone who loves office life and being around people who are forced to be together, and I will show you someone with a perverse addiction to confict. When extroversion becomes immoderate, they become masochists who crave attention and interpersonal intensity. As a result, whenever someone tells me they are a "people person," I give them a wide berth because I remember the advice I was given as a young boy which was, "you are what you eat."
I'm quite surprised that this is a large part of the top comment. I'm not an extrovert but I love office life, despite its flaws. The primary flaws of office life for me are:
1. Commute. Currently not a problem but it will be in the future for me.
2. Open plan offices are the norm and make focusing more difficult.
3. Slight more difficulty in eating home-cooked food as if you aren't organised, you end up buying lunch rather than cooking at home.
I don't think I have a perverse addiction to conflict.
Major advantages of working in an office include:
1. I work more productively usually. The environment helps me focus, rather than goof off.
2. It is much easier to have impromptu coffee and lunch conversations and interesting discussions, both work related and otherwise. This increases team social bonding and speeds up knowledge transfer.
3. The people I work with in the office regularly are easier to relate to and think well of than faces online.
I agree, however I think this whole discourse is mostly about being able to choose whether you work from home or go to the office. E.g. for software people it would be totally feasible to come into office on Monday, have all the meetings and do remote work for the rest of the week.
> I can't imagine re-adapting to something so insane as an office ever again.
It might be safe to say that one group likes being in the same physical space as their peers [0] and another doesn't, and that both these groups are judging each other for their choice (typical in-group / out-group bias).
> Why burden business relationships with forced several hours/week physical presence when nobody would impose that on a customer or a vendor, and lockdowns have shown that even (especially) marriages aren't designed for people to be stuck together that long.
See also: Chesterton's fence when advocating for fundamental changes in the way things work [1].
I think part of it is also that some people create a dependence on forced social interaction to address their own loneliness, instead of developing healthy friendships outside the workplace.
A healthy friendship outside the workplace is maybe 25 hours per month of contact, at the upper end. That's meeting frequently for meals and spending 25-50% of weekends together. If you manage to have 3 of those, that's 75 hours a month of being around other people. Still quite far from the 160 built into an office job.
I don't think friendship is a substitute for the socialization an office provides. A roommate situation might be, but that has other serious challenges.
This is something that took me a bit to realize. I've made some friends at work that do things outside of work, but building relationships/friendships outside of work are usually more meaningful and last longer.
COVID makes it worse, but the erosion of participation in structured social groups (fraternal organizations, sports leagues, churches, etc.) has been on the decline for a long, long time. Less participation means less funding means less outreach means even less participation means less groups in total, means less participation, etc.; down and down it goes. Now even the paycheck-compelled participation in the office environment is eroding.
For many people, making new friends as an adult gets harder with age. Part of that is that we're not compelled to join things like we were as children. Part of it is that we have the cumulative time and means to create our own favored environments - my house has some kick-ass stuff in it and air conditioning, so why would I leave it? :D I kid, but kinda not.
As I've gotten older, I've made a point to get more involved in entirely voluntary organizations (collector's groups, church, etc) and it takes work. It's rewarding on the balance - good for my personal growth and good for the group assuming they would agree that I bring a modicum of value to the table - but it takes a dedication that doesn't come easy. Kind of like exercise, right?
An antipattern here is expecting to replicate your quality childhood friendships quickly. Friendships, particularly intimate friendships, take a long time and many shared experiences. 80% of the job is just showing up, so nothing kills budding friendship opportunities like flaking out one too many times. Show up!
The book Bowling Alone is about this trend of declining social capital and connection in the US, and was published in 2000. This is a modern phenomenon, which transcends any intensification during the last 18 months.
> Show me someone who loves office life and being around people who are forced to be together, and I will show you someone with a perverse addiction to confict.
In my experience, being forced to be a Slack @tag or DM away from coworkers who see you as a screen name rather than a face is far worse for conflict.
Remote work doesn't mean employees get to withdraw from social interaction and isolate themselves. It just moves the interaction to a different medium.
I've managed in-person, mixed, and full-remote teams. Conflict always gets more heated in the remote teams. When you're in the office with someone and talking face to face, people are more likely to treat each other like humans. When you're trying to communicate through emotionless Slack text all day, some people misinterpret harmless comments as being aggressive and struggle to treat their coworkers differently than screen names in an internet flame war.
I had a manager in one of my first jobs tell me to always have a hard discussion in person, if you can, because "there are eyes". It stuck with me then, and it makes more sense all the time.
You definitely miss some important indicators being on Slack all day.
Many probably don't realize (yet) that there's a difference between working with people in the office then being remote and just being remote.
If you've spent some time with somebody, it's easier to assume tone and intent behind something that may seem hostile in isolation.
Beautifully expressed post, I just wanted to let you know I appreciate your writing style and what you've written resonates deeply with my experience as well.
> Show me someone who loves office life and being around people who are forced to be together, and I will show you someone with a perverse addiction to confict.
I see where you are coming from, but honestly the workplace is one of the rare places someone can easily make friends after 30, precisely because someone is forcing you to be together with other people.
There are obviously other ways to do this (hobbies, etc) but they typically aren't as simple and you're now setting up a second thing you need to participate in. I don't think people love being in the office; they love being with other people instead of being stuck by themselves in their home or quietly sitting by themselves in a coffee shop.
I appreciate your opinion, but you use words like "impose"/"force" and bring up prison.
You have the choice to choose your own employer and if you don't like the terms, the choice to leave.
A lot of people were hired on the condition of going into the office and I find it all the backlash from employees after being asked to go back into the office a bit absurd.
> You have the choice to choose your own employer and if you don't like the terms, the choice to leave.
That assumes two things:
1) That a company exists that will grant you your (let's presume reasonable) terms, and
2) That there are enough companies accepting those terms such that there are enough jobs available for everyone who wants those terms.
My ideal job would be a part-time gig where I get the benefits of a full-time gig (health insurance, 401k, equity, etc.), but can choose my hours (essentially 100% flexibly), perhaps with some sort of weekly minimum, and get paid by the number of hours worked. It would be fully remote, and I could work from wherever I want. But there are very few companies that will agree to terms like that (maybe even no companies), even though I'd be just as (probably more) productive than their "standard" full-time employees.
> A lot of people were hired on the condition of going into the office and I find it all the backlash from employees after being asked to go back into the office a bit absurd.
It's not absurd, it's people who have traditionally been on the bad end of a power imbalance (employees) finally getting the flexibility they've always wanted, proving that they can be just as productive that way, and then being pissed off that employers are requiring them to go back into the office for little reason other than management's desire to control their employees' lives.
And it's really funny that you find that absurd, because many of them are doing exactly what you claim they should do: leave and find a different employer that will accept their terms. Post-pandemic there are a lot more employers that will accept flexible/remote work arrangements than there were previously, and employers that are requiring employees to come back to the office are going to lose some talent.
That ideal job can exist, though you may have to create the company yourself (that's what I ended up doing). We were very small (5-7 people) and thought it'd be fun to try out different forms of compensation, so after some experimentation we settled on:
- very healthy hourly rate
- min commit of X hours per month (I think it was 80), then work as few or as many as you want beyond that (though for planning purposes we'd often ask people to give us a rough idea of their plans for the next few weeks)
- various bonuses that would kick in when the group reached different milestones each month (this was a consulting company, so a lot of them revolved around billable hours)
- no additional paid benefits at all
That last one took the most time for people to get on board with initially, but ultimately proved to be really popular. I think it had to do with how entrenched the mindset is around the norm, but concepts like getting paid even though you're not working, or having your employer be involved with your health insurance are pretty odd if you think about it. Things like sick leave, paid time off, etc. are also things that look nice on paper but IMO tend to be a net loss for employees - they tend to be assigned inflated values by the companies and are used as leverage against employees.
That is what is happening. People talking about it with their employers before bouncing is not that surprising, especially in a situation that is in flux.
Some light game theory to add to this discussion....
> A lot of people were hired on the condition of going into the office and I find it all the backlash from employees after being asked to go back into the office a bit absurd.
For all of the negative stuff coming from people who do not want to return to an office I find one thing in common: they all usually really like their company and job.
While "If you don't like it, leave" is the reality of the situation it doesn't change that this is somewhat irrational behavior. It is the {CEO, Boss, Manager}'s decision as to who gets to work remote obviously. That's the power dynamic at hand. However, if you think of this in any other situation you can see that there's something about remote work that makes some managers loose their cool. Imagine employees saying this:
1. I have back pain and if I had an (ergonomic chair|standing desk) I'd be able to work for longer without getting up and walking around. This would make me more productive.
2. The coffee machine makes bad coffee and everyone walks to the coffee shop across the street 3 times a day. If we just got good grinds and a machine in the office we'd all save money and we'd save ~1hr/day/engineer on context switching for coffee.
A {CEO, Boss, Manager) has every right to say: "If you don't like your (coffee|desk|chair) then you can leave" but they are obviously acting pretty childish here. If you look at all of these situations logically you're looking for a small input effort for a large continuous return on investment.
If you add into the fact that myself, and many others, think working from home makes us MUCH more productive you can arrive at the following conclusions:
1. We are not more productive, we just think we are.
2. We are more productive, and we commute less (save money + sanity).
If we think out this decision matrix:
- Employee + !Productive, Boss + WFH: the employee is no more productive - maybe even slightly less productive - and this comes up in their performance reviews and they're asked to come back to the office. The employee will probably see that WFH does not work for them if this performance review is fair (ex not "You called into the meeting but since you didn't come in person you were obviously not listening as well").
- Employee + Productive, Boss + !WFH: The employee can quit and find a WFH company. The employee may be willing to accept *less* money and will produce *more* value for the new employer. This new employer now has a major leg up (in most industries) over the old employer.
- Employee + !Productive, Boss + !WFH: The employee could still jump to another company for less wages at a lower output if WFH means a lot to them.
- Employee + Productive, Boss + WFH: Company gains efficiency for no extra money. Employee is happier.
In this chart we see in every situation except one the employee wins out over the company. In the situations in which the employer allows the employee to try WFH the employer wins out massively: their employee is either happy that they were given a chance or the company has found a way to make someone much more productive.
> I'm not against remote work, I just think people are being too entitled about it.
Does this not personify the relationship with the company a bit here? This is a negotiation. Skilled laborers have the ability to throw their weight around here a bit.
I personally don't think using bargaining power and leverage to ask for more (perks, pay, etc) is entitlement. The employer is allowed to say "no" and the employee is allowed to look for some place else that will say yes.
I think the mental framing that "people are up in arms over it" might be playing a bit into how you envision this working out. Most people I've spoken to have just said something like "I really liked working from home and if my boss asks me to come back I'll look for another job".
> Why burden business relationships with forced several hours /week physical presence and face time when nobody would impose that on a customer or a vendor, and lockdowns have shown that even (especially) marriages aren't designed for people to be stuck together that long.
That's one reason to go into the office: to leave your spouse alone for a few hours. It's much healthier to resent your coworkers than to resent your spouse.
I can't speak to your office environment, but in all the offices I've worked in, I haven't been "forced" to interact with coworkers more than I want to. Being at the office gives me the option to engage in high-bandwidth IRL communication when necessary, and to not interact/ignore other people when I'm busy with something.
I think it can be healty to maintain a strict "home is home" and "work is work" separation. Home is then a place of escape/relaxation/recharging where work does not interfere.
Some people can manage that separation with a home office. Others prefer a physically separate workplace.
For me, I didn't think I would like WFH. When forced over the last year, it was better than expected. Certainly not having a commute was nice, not having to "dress up" for work was nice, but both my productivity and the amount of direction on tasks/priorities fell off a cliff. Interruptions were about the same, but when they come from spouse/kids (especially spouse) they are harder to deflect.
> Home is then a place of escape/relaxation/recharging where work does not interfere.
Or the other way around. That's the rarely stated but arguably common case, particularly for middle-age people: office is a place of escape/relaxation/recharging where your spouse and your little children and/or your inlaws don't interfere.
I love my WFH, I have it worked out with my wife and our family, and I don't want to ever have to work in an office on a regular basis - but I do understand this point. Parenting is hard. Marriage is hard - and COVID in particular threw a lot of people into uncharted territory. Despite all the romantic ideals and the condescending opinions of some people, modern marriage in western world is designed around partners spending significant time apart. Our current pandemic suddenly forced every couple to live a lifestyle most don't experience until retirement. Few were ready for this.
I actually liked working in the office. But maybe I was lucky having nice colleagues. During the COVID-19 home office year I initially hated working from home. I kind of got used to it over time and it is working better than expected.
However:
1) I am definitely feel less productive and I find myself getting stressed out easily when something unexpected happens at work (live bugs for example).
2) I hate teams meetings. I mean the whole microphone/camera not working mess got much better. But I find these meetings less focused and less communicative. Nobody feels obliged to bring a meeting to a productive end (less than ordinarily).
3) I definitely experience a lack of communication across teams. I have no idea really what my colleagues are doing outside my team. Four to five people quit during the year and, personally, I have no idea what happened making them so dissatisfied.
4) I gained some weight due to the lack of commute and decreased mobility. During the warmer months I enjoyed my bicycle ride to/fro the office.
5) The commute also helped me to shut off my thoughts about work issues. Now, I carry them with me all the time and sometimes I return to work at night because I feel the need to finish something. I try to add breaks during the day to distance myself from working at home.
All in all, I don’t see why techies are so eager to isolate themselves at home. While my colleagues are certainly not good friends (which I don’t have much) but I always enjoyed lunch time with them, chatting with them over a cup of coffee or enjoyed a team event outside the office. Living with and loving my family for many years it feels good from time to time to be a separate person with a separate realm from home.
1) I am definitely more productive than in an office, almost by an order of magnitude. That is in a large part because of my specific personality idiosyncrasies (I get anxious in shared working environmens), so it doesn't generalize.
2) Meetings I'm in are exactly the opposite - they're much more focused and productive. Probably because everyone has more interesting things to do than waste time on chit-chat over a videocall, so there's this constant pressure to either do something useful, or cancel the meeting.
3) This one matches my experience too. With no ability to just bump into people or notice they're there, I do feel as if my team is the entire company.
4) No change.
5) Sort of the same, except I consider it to be a feature more than a draw.
> All in all, I don’t see why techies are so eager to isolate themselves at home.
To this, the answer is simple: autonomy. You get to choose your own environment, your own pace; you can protect your personal space. And, you reclaim the time you wasted on commute, which you get to spend on what you want. In my case, I'm getting 2 hours of my life back every day. Some people are getting more.
Your experience matches what I see in offline contexts. I think comment sections online online have a disproportionately large number of people who prefer to get their social activity online. It's natural that people who spend a lot of time on forums, HN, Twitter, and social media would want their workplaces to also go remote.
I take a lot of the remote-work perspective on HN with a grain of salt. It's easy to forget that HN is still a bubble online that doesn't necessarily represent the norms in the real world.
> And not every s/w engineer works in the way described, eg pair programming is hard if one of you is at home.
For me the pair programming experience has only improved with remote working. It's so much easier to share a screen in a remote call than to awkwardly huddle together around a small desk and look at a single 22" monitor or 15" laptop screen. Also it's easier for teammates to chime in into a call or ignore all together which is harder to do in an (open) office space without requiring headphones. Even onboarding new team members went better than I expected.
Coding by yourself can obviously done anywhere. Working with other people is much faster and easier in person, and arguably the more important part of the job for high level engineers. This is why I think hybrid office/remote is a pretty solid approach.
> Working with other people is much faster and easier in person
Does "in person" mean sitting next to each other? Or can they be in different rooms?
I have seen developers collaborating over Slack even when they are in the same floor in the same building. And if collaborating over Slack works then it doesn't matter if you're in the same building... or even in the same town.
I find it much easier to collaborate over Zoom when I have all my screen space and computer to myself. I prefer it so much that I actually changed our company weeklies to be remote-first.
100%. I was used to only working with other engineers over zoom. I started going into the office and I was shocked when I realized I either had to sit with my laptop on my lap which is inferior to my own set up or just follow along as someone else used their computer which I couldnt see well.
agreed. The virtues of pair/team programming really took a hold for my team when WFH forced us to do screen-sharing rather than just sitting next to each other.
Now, we regularly do screen-sharing for development and demos, with the process of screen-sharing being as normal a part of our development cycle as pull-requests.
I think there are two main reasons cited by companies. First, protection of IP - they see it as easier to protect Intellectual Property if work is done on site (this is 10x for government contracts). Second, there is a fear that employees are goofing off. I've found I generally work harder remote, to ensure I am visibly being productive. The belief in many managers though is that if you're not 'butt in seat' at the office then they can't look over what you are doing.
I don't think either of these arguments hold water, for the reasons below.
First, with a VPN and modern controls on means of exfiltration you are able to maximize your protection against IP theft as well as to monitor your developers (see second point below though). That said, if a smart thief is going to steal your data, if they have physical access, if they are willing to accept the risk (this places doubt on smarts), and if they put the time and effort in, then they will likely manage to steal something.
Next, trust your people, but verify. Hire the best you can, pay them well so they are happy, and treat them like valued people. When hiring use background investigations, etc. to vet. The more you monitor, the more you say you don't trust them. The more they don't feel trusted, the less happy they'll be. The less happy they are, the more likely they are to leave or worse, commit the theft.
Last, a riff off the previous point. If you get good people, treat them well (incl. help when they have issues), and trust them to do their jobs - most people will perform at their best in a reliable and consistent manner.
Also on the "trust but verify" bit: you don't have to hire someone new and immediately give them the keys to the kingdom. Gradually build trust, and don't give an employee access to sensitive internal information until they've shown they can be trusted with it.
> Second, there is a fear that employees are goofing off. I've found I generally work harder remote, to ensure I am visibly being productive. The belief in many managers though is that if you're not 'butt in seat' at the office then they can't look over what you are doing.
It's easy, just look at the pull requests!
If your manager can't look at a PR and figure out what's going on, that's a red flag.
If goofing off is a big concern, you are hiring wrong.
For junior coders, sure. As you become a senior engineer, your job is going trending to be more about design and communication, and less about coding. If you are at a place where the entire team can write their documentation in Markdown, LATEX, etc and design in PlantUML or other markup, then that's all in the repos, but most shops are (cringe) MS Word, Magic Draw, etc. There are artifacts, but they aren't as clear cut as a PR.
Companies pay you for your output. The notion that they own your attention from 9-5 is ludicrous, right? Even in the office, we won't harass our employees if they close their eyes and meditate or they practice pen-spinning or reciting digits of pi, provided they're getting their job done.
And yet if they're at home, and they want to take breaks to improve their quality of living, this is suddenly a massive trust issue? In the past, commuting, we forced them to take two huge anti-breaks just so we can stare at them and so they can chit-chat with others? I just never agreed with the butts-in-the-cubicle-chair and the value of water-cooler gab.
> The notion that they own your attention from 9-5 is ludicrous, right?
It's not necessarily about attention, but about availability. Companies shouldn't care if employees take short breaks away from the computer while working remote. However, unless the business truly has perfectly isolated, asynchronous units of work to give everyone, you do need some level of availability to co-work with people and discuss things together.
Most remote companies end up with some core working hours where everyone is expected to be online and available for collaboration. Without this, it becomes a scheduling nightmare to try to get people online to answer questions or collaborate.
I think all of this stuff is still valid, given the context, and I say that as someone who has been working 100% remote years before COVID.
Jobs are more than just a collection of people working independently. You really need buy-in at all levels of the organization to enable remote work to work optimally. Partially-remote or half-baked remote policies (or rushed, during COVID) often leads to organizational and cultural problems, unrelated to the individual work performance of individuals.
I think if you ask anyone who already worked at a 100% remote organization before COVID, they'll tell you: being already 100% remote was a competitive advantage during COVID.
Being a remote organization is an advantage no matter what: it just means that things are more coherent, better documented and more tools are deployed to make an organization that ticks.
Remote vs non remote is kind of like setting up a system from a GUI vs setting it up from a script. One is easier, very ad hoc and doesn’t require planning other than intuition; the second requires deliberation but makes for a consistent, flexible and documented procedure.
I think it is an advantage, at least, for businesses which do a type of work which doesn’t require physical presence, and hires people who can function productively when remote. I don’t think it works well if your organization doesn’t do this, and I think it’s very difficult to do a mix of remote and in-person (which is what the OP is about)
I've been working from home almost completely since 2009 and worked about half time from home since 2005. It's definitely not for everyone, but the only way I'll ever go back to an office is if it's literally the only option left. For me the biggest reason is the staggering amount of wasted time associated with going into the office generally, but specifically for software dev work it's an environment that is stacked against you.
There is definitely a lack of trust going on in a lot of places. There is also the question of building relationships. Ask any sales person if he/she thinks warming up a relationship is easier face-to-face or from a distance.
Then there is the fact that not everyone is efficient with WFH.
Finally, if one manages to split his tasks in batches WFH/office hybrid could definitely become an option for many, e.g. work with team in office one week / work on long form client emails remotely. But that's a very big IF.
I think “wanting our own personal space” is something that we all thrive for during our lives: buying a house and living in it with our family & close ones; riding a car with people we know; etc.
The problem is that it’s one of those things that we want because it just sounds better, like chocolate or a fast car, but then when our monkey brains slowly lives it through we realise it’s not really the most sustainable solution for our well being.
We evolved in tribes and social circles that are not in line with “what we want NOW because it feels safe and/or society prescribes it”. I do think that work offices were one of the few things in our highly individualistic society that allowed us to somehow subconsciously socialise and activate those primitive brain cells that we have become so detached from.
What I’m trying to say is that obligating people to come to office is horrible and it’s great pandemic is changing that, but humans need society to sponsor more ways to get us to live and interact more with one another.
And with offices being out of the equation I fear this will make it even harder for us to create subconscious tribes (ones that exist without even wanting them at first).
I would be interested to hear the opinions of anyone who was at Yahoo when they went to remote-friendly, and then went back again (all pre-pandemic). The story heard on the outside was that remote work was not working out, but I never heard the inside story.
I am a contract programmer, and I have worked both in office, remotely, and also hybrid (3/2). I have no strong opinion on the matter. But, I always know I'm temporary, by choice, so the fact that I'm not really making strong connections doesn't bother me, and my loyalty to the company isn't an issue because I'm a "hired gun". Yahoo apparently encountered something they found to be a problem with too many people working remotely, and I'd like to know how it all looked from "ground level".
> I would be interested to hear the opinions of anyone who was at Yahoo when they went to remote-friendly, and then went back again (all pre-pandemic). The story heard on the outside was that remote work was not working out, but I never heard the inside story.
I think Yahoo had much bigger issues to tackle at the time.
Because we're the modern equivalent of a slave. Slaves are always at their masters dwellings. They don't have 'home'. Obviously modern slaves do the same for the most part.
We should count our lucky stars were not required to sleep at work.
I worked at a large American healthcare tech giant with a certain Wonka-esque private owner who famously said, when asked why she didn't support adding 'nap rooms' for employees, "That's what your desks are for."
Except for actual slaves who are still around and who are worked for no compensation and endlessly abused to no end. I think this statement is highly insulting to people who are real slaves these days. Corporations do mistreat developers for sure, but to claim to be a slave is beyond laughable.
Except it's not that way. You can't quit your job except to take another one. They have things like 'real estate market' and 'taxes' to ensure that. You can't quit in the way most people imagine quitting. We need this for the economy to function. Just like the Romans needed slavery for theirs. You are right about the compensation. That part has improved considerably. Still the supposedly appalling thing about slavery wasn't the lack of compensation but the lack of freedom.
Except sometimes just because you are able to quit doesn't mean you can quit. Hopefully that's less prevalent in IT, but does happen (e.g. people on work visas that cannot change their abusive employer w/o having to GTFO the country).
- Most people don't have significant savings. Even in IT.
- Many people have dependents to support.
- Quitting a job and finding a new one is a big hassle.
- Your chances at finding a comparable job to your previous one are strongly correlated with your performance at your past jobs.
Combined, this means almost no one can just quit, without putting themselves into immediate, moderate-to-high threat to the lives of themselves and their families.
You're right! I just went with an example that used to be the most relevant to me personally (the "work visa" part, fortunately not the "abusive employer" part).
Let's throw in one more reason: health insurance being tied to current employer also means people may be forced to stay, at least until they line up their next gig.
1. They live in one city, and received a job in another. 2 hours would be Philadelphia to DC or NYC for example. But they can't get a more local job (those don't exist, they can't land them, etc.)
2. They can't move for some reason. Their partner can't get another job. Their children are in a school and they don't want to move them until they graduate. Their parents are family are nearby and they must be near them, medical issues are possible, elderly, etc.
4. is likely not true - software positions at worst are decently middle class.
3. is an argument against empathy. they made their choice to prioritize where they are living over commute. That's exactly OP's point.
1. again, if they choose not to relocate then the commute is their responsibility not the job's fault.
2. is the main point i now have a lot of sympathy for now that I have kids. Kids benefit from continuity and uprooting your whole life for one of the partner's jobs is somewhat selfish.
But even in that situation, I feel like the onus is still on the person - they are choosing their kids over their commute. The commute isn't for the job. The commute is for the kids.
Hopefully this isn’t from delusions but there ARE SE positions with very bad pay especially when what class you eligible for depends on where you live. Software positions at worst can be lower class.
I fail to see how this is at all relevant to whether or not we should return to in person work. If the Bay Area truly is unlivable, that strikes me as a local political concern. A place with that much wealth surely could have built more housing, infrastructure, etc, but the local population chose not to. Either vote with your feet or live with the consequences of the life you and your neighbors chose.
How do you know they live in an exurb? Maybe they just live in a town two hours away? Why do they live in that town and work in another? Maybe they have family or social responsibilities that force it - I don't know and neither do you.
I don't think so. I know many people who for example wanted to keep their children in the same school so commute for a new job. I don't know anyone who commutes through two hours of suburbs. Where is that even possible? Los Angeles maybe?
People in New York, Chicago, Atlanta, L.A. etc, get themselves into these situations by buying new construction on the edge of the city thinking that the traffic on the expressways can't possibly get any worse. They then realize several years later that it has, in fact. The open secret is that their lifestyle choices are what's causing it.
My point is that you are not entitled to both your McMansion enclave and your cushy software engineering position at Big Corp. Denser development (in the U.S.) is necessary and would be achieved if people were willing to pay for it and vote for it.
Instead, they do the worst possible thing, which is imagine they can live a pseudo-bucolic existence and not be members of the urban center, or at least old growth dense suburbs, that actually support the jobs they want to have.
Is this pathology uniquely American? No, but arguably we invented it and have taken it to the most extreme level.
You've got absolutely no idea what kind of home this individual lives in or their personal situation or why they're commuting that far. You're criticising them for something you've imagined.
Let's imagine for a second you're correct that they are commuting from one relatively underdeveloped area to another.
That's still totally unrealistic in the modern economy. I get it. All of you that have kids and a settled life want to flip the table and make yourselves as unavailable as possible. No more mentorship of younger engineers and new team members. No more face to face planning and strategy. No more conferences, after-work networking, etc.
It's selfish. You're going to be proven wrong by those who are willing to show up, collaborate, and innovate. We're going to run circles around you and leave your failing businesses in the dust.
Why burden business relationships with forced several hours /week physical presence and face time when nobody would impose that on a customer or a vendor, and lockdowns have shown that even (especially) marriages aren't designed for people to be stuck together that long.
The only other situation you spend that amount of time with someone is a cellmate in prison, and the inevitable and necessary conseqeunce is micro-power struggles over the least significant things because in spending that much time together, you literally exhaust every other way to relate.
Show me someone who loves office life and being around people who are forced to be together, and I will show you someone with a perverse addiction to confict. When extroversion becomes immoderate, they become masochists who crave attention and interpersonal intensity. As a result, whenever someone tells me they are a "people person," I give them a wide berth because I remember the advice I was given as a young boy which was, "you are what you eat."
I can't imagine re-adapting to something so insane as an office ever again.