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- Hacker News
- For me personally, life has basically been divided into before and after. I used to spend an extra two hours every day just getting to and from work, taking public transport, which honestly wasn’t exactly inspiring. Now working from home is a real pleasure, and life has become so much more enjoyable.by GreenLightGo
- >> "This suggests you let people work remotely if they want to work remotely,"
I can't believe people need studies to see that. All you need is some common sense.
by ozgung - Unfortunately a lot of RTO advocates need to learn this.by hightrix
- If there were no previous study available, there would be no argument to enforce a policy to enable this. So I am thankful that someone made a study, now there is more ”data” to back the claim up.by Zolomon
- I've been working remotely for over 20 years. ProTip: working remote does not mean working from home. Surround yourself everyday with the people you want. Go to coworking spaces, coffee shops, parks. Find fellow remote workers and host coworking sessions and your places.by gr2m
- Interesting! Thanks for sharingby informal007
- I can see how this can help get you a change of pace, but as someone who learned during the pandemic they don't like remote working nearly as much as they thought they would, isn't doing this every day just commuting to a worse office with extra steps?
I guess if your office is really awful or your commute is ridiculously long it might be better. But all the talk you see about why working at an office is so bad for people's productivity cite the noise, distractions, unrelated chatter etc. Co-working spaces filled with people who aren't even on your team, coffee shops filled with angry customers and stay at home parents toting their toddlers and parks full of barking dogs and biting insects seem like they would all be their own cacophony of distractions and noises to rival even some of the worst open office plans.
Also at least around where I am, co-working spaces cost between $100-500 / month, and the coffee at the coffee shops while better than what is at the office is also $3-5 a cup. The parks are admittedly free, but the ergonomics of the tree trunk and root system leave a little to be desired. I'm sure it works for some people, but if I'm not spending my day working on my front porch in the sun with my dog, I think I'd rather be in the office instead of in the corner of a local coffee shop.
by tpmoney - There's a mall near my house that has a food hall that has become an informal co-working space. At one point, the coffee shop had a coffee day pass.
Before my team got a back to office order we had weekly meetings there.
Considering how malls are suffering I don't understand why they are not offering more options like this.
by forinti - I've been remote for ~6 years. I can't stand being in an office when I don't need to be there and looking busy. On top of that, commute savings are great. I work out of a coworking space a walking distance from where I live. I also had a child recently, and being able to pick him up easily after work is priceless. Forcing most tech talent to be in the same 2-3 cities is one of the worst things in recent history.by dayvid
- No longer commuting from Shoreline to downtown Seattle and spending 2+ hours in a car each day certainly helped my sense of well-being.by cactacea
- Did you ever consider downsizing or renting to be closer to work? I can’t imagine choosing to commute that far every day.by DiggyJohnson
- Shoreline to downtown Seattle is not even close to 1 hour each way by car, maybe 35 mins, if you stretch it. That been said, I feel you, commuting sucks, consider living closer or finding a new gig.by j_rosenberg
- Remote work is one of the things i would expect every country government to incentivise and promote.
Countryside, villages, islands would revive, less traffic, pollution, less unnecessary company and personal costs, more happy people and families, more opportunities globally, etc.
But no, some property owners in the centre are more important than this and we have to live in overcrowded cities. Kudos
by higeorge13 - From a nation standpoint, doesn't "incentivizing and promoting" remote work also incentivize off-shoring jobs out of your economy? If your nation's companies perfect remote work, why would they higher your highly paid citizens living in (relatively) high cost of living areas when they could hire massive remote teams in lower cost of living countries to do the same job for less?
I'm a big fan of flexibility, and certainly think companies should do their best to treat their employees as adults and let them do what works best for them and their teams. But it is really weird to me to watch an industry that has spent years trying to convince companies that hiring off-shore remote workers had all sorts of negative externalities on team cohesion and the development process suddenly fall head over heals in love with the idea of all companies going all in on "off-shore remote workers".
by tpmoney - I have been remote working for the past ~5 years or so. I had to RTO briefly for 3-4 weeks, which was about as long as it took me to find a position with a new org. I love the benefits at this stage in my life (young children, etc.) but I'm not sure the networking relationships I developed early on in my career "in the trenches" would be nearly as strong or beneficial as they have been had I started remote. I'm curious to see how that plays out over the long-term for folks that may start remote and attempt to stay that way throughout their entire careers.by scrapcode
- Some people have been working remote for much longer than the past few years. They are doing fine.
Maybe it depends on the nature of your work, but I think remote working revealed to everyone how much office "networking" was always kinda delusional.
For sure, networking is important, but I have never found opportunities talking to the same people in my fishbowl. It was almost impossible to talk to the right people within the organization in person, and cornering them is not a great first impression. Reaching out to them on Teams is a whole different ball game, and one that I think more people are good at. Getting the right attention from the right people is also easier in large group chats.
Apart from that, working remote is not strictly at home. There's a whole wide world out there to meet people and find opportunity.
by sublinear - So I was part of a very small company (<15 people) that was bought by a mid-sized company that otherwise had no presence in our country.
Leadership left and there was a few years where no one else in the office was in the same teams or reporting chains. The majority of people were in a single office in another company. I found it very difficult to participate and was left out of most decisions. Then covid hit and everything changed. With everyone working from home remote networking opportunities were built, I was an equal part of every discussion. Now I am in a large fortune 500 organization with a mix of working arrangements and I don't have any issues networking. I like to think we do a pretty good job with junior participation as well. The main thing I'm missing is the rumour mill and the pulse on what unrelated roles like sales/finance are saying on the ground.
by TheCycoONE - A theory I've proposed that I would love to get scientific evidence for... I would guess that WFH is effectively bimodal. WFH advocates would largely fall into a high performance bucket, and detractors either believe that average employees are low performers and need monitoring or are low performers. This is not social vs anti-social, its wanting to be productive with your time - whether thats the time you spend working, or with family etc.
I would love any scientific evidence for or against this theory. If anyone has any studies or natural experiments I would love to know about them- WFH for high performers: fewer distractions because you can control your environment, less time wasted on commute, less time on non-work communication, etc. More flexibility, better control of your time and space. - WFH for poor performers: No oversight so you choose to work less. You control your environment so you can add distractions - Meetings, TV, social media chores, family, leaving to go do stuff. - Office for high performers: Constant series of distractions you can't control - social conversations, meetings, etc... keeping you from doing work. - Office for low performers: Constant series of distractions you can't control letting you avoid work without repercussion. Meetings, Social time with coworkers, etcby jppope - you think low performers are advocating against WFH?by Ancalagon
- There are 100% people who are the reverse. It sounds like you're optimizing for heads-down IC time, which I agree is more productive at home.
But for team building—which, in very early stage companies is huge—and quick identification and resolution, in-person can be much better, in my experience. (Not always! Person, team, role, etc. dependent.)
There's a HUGE difference between in-person meetings and over Zoom. Teams in person—again, my experience—can move much faster because you can process social cues, body language, attention right there. There's zero latency.
This isn't to discount the distractions you're talking about, or the trade-offs of commute and cost-of-living to be near an office, etc. Very real.
But saying that high performers are better WFH and potatos are better in-office is not a universal truth.
by tyre - There are a thousand factors, but one of the biggest and simplest is getting commute time back. Gaining even one hour a day is life-changing. Imagine gaining two hours.
- Wait, are you saying that human contact has no bearing on one's psychological well-being? Or are you saying that I'm being deliberately obtuse?by KludgeShySir
- Commuting to work for people who don't absolutely need to commute to work may be the biggest cargo cult of them all.
- It's funny, because talk about a 25% potential productivity improvement saving multiple hours per day per employee in literally any other context and management would be crazy for it. Like AI hype bubble crazy. But culturally they cannot come to terms with the idea of losing power / control / influence over how work is done, so WFH gets treated completely differently.by zmmmmm
- >one of the biggest and simplest is getting commute time back
Zoom out. Being full remote means I don't even need a car. I can live in a walkable city with passenger rail in a low cost of living location. I can reduce my living expense to just food and utilities with a paid off house and no automobiles.
by panny - I go into my company's Boston office with an hour and a half commute each way by train about once a month. Even doing that once a month sucks. I couldn't imagine doing that even three times a week. I regularly get LinkedIn messages from recruiters with hybrid offerings in Boston that pay less and will then suck an additional 9 hours a week out of my life. Biggest nope I can think of.
I'd have to get paid a lot more to sacrifice an additional 10 hours a week commuting. You can't just tack an additional ten hours worth of pay on, and even if the pay was excellent, I can't imagine this is something I can do long term. Losing three hours a day for a commute eats into so much social and sleep time.
by jjice - Its not just the time, its the energy expended.by mikert89
- I know of a company where they want anyone within 90m to commute, so that's up to three hours lost in a day, making an 8 hour workday actually 11+ hoursby e_i_pi_2
- Not having to plan my life around traffic patterns is the biggest advantage for me.
I enjoy working in the office at my current place of employment... nice office space, small company, everyone who works there is great and the office is only 15 minutes away if there is no traffic.
But I live in Southern California, so when there is traffic that 15 minute commute balloons to 45-60 minutes.
So I work from home most of the time. I still go in a couple of times a week (voluntarily, not required) but there are no expectations of a set schedule so it is very easy for me to avoid heavy traffic commute times.
by georgemcbay - Here is the actual study: https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10....
They didn’t control for occupation, pay, managerial status etc.. An on-site physical job like nurse, facilities, or technician was compared to predominantly remote administrative jobs.
by dahdum