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cross-posted from: https://derp.foo/post/119697
There is a discussion on Hacker News, but feel free to comment here as well.
Any job that can be WFH should be WFH.
Any job that can’t be WFH that requires sitting at a desk all day should give each person an individual office. The open office plan has been an absolute nightmare, and only benefits micromanagers. It’s a productivity disaster, and makes for a miserable experience, and only exists for the sake of surveillance. However, I doubt there are many jobs that can’t be WFH that require such a situation.
The real issue here is an intentional mis-framing, imo. Why must people get back to a traditional office setting? The only people who want this are employers who think that Butts In Seats = Productivity, and the only way to ensure it is to intensely surveil your employees. I also don’t give two shits if some real estate company goes bankrupt because business tenants stop renting their properties. Boo fucking hoo.
I’ve been working for a remote-first company now for over a year, and I won’t ever got back to working in an office. There is literally nothing about what I do that needs me to be physically present in any specific place. The problem isn’t “productivity” or “collaboration”, the problem is entirely based around a work culture that is fundamentally punitive, puritanical, and antithetical to life balance.
Can I bring my dog to that office? Will it have my fridge there, and my kitchen? I’d also want a teleporter so that there’s zero commute time.
I think we’re a bit beyond just rebelling against the “open office” concept.
I would settle for just the teleporter, so home is still seconds away. Then I would have a fridge, and private bathroom, and access to my dog.
Can it be like the doors in Monsters Inc? I’ve got wall space for a door.
(Teleporters, even linked teleporters would be such a game changer)
+1 for monster’s inc doors, I’d like one of those to visit my family more easily
Fuck that, I don’t want my boss coming into my house through a teleporter.
So many employers act like they own their employees as it is.
Hey @entropicdrift, I’m sorry to wake you–you looked so peaceful–but do you have the cover page for this TPS report?
Maybe if there was a controllable delay on the teleporter…
NOTIFICATION: Your boss has entered the teleporter buffer. Allow materialization? [YES] [NO] [ASK ME AGAIN LATER]
[FACTORY RESET] selected, are you sure? Please do not power off while occupants are in the chamber.
Allow dematerialization. I’ll think about the rematerialization.
Yeah, this take reads like some corpo shit. The advantages of remote work are many, as you mention. It’s a red herring to say people don’t want to come back because they don’t have their own space.
No commute is a giant plus and pretty much makes any return a deal-breaker.
Being in your own space (not space given to you by your company) is another giant plus.
The fact that I can be in the shower 20 mins before that morning meeting is huge.
There’s an attack on remote work right now, funded by all those middle managers who feel like they’ve lost some of the little power they had. Don’t buy into the smear campaign. There’s never been a clearer benefit to workers. Hell, many of them even designed the systems in place to make it possible (yes, looking at you Zoom – now you’re a joke).
I go to the office a few times a year, mostly for all-hands meetings that are often also parties. Any more than that, and I’m looking for a new job. Recently, the company mentioned something about making the office more enticing. That went over like a lead balloon. There are a lot of other companies in the same city with better pay for in-office and hybrid work, and many of us live 1.5+ hours away.
I mean, if they want to make it more enticing, go for it. Just leave me the option to not be enticed.
My workplace lets everyone work from home or an office as they see fit. Some people need different things to work best. Some people miss the face-to-face that they used to get in the office, so management put together monthly “we’re catering lunch, and teams are encouraged to plan whatever activities they think might work better in office for this day, but make sure it’s optional”.
So once a month I go and get some free food, and we do some face to face planning which benefits a bit from being together, and last month the team hung out and chatted for a bit after work, which was nice.
If management wants people in office, I’d much rather they try to make that happen by making being in office worth it, as opposed to telling people they have to or else. Carrot > stick.
I can identify with this. I went on early retirement (5 years ahead of time) because I was sick and tired of an open-plan office that kept distracting me constantly. If I had to get something done seriously quickly, like consolidated month reports etc, I had to do it from home. My productivity was at 50% or less at an office because of constant interruptions, or colleagues talking at the desk next to mine.
And of course senior managers would have their own offices, so they could get work done.
The rule should be, if open-plan offices make so much sense for collaboration etc, then everyone gets an open-plan office, including HR and the CEO. They can also go meet in a meeting room for private conversations.
It’s easy to make decisions for employees when you don’t have to follow those decisions yourself… want employees back at work, yes then make it better for them.
No thanks.
Yeah working from home I already have my own office, just a few steps from my bedroom, with no manager looking over my shoulder, a fully stocked kitchen just downstairs, and 0 distractions while I work
Stop trying to make return to office happen, it won’t for anyone with negotiating power, and those are the most valuable employees. Try to make your employees go back to office and the best ones will just go work for someone else
It’s extremely telling that hardly anyone asked “how can we make the office more attractive?” and instead focused on pressure and threats.
I would really like an office nearby, a proper desk setup eats up a lot of space in my apartment. But my employer’s office is 200km away and the local companies pay 30% less. I’m staying at home.
Force them to treat commute time (within reason) as work for which the employee must be paid, and you’ll see a bunch of companies blanch and do an about-face on their attempts to get people back to the office.
As for the primary thesis of the article, well, if I go into the office I’m the only person on my floor even if the building is at full occupancy—there are two desks in the basement and the other has been untenanted since a couple of years before the pandemic. I’d still rather stay home, and not waste the time and gas, even though it’s only a 15-minute drive along back roads.
I don’t know how you can factor commute time in. Is it my fault if my coworker decides to live twice as far as I do? Unless the company moves the office, the worker decided to work there.
Honestly this kind of attitude hurts workers way more than it helps them “well yeah I could get an extra $10k a year, but Bob over there might get $15k, so no deal.”
And if your coworker wants to spend an extra hour in their car (even if it’s paid), that sounds like their problem, not yours
No it’s about shared duties and having to complete more tasks because I live closer to the office. That’s not right. I could be listening to an audiobook or podcast if I had a long commute. Even play a game If I take a train or bus. In fact this kind of unequal treatment is part of the push for unions in certain environments in the first place.
Start time is 8am bob leaves at 630 and sits in traffic or train you leave at 745 how are you working more or doing more duties.
Either those that live further away work less non-commuting hours or get paid more. Either way that’s not going to go over well. Unions almost always equal things out, sometimes to a fault.
Not your fault, but it hardly hurts you if your coworker is being asked to work an hour more than you are.
In some ways, it helps you because you would be more valuable, because you cost less.
Is it my fault if my coworker decides to live twice as far as I do?
I’d rather just let them sit in traffic thinking they gamed the system.
I think you can factor it in along with all other benefits. Employees absolutely consider commute time when applying for work. If companies want employees in office and are trying to compete with employers that allow remote work, they need to start making a case for why the commute is worth it. Tech companies tried doing that with ping pong tables and beer, but now that remote work is so common that doesn’t carry much weight. Compensating an employee for commute time in some way seems like a reasonable benefit that companies should consider offering.
Mileage compensation is one thing, but not including it in hours you work. I guarantee that would create resentment and hostility in every workplace.
I think that differentiation is only a difference in how the benefit would be calculated. It would be quite a departure from the current state of things, but it’s worth being part of the discussion.
Assuming we’re all compensated at different rates based on our value to the company, then one person’s time is more valuable than another person’s time. As the employee, commute time and work time might as well be conflated since it’s time spent away from the rest of our lives. It’s different for the company, of course, since commute time is not productive work time, but if we’re talking about this as benefits that companies might offer in order to retain or attract employees then I don’t think the company’s opinion matters.
For the sake of discussion, let’s say it’s now the law to compensate workers for their commutes. Wouldn’t this incentivize employers to hire only people who live close? Further limiting the working opportunities of rural workers doesn’t seem intuitive.
Well, I did say “within reason”. So the company would need to factor in how close the nearest available housing that the employee can afford is to the office, and/or where the employee lived before they were hired. So they can define a maximum distance that they’ll make payments for, but it has to be sane.
If there isn’t enough housing for their employees within a sane distance of their office building, maybe the company should move.
(There’s also a whole discussion in there on the extent to which employment is a choice, and who has the decision-making power.)
This feels like a disingenuous argument formed to prove WFH is the better answer. Similar to the argument that salary shouldn’t be based on COL wherever the person lives.
Isn’t that what all that “business” is about? Innovating to keep up with other available alternatives?
Managers and company executives hoping to get people back into the office by whining and saying that’s how it used to be ain’t gonna work. They will have to offer something to stay competitive. Be it higher pay (compensation for commuting), better flexibility, better office resources (not just donuts and smiley stickers).
No, business is about extracting money by any means necessary.
Oh God, yes! I’m old enough to remember when people thought it was important to have quiet and privacy to think.
I used to love my job. All my life I’ve loved programming, and I used to love being able to solve other people’s problems for them by doing the thing I love.
The open-plan curse killed it for me. For years I’ve done as little paid work as I can get away with because I hate trying to think in an open-plan horror so much. It’s like having my brain in a blender.
I still program, and think, a lot, but I only do it for other people when I need the money.
Isn’t it significantly cheaper for most businesses to be run remotely? What is the pressure of returning to work coming from?
It’s so much cheaper that my last job, which was a remote-first company, was able to pay to fly everyone and a +1 to an all-expense-paid resort for five days to do team building. All of that was cheaper than an office in SF where they were based.
It is!
Most companies make BS solutions for fake problems. Not going to the office exposes a large chunk of fake needs.
Do families really need two cars? If you aren’t commuting every day, probably not.
Having more free time means people are more likely to cook and clean for themselves. Can’t make money off of that.
How many suits do you need to own? None! You only owned them because you are supposed to wear them in the office.
Dry cleaners? No longer a bill.
Gas? When you aren’t sitting in your cities parking lot of a freeway isn’t bought as often.
Speaking of parking lots, you aren’t paying for parking anymore.
Daycare and dog walkers aren’t needed anymore.
Going up work is expensive and companies want us addicted to these fake expenses.
The portion of managers which don’t actually contribute anything to productivity don’t have much to do if everyone is at home.
And the people who own the real estate (more often CEO, executives, board members than you might think) need their office buildings to maintain inflated values and collect those sweet, sweet lease payments.
Fuck that. I already have an office at home.
