UK excepted, which is doing a piss-poor job of controlling our border. Kind of ironic given all the Brexit ‘take back control’ bullshit from the same wankers currently failing to stop tourists arriving in their thousands daily.
I suspect those $$$ will speak equally loudly about savings where buildings can be compartmentalised and mothballed or sub-let. But MBA accounting types can be weird and, as you say, myopic.
as an 'essential" who has had to work onsite through all this fun?
I have ONE SIMPLE REQUEST for all ya’ll 'returning"
slower traffic? Keep right.
you haven’t driven in a year? I can tell by the cobwebs all over your Prius goin 62mph in the fast lane…
Please? you don’t need to control everyone else. just move to the right
stay in the right lane. Please… let those of us who have been doing this – keep going to work…
I’ll agree that someone who cannot carve out an appropriate workspace at home is going to have trouble working from home. My office had some people return that had poor internet access or home situations that didn’t support remote work. But, that doesn’t mean remote work is bad for the company, it means remote work was bad for that employee because they couldn’t create a good remote work environment. Give that employee a raise so they can buy a home with an extra bedroom and proper internet access, let them teach the family that they’re “at work” when the door is closed, and a good employee will shine just fine. Do all that for the bad employee that doesn’t get work done in the office, and they’ll still not get work done remote.
Remote work isn’t a substitute for child care. Trying to work remote to pick up the slack by school and child care being remote is a disaster for everyone. It’s not so bad for kids in middle and high school, they’re more like slightly needy coworkers. But trying to help kids under 10 while working remotely is a disaster. At an early remote job, I used to joke that I had a 10 mile commute to home. I had to drive the kid to daycare 5 miles away before work.
Working remote is work. If people think they can do something else like child care at the same time, they’re thinking of it wrong. Sure, you can do laundry or meet a contractor. Save the commute time, and things you might have stepped out for are easier to integrate. But, you’re still at work and need to think of it that way.
Or you’re more likely to see a competitive advantage for companies that don’t have huge budgets for buildings, heating and cooling, workers driven to exhaustion by juggling their commute and their family lives, etc, etc. While you’re chatting in the hall, Bill is over there putting more money into his bank account and hiring away the best workers because they love the flexibility and being able to live anywhere.
This is the future. It’s happening. Stepping back to the past with feeble excuses about “collaboration” which never happened in 99.9999999% of all offices won’t change that we should be moving fast and hard in this direction. It’s good for everyone AND the environment. Win, win, winning all the way.
EDIT: And this isn’t just you I see saying these things. People in my own office have said similar things. But the proof is in the past year: we were as productive and successful, as able to create new ideas and overcome challenges, as we ever were. That’s why they’ve decided “anyone who can work from home, you’re allowed to.” Some folks can’t, but that’s the nature of our work and there’s no getting around that.
But more than that, there’s this ideology wrapped up around “work is your life, you should go to work and participate with everyone there.” Which is an old American view of work and one its past time we buried and moved away from. Life is what happens outside of work. Work pays the bills. For the majority of us who work because we need money to live, you get our efforts and that’s it. For those who live to work, good for you, enjoy yourself, but don’t foster that notion on the rest of us. We’ve got lives to get on with.
The extroverts in my company are always champing at the bit to get back together in the office and have a giant potluck. Always with the “I can’t wait to see you all again! Lol!” I’m like, fuck that shit. Other than having an abysmal work from home setup, I’m happier than I’ve ever been this past year not having to go into the office.
As an introvert it’s a great feeling to be able to have some fucking privacy (especially after the shift to the damnable open work space trend) and get work done without constant interruptions.
For all the talk about “diversity and inclusion” in tech work, neurodiversity all too often seems to be left in the dust. It’s always the Type A extrovert Chads that seem to set the pace of how the workplace functions.
Chat rooms, message boards, wikis, email lists - hell, even source repositories are all fine alternatives and have some sort of permanence. Hallway conversations are so old school and a really bad way to preserve and share precious institutional knowledge.
You mean “interruptions”?
Not really what I am getting at. “Upskilling” is a better term, as in the whole team becomes more knowledgeable more quickly. Not “Tribal Knowledge” - the use of documentation solutions I don’t think has that much to do with remote versus local work. Or at least shouldn’t.
Wiki-style documentation or other permanent knowledge repositories does this far better than a hallway conversation which is ephemeral and doesn’t scale.
Blockquote While that works for some, it’s not true for all. I’m perfectly happy without those “microinteractions” which for me are distractions…I’m not really into reading body language or other reasons people insist we have to be in the same room.
100%, definitely not true for all. There’s a lot of people - many neurodivergent - that find no value from non-verbal (or even non-textual) communication or even negative value. On the other hand, there are many people that do, perhaps most people that do. Definitely depends on the job, the people, and the culture.
Yikes! So angry and dismissive. So many nines!
Blockquote “work is your life, you should go to work and participate with everyone there.”
For some, having a clear boundary between work and home - by working at work and not at home - is a way to work to live.
I am not looking forward to resuming my 1 hour each way drives into work. My productivity is certainly going to drop as I’m no longer going to work deep into the evening also.
But hey, they’ll see me in the office and that’s what matters, right?
Swiping that one… 
Yeah, no. Most people want to go to work, do their job, and go home. That’s. About. It. I’ve worked fast food, I’ve worked in schools, I’ve worked for local government, insurance companies, investment brokers, and now a research organization. It was the same every place.
Poll after poll shows the majority people are happy working remotely and want it to continue.
Part of me is curious about how work-from-home could affect incentives for people to keep living in, or keep moving into, dense walkable cities and for cities to build more dense and more vertical. There’s a mish-mash of old articles I’ve read running through my head right now about suburbs and climate change, walkable cities and public transportation, and more, and it’s got me thinking about what kind of externalities that large numbers of people working from home might have.
Like, the articles and info swimming around in my head is about how suburbs are wasteful of energy (heating/cooling) and other resources in ways that dense apartments and cities aren’t, and that doesn’t count how people in the most suburbiest of suburbs have to commute in their cars to get anywhere, be it the grocery store, a restaurant, a shopping mall… acres and acres of subdivisions supported by huge strip malls isn’t the best thing for our carbon footprint.
I’d like for everyone to be given the option to work from wherever they live (I may not use it because I find having a separation between where I work and where I live helps me focus better), but I also fret about that kind of freedom of choice coming into conflict with what I’ve been told about how we need to tackle climate change and reduce wasteful consumption & urban/suburban sprawl.
Big tech eager to minimize remote working
Of course they are.
I might not mind working in an office. Unfortunately what they have on offer is a ridiculous warehouse with desks in it, ostensibly called an “open office”, and it’s such a nightmare that until I got headphones I was going out in the hallway to work at all.
I understand a lot of big tech companies have the same thing for some inane reason, which I think tells you how much concern about employees and even productivity are really driving their decisions.
I’ve been working from home for over a year now; I don’t miss commuting two hours there and back each day, cold office temps, forced ‘social’ interactions with co-workers, or the general ‘fake-nice’ atmosphere of the office environment.
There’s just no place like the office wherein to use the internet! /s
I am working from home too, the thing I don’t miss is commuting, having to eat in a cheap cafeteria or get some food from home, office heating. I also had, thanks the mighty Ikea, made a tiny office zone in the kitchen. But I suppose that for people with children, that don’t have the space at home going to the office is a better thing.
