I used to love going to the office. Discussing our team's latest Python problems over a coffee. Looking over at their screen and then asking them why they look like they want to beat someone over the head with their keyboard repeatedly. Guessing people's emotions in a heated Retro from their body language. Grabbing dinner with a few colleagues after a long workshop meeting in the evening and then realizing that, aside from all the differences we might have about static typing in programming languages, we all like the same exotic progressive metal bands.
Many of these things that made my job much more than slaving at a digital conveyor belt seem to be gone these days. And the worst thing for me is that I feel few people relate. On the contrary, many are screaming in outrage if asked to come to the office even for a single day a week and threaten to quit.
To provide a bit of context, I have been working in the Berlin Tech Startup scene for almost a decade. I remember thinking after the first few weeks on my entry-level job that this couldn't possible be the horrible "working world" I have seen relatives complain about all their lives. It was fun, gratifying and stimulating to learn new things, meet new people and all the while be payed for doing so and building a career.
Now, I am fully aware that there's a low of people for whom the horror of commute doesn't make up for the gains of socializing and others that just abhor having to talk to real-life people. Then there are people who work mainly to get paid and do not care to invest themselves beyond what is necessary. But are those really the majority? I always saw tech as the field where a disproportionally large amount of people truly love what they do. Mostly, because it takes so much grit and persistence to get good at it that most people wouldn't succeed unless they see something in it beyond putting food on the table.
Have I been under some weird form of Stockholm Syndrom where I actually enjoyed something that was pure torture to most? Have a lot of people realized they don't actually like being among other people, apart from their closest friends and family?
And finally, I feel no one else is realizing that they are happily hacking away at the amazingly well-paid branch they're sitting on. As soon as a company's IT department is practically fully remote, why should they page a German wage for someone who is a face on a screen, when they can pay a fraction for that same face broadcasted from a few hundred kilometers further east or south? German is hardly used in business context here anyway and lower-wage countries within ±3 hours timezones abound.
All in all, there is a gnawing feeling in me that Covid made a significant dent on the once fun (Berlin Startup) tech working culture for good. And worse, I suspect there is gonna be more consequences down the road for the tech job market at large that few people seem to see.
I know that "the office" is a bad place for a lot of people. There may be product managers that ignore the noise-cancelling headphone stop-sign and make you lose your stack of thoughts just to ask if the dev app URL is still the same it was yesterday. There can be bad managers and unpleasant situations all around. But shouldn't we rather work on fixing those things instead of making them bearable by just turning off a camera in a Zoom meeting?
From talking to friends, I feel this is a very controversial opinion to have and I don't really get why. Any help to make me understand would be greatly appreciated! And just to be clear, I absolutely do get that for some people (fresh parents, people living at home to take care of their parents etc.) remote work is a real blessing. I am just wondering if that is really the case for the majority or what it is that I'm missing.
At home, I can work in silence if I want. If I want background noise, I can play music on a stereo or turn on the TV in the next room. When my back hurts, I can lie down on the sofa, or stretch and foam roll in a way which would be conspicuous in the office. I can be barefoot all day if I want. I can snack on the food that I like enough to buy, without broadcasting the pretention of bringing my own food to the micro kitchen. I can eat healthier lunches than the office catered food. Even without considering commuting, or the amount of time spent in synchronous interactions, just being able to control my own space is sooo much more comfortable. I injured my back this year, and taking care of it has been so much easier at home than it would have been in open plan hell.
A bunch of that stuff is nominally compatible with being "in the office" -- just give me a private office, with real walls, the ability to buy my own furniture, etc. But tech long ago decided that engineers get cubicles or open plan desks, that the way you know we're working is seeing that we're looking at screens rather than seeing our actual output, that a clean modern spaceship aesthetic is more important than workers being able to control or customize their workspace. Is it that we don't value the office, or that the office has been created by people who don't value us?
Assume for a moment that working remotly and a flexible workday would have been always the default. And now some companies decide: Hey let's contractually enforce a 9 hour continuous workday where all our workers will be locked in a big ugly building that we build just for that purpose (Btw. at least one of the 9 hours will be unpaid because this is where people will have lunch. Also we won't reimburse anyone for their traveling expenses or their time spent during the commute).
Now read again the arguments you wrote to support this new idea.
You do confuse "loving what they do" with "being at the office" and "socializing during slack time". I do love my job but I do hate socializing with people, which is definitely not my job. That is why I'm working in IT, I don't have to socialize beyond the bare minimum to be successful. I think IT attracts introverts like me, and I do suspect we are the majority (but I have only anecdata for that).
> I know that "the office" is a bad place for a lot of people. [...] But shouldn't we rather work on fixing those things instead of making them bearable by just turning off a camera in a Zoom meeting?
Things have gotten worse and worse around the office. Small one- or few-person offices gave way to cubicles, which gave way to open-plan offices, which gave way to open-plan seat-lottery not-even-your-own-desk offices. No amount of pushback changed this direction in the slightest. Meanwhile noise and interruptions got worse and worse, where in my private office people knocked politely before entering or were kept out by the DND sign, nowadays the seat lottery puts me next to a loudmouthed marketing phone-drone, who when not screaming into the mic drones on about his awesome sales statistics and his new yacht. At least the boss can't easily walk over anymore and breathe down my neck because the seat lottery put him somewhere else usually. Any and all things that have been tried to fix this are band-aids and lip-service. It only got worse and worse.
WFH is great, finally a step in the right direction. I do have no sympathy for the extroverts, because they got us into the aforementioned mess.
There is nothing that will pull me out of 'the zone' quicker then hearing distractions in the office. People talking, laughing, standing in front of your desk talking about shit that has nothing to do with you.
I would often go work IN THE SERVER ROOM, just to get away from the noise and distractions that existed in the office. [Open Office layouts need to be destroyed]
So WFH means I get 2 more hours a day of ME time. I sleep in later. I have more freedom of WHEN I work. If I get a flash of inspiration to solve a problem at 1am, I can jump in and fix it.
Being able to lean back and ask my co-worker: "Hey Bob, what was thing called in NGinx that we used last week?" is much less formal then trying to articulate in a slack/teams message.
BUT, I hated being interrupted by others asking things like "..what was thing called in NGinx that we used last week?" when I could have just been asked in Teams/Slack.
So to simplify these points; If you are pro-social: WFO is better If you are anti-social: WFH is better
But I think it will become increasingly common to divide social life and work in the future. Imagine the following: You have a few good friends in Berlin and each of you work for different companies. But you all work remotely. You could rent a small office space with your friends everyone could work from there, but on different things. You can grab coffee together and talk about metal bands, you can grab lunch together, and you can get a drink after work.
I for one, would prefer this setup, then being force into a location and social life that I don't want to be part of. Sure, you can be lucky and meet great friends at work, but often times this is also temporary - people leave teams, people leave companies etc.
Funny. If I was a person from the east or south, my answer would be: Great, bring it on, share the wealth! Why should Berlin get all the best jobs?
Edit:
Incidentally, there was a now-deleted reply to my comment that made mention of the danger of a race to the bottom, and I'd add the following in response to that:
Eh, I have a less pessimistic view. For at least 30 years now we've been frightened by the spectre of outsourcing, and in the end, those fears never really materialized. Certainly a lot of work moved to India, Southeast Asia, Eastern Europe, and so forth, but it certainly hasn't come at the expense of tech in more expensive markets.
The reality is a) there's more than enough tech work to go around, and b) outsourcing is incredibly complicated for a lot of reasons that have nothing to do with the physical location of labour. There's no shortage of factors for this--regulatory differences, labour quality differences, cultural differences, communication barriers, timezone issues, etc--and Zoom hasn't magically fixed them.
Now that such a benefit is widespread, the majority of people get to design their own lifestyle for the first time ever, and they really enjoy it, instead of designing their lives around the needs of their employer (or your needs). It's not just commuting, it's moving closer to the office; its time away from family; it's cost saving conveniences because they're short on time; it's expensive lunches when they forget their brown bag; and feeling obligated to hang out with people they really just have a business relationship with (and maybe one they don't want). And yes, a lot of people's mission in life is their family, but that doesn't make them 'less than' you.
Remote workers aren't enough to outsource, outsourcing is not a new thing, it's been around for a very long time. There are a number of reasons why a company might not outsource such as tax incentives, cultural clashes, work style clashes, and logistical challenges.
I would encourage you to do some introspection as to why you think you need the office in the first place. Why do you need the social aspect of it? is something missing from your outside-of-work social life? Design your life around your own needs. Co-working spaces are still a thing, and I even go to them sometimes.
This sounds like hell to me and a way to keep someone at the office longer so work becomes more ingrained in their day to day life. I don't want work and my life so connected that I'm going to dinner with co workers.
Discussing issues? Lets do that over a video call. Works really well.
Want to socialize? Thats what my friends are for. Guess what? Since many of us work from home we can actually walk to the local coffee shop or lunch place and talk about something other than work.
Want to get dinner? I'll go with my wife and because I don't have to commute home I might able be able to get a table before 8pm.
Everything you are describing sounds like it could be solved with having friends instead of only co workers.
EXCEPT for the hiring cheaper labor in x country. But that has already been happening. It will always happen. Sometimes more, sometimes less. There are massive dev and qa outsourcing teams located across the globe. Why doesnt everyone do it? Well there are a ton of reasons but if its been happening since the 90s its incredibly unlikely that in y or yy years it become exclusively the norm.
Instead, people have simply decided that theh will WFH instead, an option which isn’t available to the majority of workers, who are generally not as privileged as the people who can WFH.
The next step will be all the WFH people who are almost certainly significantly higher earners complaining about having to pay taxes towards improving commutes and public transit which they don’t even use, so gradually public transit will get worse and/or more expensive at the turnstile, making life even worse for the largely underprivileged who don’t have the option to WFH.
The push for WFH has been approached entirely from an individual perspective, which will result in further separation between the privileged and the rest, a further rise in inequality, a further increase in social disunity and a further destruction in community.
It didn’t have to be this way. We could have approached WFH in a much more community oriented way, having people WFH but simultaneously investing in making the lives of those who don’t/cannot WFH easier as well, through investing in better public transport, etc.
You like working in an office. Cool. Go work in an office.
I don't like working in an office. Cool. I work from home.
The only thing that's changed is that we have more choice now. Like when I finally landed the first job where I didn't have to wear a tie anymore.
Listing 3-5 things in positive tone about going to the office.
Listing 3-5 things in negative tone about working remote.
It is just a point of view. Let's see how I fare:
I love not to see people wanting to bash others in the face, not having heated discussions but calm and easy to control meetings that are up to point because you cannot just speak louder over people on a remote call. Love to provide actual value instead of hanging around coffee machine and bike shedding.
I am fully aware that there are people who rather go drink beers or have coffee with their coworkers than spend time with their family or neglect house pets they got because they felt lonely even if they live in a small flat in Berlin.
Hiring people from outside EU is not that easy/cheap - you either go via intermediary that will rip you off or you will spend time/resources on finding good people. Screening/hiring people from your own country is much easier, handling any issues that may arise after you hire them is also much easier.
Granted, even on the internet I enjoy interacting with people, by reading and writing comments like this.
But real time conversations are not always enjoyable. They can be enjoyable in the right place and time, but the company office is often not that place or time.
Also you don't get to choose your office mates, and it's not uncommon to have some sort of overbearingly loud/chatty office mates who just enjoy torturing you with their stories even if you are not interested.
My social life exists outside of work, and I see "work" as an exchange of money for my time and expertise.
I really enjoyed working in the office when I didn't have kids. Hanging out with coworkers after work was pretty normal, and sometimes my wife would come along too. We're still good friends with a lot of my old coworkers. In fact, those are the people we hang out with now.
But now that I have kids I'd rather spend time with them or on my hobbies with them or hanging out with other people with kids while the kids do kid's stuff.
It's true, I don't know my current coworkers nearly as well as I did my old ones, and that's been a bit of a problem. We have occasional in person events and it's always a good time.
But that's because it's infrequent. Giving up my flexibility of working from home is something I will never do. But I totally sympathize with people who don't have kids and their social circle is their coworkers (that was me!).
I think the value of removing commuters from the road is an enormous win. Cities can be re-fashioned at the scale of pedestrians, and urban cores can be built around residential and recreational uses.
You've put your finger on the problem. It's about how people socialize.
From your text, it's clear that you've done a lot of your socializing in your job.
Many people don't. In fact, many put on a fake smile and just get on with the day.
The extra hours a day allow me to socialize with people I really like in my actual life. I've rebuild friendships that were on life support and rekindled with my partner.
Don't get me wrong, I enjoy the occasional team building exercise. I also value workplace relationships and do my best to make sure people are okay with their mental health. But I'm not out to make friends. In fact, I've always been annoyed by people who used work and the office as a way to hold their colleagues hostage in office "friendships." I'm not saying you do that.
Now everyone is free to do what they want. In our case, the office is open and the 5-10 people who were leading the office social life still go there. It's how they enjoy their workday and it's absolutely valid to do so.
All the other people who were just friendly for the sake of professionalism no longer go in and interact with others except for professional reasons.
If we lived in a world where we had complete control of our workspace (as long as we were physically present in the office) I would work in a private office with a door that locks. I would walk in every morning, work without talking to anyone, and leave in the afternoon. It would be identical to WFH except with an added commute.
For me, it's a dream.
People are too drunk on work from home having experienced it for the first time.
I have done it for years. It has its pros and cons. I agree a huge reckoning is coming for white collar work writ large. (1) It can be more easily outsourced. (2) It's easier to fire someone you don't see every working day.
I see advantages and disadvantages for both, and if we could completely ignore covid I guess I'd still hold my stance of "if the office is not too far and I see a worth in being there in person, I'd like a 2-3 or 1-4 split every week". Depends on your job I guess, with the way my team works 5 days in the office would be actively detrimental as we're basically on zoom calls with different people of the team a lot (we don't have one project/product, but several small ones).
At my company, I can work fully remote if I so desired, but I go to the office most days of the week precisely because I want to interact with other humans. Sitting alone in my room hacking at a keyboard isn't exactly emotionally fulfilling.
That said, I appreciate the flexibility. Today I didn't go because it was raining (and here I am browsing HN, haha), naturally, I feel lonely, because I have a need for that connection with others. I've had more than enough loneliness during college years.
[1] https://www.yourpsychologist.net.au/what-are-your-emotional-...
If housing in the city was more affordable and people could live a few minutes from the office, maybe they'd be more inclined to go in. Thanks to vampiric landlords who want to suck every penny out of tenants, the young people who do want to go in can only afford to live an uncommutable distance away.
This has already happened and has resulted in unification of salaries across region (and is probably why the German salaries stayed relatively low in the past decade). In Berlin, a lot of seniors are still making no more than 70k euros a year. People of similar caliber will easily make 60k euros a year in Poland, while having incomparably lower taxes and costs of living.
I have made so many good friends at work because we were meeting everyday. While I have made some good friends in remote setup too, I haven't met them outside work (working hours) ever.
However, there are people, who don't like interruptions, don't want to commute, don't want to get up early to get ready for work and I respect that. There are some valid reasons for some to work from home, it may be more productive and be able to get into the "flow" / "zone".
Future is remote, more transactional work relations and lonely. (I know, people would jump on me for saying this :)
I think of it like this - extroverts gain energy from social interaction, introverts lose energy from social interaction. Working in an office environment with all extroverts is great so long as the company's work doesn't require more introverts than it has available.
But if introverts work alongside extroverts, the introverts are essentially paying a subsidy to the extroverts in the form of their own Lebenskraft. When people got sent home, extroverts lost this subsidy while introverts stopped having to pay it. Of course, they don't want to start paying it again. Who 'wins' this power struggle is essentially a question of who has more leverage, and extroverts of course have more social capital (because gaining it is a self-renewing function for them). However, because they dislike interruptions introverts tend to do more 'deep work'[1] which makes them harder to replace in an industry like tech.
Regarding your point about attacking the branch we're on, that's valid, but I would point out that almost everyone says they want an equal playing field for the global village, and leaving 'but not if it impacts my personal standard of living in any way' unsaid at the end doesn't go over well if you do have to say it aloud. For myself, I can only say that if I can't stay competitive in the global marketplace given the advantages I'll retain in such a marketplace, I probably need to rethink my strategy.
For your personal situation - can't you find a co-working space to work alongside other extroverts in? I would imagine Berlin doesn't have a shortage of them.
For this reason, when I hear corporate taking advantage of the between-wave lull to trumpet going back to the office, it smacks to me as corporate deciding their need to see butts in seats is more important than my desire to not get sick. Long COVID is a scary thing and AFAIK we don't know any predictors for it!
If it weren't for COVID I would likely prefer to be in the office for the reasons OP lays out. (though now that COVID has happened, I think I'd try to make my commute shorter than it is now)
There's certainly a number of us where 'work from office' (WFO) really means share a vast open plan area with people and all their annoying habits.
That's why I don't want to go back. And that's why others don't want to go back. I believe the whole "I'm an introvert" thing to be mostly false for a lot of people for the reason above.
I don't mind socialising at lunch time, or in the office kitchen. But I'm paid to work, and work is code, and code is thinking. Thinking is done silently and without distraction.
But if employers want me in the office. Give me an actual office.
Where I can close the door and don't have to listen to someone eating at their desk, or some other annoying personal tic.
But I don't miss having to live hundreds of miles away from my friends and family, who live in a rural area with no tech jobs.
I am sure Berlin is loads of fun. But I'd rather be here with the mountains and the sea and the people I love.
I would worry less about this, keep coding, get more exercise and consider seeing about scheduling meetings at equidistantly located cafe's with your team for a bit of fun.
People will sort themselves into the teams who share their preference over the next 5 years.
Just like how not everyone wants to work 100 hour weeks at an investment bank, but a certain group of people want to take that deal. You self select for it.
I think this debate gaining the fervor of a religious war stems from people not wanting to have to leave their current job to obtain their WFH / WFO preference? The re-shuffling will take a few years, but if you prefer something different than the pre-COVID status quo then you should be happy the shuffling is happening.
Thinking about it more, the WFO crowd grouping themselves only with people who actually want to be there is probably better for them too. The great re-shuffling benefits all! Don't go all Spanish Inquisition on those who don't share your work arrangement preference.
I usually prefer cowork spaces, or coffee shops as a fallback. In such environments, socializing is possible, but opt-in. People around are not (usually) your colleagues. But they're still people, so if you're looking to make friends over coffee or lunch, it's available.
You also have expectation of privacy. No one looking over your shoulders and drawing conclusions. Whether your screen is filled with code for 10 straight hours (which often goes unnoticed in the office), or decide to spend your time watching YouTube clips (which may raise some eyebrows in the office), in a cowork, no one cares. It's your process, you're the adult.
> But shouldn't we rather work on fixing those things instead of...
People will be people. You can't fix that. The social dynamics are too complex. The challenge is akin to not thinking of a pink elephant.
The stuff you said for WFH people is largely a bad take.
I'm doing some volunteer work at my kid's school which would be a major hassle if working at the office. Her teacher said most years she gets 3, maybe 4 volunteers signing up. This year she got 14.
I went into tech because I fell in love with programming as a pre-teen. I love building things. I love the everyday magic of typing incantations and seeing the response on the screen.
I'm also a world-class introvert. If I never had to interact with anyone in person besides my wife and kids, I'd be a happy man.
You're conflating "I don't want to be in the office" with "I don't love my job", when in fact the exact opposite is true. I love my job more than ever now that all the parts of it that I disliked (such as my boss wandering in and starting a conversation in the middle of my flow state) are gone. And I don't think I'm alone here—most people I've met have been programming since they were kids are also extremely introverted. Whether it's cause or effect, there's a strong correlation.
People like me don't want to avoid the office because we dislike our job, we don't go into the office because it allows us to spend more time on the parts we've always loved.
Although I LOVE working remote, I sorely miss those interactions that happen at the office. I find they make me happier (being a socialite), help me build relationships that lubricate work interactions, and often are a much needed break.
However I count myself extremely lucky: my company will pay for me to fly in to HQ several times a year and put me up in a hotel and I take them up on this. I spend 1 week in the office, I plan on getting ZERO sprint work done, and I simply use that time to reconnect with my colleagues (who try to fly/drive in that same week), do group activities, planning meetings, eating out at night. It's simultaneously energizing AND exhausting.
After that week is over, I feel so much better and I fly back to my home office and find that I have a renewed sense of energy and creativity and am also much more productive with my "real" sprint work.
So I guess I get the best of both worlds! If you can get your company to do something like this, I highly recommend it. Although I know it is quite expensive.
I work as a software engineer. I love my career. I also love to work (100%) from home. It's not an imcompatible setup.
> Then there are people who work mainly to get paid and do not care to invest themselves beyond what is necessary. But are those really the majority?
I work mainly to get paid. I do read all tech books that land on my desk as well on my free time. I couldn't care less to play office politics. I love writing Go programs on my free time. I couldn't care less about discussing REST vs Graphql, Rust vs Go with office colleagues. Again, it's not incompatible.
All the fresh parents I work were the first people who wanted to get back to the office, because they have too many distractions at home. Meanwhile, I know many childless folks who have peace and quiet at home and are much more reluctant to go to an office.
The only way I survive remote work is because I now have a family. Wife, two kids, dog, couple cats. Plenty of stuff always needing to be done around the house, I can always find something to occupy me. There is always someone to talk to if I want to (the kids go to school, but my wife works from home too).
So I feel your pain. And I think there are more of us than you think, we are just not particularly outspoken. It's just not cool to have such thoughts these days, as you have noted.
Because if they are worth anything, those people will find somebody else willing to pay German wages.
Pay peanuts, get monkeys.
But work is a site of control. I think this is the source of controversy you've discovered. Even if you enjoy your work and the people you work with, it's still an obligation. It took 18+ years of conditioning to get you used to this life. Finally, workers (granted, members of the laptop class like us, already a pretty well-off group) get a bit of a say, a tad bit more control over their lives. You don't have to sit in traffic, or on a train, while your brain rots with stress. You don't have some petty asshole looking over your shoulder. You can see your family more. You can sleep more. It's quite liberating to have that choice.
From where I'm sitting, I see a big push to return to the office in the media. I get the feeling, totally unsubstantiated by evidence, that this is coming from the top. Insecure leaders who need to see their underlings typing. People who genuinely hate that they've lost some control, demanding that the serfs come in under their eye. This is neither nuanced nor totally fair, but I'm trying to evoke some feelings here, to maybe get at why this is controversial.
For me personally, if I could wave a wand, I'd choose a very short commute and 2-3 days in the office. But I also bristle at the back to the office push.
That used to be true, before smartphones arrived and before DevOps became a thing.
Now it is what it is - a lot of (mediocre or worse) people working on something they don't particularly like, in order to get by. And that's ok.
The romantic days of IT are over, there are no more heated discussions and geeky hobbies we all used to love.
I thought working from home would be great. But after I did it for 12 months, I became sick of it. What I think now is that hybrid model works for me - I can go to the office when I want to, but if it's raining outside or I feel really bad - I can stay and WFH.
For some people, full remote works. For some - full on premises works. For some - hybrid is good.
I guess this falls into de gustibus non disputandum est category, but my unpopular opinion is that IT is full of impostors and that a huge number of impostors uses work from home as incompetence disguise - because it's so easy to hide incompetence while you're away from anyone who can spot you.
It is not that I do not like going to the office (on occasion), its that going to the office degrades my life outside of the office.
Answering with only my perspectives:
Working from the office is a tilt in favor of the employer because they dictate the location. WFO is the historical norm, so until WFH is equally normalized, calls to WFO feel troubling. Given the two points, any employee support (perhaps rightly) can and has been used by employers to justify returns to office and limitations on WFH.
But ultimately, these conversations are good to have.
You sound like exactly the co-workers I want to get away from. Leave me alone, I'm working and thinking. WFH might not be fore you.That's fine. It is for me. Leave me out of your glorious vision.
I am aware of precisely zero software development companies in London that work from the office in the normal way that almost everyone did in 2019.
I can either do Zoom calls from home, or Zoom calls from the office. Barely anyone is there.
That's not WFO. That's just a waste of time, worst of both worlds.
Working from home gives me flexibility and uninterrupted heads down time (in theory) but I’m generally much more distracted.
I think people (myself included) overestimate their ability to get stuff done at home. There’s an adverse incentive, because being honest with yourself about that means you might have to go in more. But people vary. Some people are very disciplined working from home.
Hybrid is the way.
For me, WFH is all about saving 2-3 hours per day by not having to commute. Additional benefits include access to better food during the day and fewer interactions with assholes.
I hated going to office (and that's why I stopped doing it like 20 years ago).
But it's not a case of one of us being right and the other wrong, it's just that some people are more extrovert, and some are more introvert, and we simply don't enjoy the same things.
Now, being introvert doesn't mean I hate other people. I actually enjoy in daily interactions with my colleagues, and with many of them (current and ex) I'm a close friend, we (and our families) socialize outside the work regularly - but we don't need to be locked for 8h in the same building for that. Being able to do it on our own time and terms is actually much more rewarding for everyone.
- the USA's failure to provide even a single city that's pleasant to live in and travel around without a car
- tech company insistence on open office layouts that are not conducive to deep work
The first one sounds like a commute problem... but it manifests in more ways than you think. When you have to travel around in a car, everything is expensive. Parking is a pain. There's a certain amount of effort required to hop in a car, leave the parking garage for work, find a parking space near a lunch spot, etc. It's a huge financial burden in maintenance and feeding with gasoline or electricity. The economics of cars also impact how much space cities can devote to housing, how dense we can make downtowns, etc -- which has knock-on effects on housing prices and rent.
Open offices make me never want to come into the office because I can't concentrate. They're always the wrong temperature. I can't personalize my desk or my space into something that best suits me. I can't leave stuff out on my desk, or even in unlocked drawers overnight because apparently the janitor might steal Kafka secrets and sell them to competitors.
I actually like the idea of walking or biking to an office (with an actual office for me) where I can collaborate with coworkers in person. But modern society and tech companies have externalized so many costs -- car ownership, commuting time, comfort, rent -- onto workers that I'd rather just work from home. The last city I lived in had massive car theft and crime problems at night; it's not like I'd "hang out" with my coworkers for dinner downtown even if we all showed up.
Yeah. Is it going to happen? Doubtful, because it's not necessarily good for business. Most people don't go to a job because they enjoy it, but because their salary outweighs the level of suck at that job. To make things more conventionally pleasant at a job may actually make a person's job suck more overall if it means shifting focus from getting work done to appearing social.
There is definitely something to be missed from the social opportunities at working in a physical office, but the movie Office Space is a classic for a reason. If a sequel was made taking place at a remote company, somehow I don't think it would be nearly as funny. COVID may have pushed remote work along, but said remote work is still a response to even more problematic corporate culture.
> All in all, there is a gnawing feeling in me that Covid made a significant dent on the once fun (Berlin Startup) tech working culture for good. And worse, I suspect there is gonna be more consequences down the road for the tech job market at large that few people seem to see.
I've seen the same thing happen to the Los Angeles tech scene. Absolutely dead. Sure, there's a teeny tiny bit, but trust me, there used to be more going on. This will have consequences because it's much harder to network with random people than it once was.
I hate having practically no input on WHICH people I have to associate with. I hate the culture and vibe that proliferates in offices, it's like the worst aspects of a library and a cafeteria all at once. I'm tired of people acting like I have no emotional intelligence just because it's not my job to talk. I hate acting like a potted plant all day and feeling the body pains that come from sitting still and being quiet for an unnatural amount of time.
The office is not real life.
I am sure that the bad economy will drive more back to office, but then we will have to contend with all that a bed economy entails.
I am taking this period as a sabbatical from the industry, but hope it will come back with a better balance when the economy starts to turn upwards.
Working late occasionally, or more often just spending time with colleagues I was also friends with after work; and hacking away in close collaboration with them during working hours, taking long lunches and talking through tech problems. It was a really thrilling and enjoyable part of my life!
But everything (even sweet things) comes to an end. The CEO was a sales guy and eventually tech debt languished under the weight of one-off features, and one of my closer mentors took off to start his own startup. I got married and stopped coming in to the office as frequently, eventually I found a new job. Full time remote (though we offsite 4 times a year together).
I’ve been happy the entire time. Working at that small startup was great in the office. Working at this larger and more mature tech company with an incredible fully remote culture has also been great.
As is the answer for so many tech questions: “it depends”.
A lot of us work as part of a team. It's nice for a teammate to be able to work anywhere they want, anytime they want, but when I am dependent on work from them to complete mine and they are unavailable that's a problem. For WFH to truly be successful there need to be team agreements about how to handle this. Me being able to just walk up and destroy their flow is no worse than me not being able to proceed if they aren't available.
Some of us (myself included) would like to have some amount of separation between work life and home life. The first few months of COVID confinement felt freeing, but over time I got annoyed that the room I went to to have fun on my computer was my "work" location, and every night when I went to go to bed I walked by "work" and on the weekend, I walked by "work" all the time or used my computer at "work". I, for one, would like this not to be every single day I'm at "work"
I don't know if you're aware, but good devs in Poland, Ukraine or Romania are practically being paid western EU wages by now.
And when it comes to people who are outside EU: There's definitely talented people but experience from my 10y+ of working is that shared cultural understanding is as important. That's why hiring devs from several timezones away doesn't often work, even if they're talented and cheaper.
BTW. On my side, living in France, I doubled my salary by starting to work remotely. Quite likely you can also find better paying jobs than your current one that are full remote. (Now, France outside of Paris is generally severely underpaying, and probably in Berlin wages are higher; but still there are companies paying higher than std Berlin wage on full remote).
It's not controversial to have an opinion. If you prefer to work in an office with a lively social atmosphere and your current work environment has changed to the point where that isn't realistic, then what prevents you from finding a new place where that is valued?
You have to find the room or virtual room you want to be in.
Because for them it is nothing but useless waste of their time.
>"Have a lot of people realized they don't actually like being among other people, apart from their closest friends and family?"
I like being around friends (not necessarily closest) but on my own terms, when I feel like it and they're in a mood as well. Liking it because you have no option but be there from 9 to 5 - sorry, I have better things to do with my life. I suspect that there are enough people that have the same feeling.
>"horror of commute doesn't make up for the gains of socializing"
Socializing can and is being perfectly achievable outside of the office. If one can't find people to talk to outside of work - it indicates a bigger problem I think. I am not against having coworker friends but in my view it is just an extra, usually I prefer to find people elsewhere.
I'm in the hybrid camp: most of the time at home, then one or two days at the office to catch up, attend the important meetings/workshops in person, and debate about the new tech du jour. These days at the office feel much more like an offsite than a regular day at work and I look forward to seeing my colleagues. Obviously, the daily productivity takes a hit but I'm certain that the weekly productivity is better than either full remote or full office.
Wanting to be around other people is normal. Wanting to work from home is also normal. Wanting to occasionally flip between the two is normal.
Employers can and should enable both.
Have a kid, then you’ll be happy you work remotely and won’t miss other people.
Once people get older and have families, I feel like they prioritize that over the social aspect of work. So they like remote.
Whereas younger people kind of want to do more socializing at work. So they may prefer going in (and commuting doesn’t feel so bad when you haven’t been doing it for years or decades)
You know what is even better than wearing noise-cancelling headphones and not being interrupted? Not having to wear them at all because there simply is no noise nor any source of interruption.
This seems to be the take of most people that want to go to the office. It's an insulting take. No wonder I don't want to see your face in the office if that's what you think of people that prefer working from home.
To me it seems like all the things you like about the office that you listed above are things you are supposed to get out of having friends. Have you tried that?
Based on my understanding, there aren't a plethora of opportunities to outsource work cheaper than good German devs.
I say this having worked for a German company with some excellent developers. Hiring a good developer from India would actually cost a German company more than hiring one from Germany (even if it's a remote job).
This question is definitely relevant to U.S. workers though, but I think the U.S.-based companies preferring workers in their own time zones prevents cheaper off-shore remote alternatives from being hired en masse.
I think it's important to keep personally connected to your team - and while I feel that should be possible with WFH as well, it seems like the online tools we use aren't really up for it though. We tried having coffee together using video chat... but there's always friction.
Even on the rare occasion where nobody drops out of the call, has their voice go all robotic, lags horrifically or turns into a mush of compression artifacts - you still just sit in front of a grid of floating faces... there must be ways to improve that!
So, it's because of people like you that we cannot have nice things. You see, a decent company will pay the same salary regardless of location. The only thing that matters: skills.
It's weird that so many assume that it's either physically in the office yucking it up or just completely disconnected and not using any internet communication tool at all.
Why not suggest something like a Discord server with a voice channel? Or try the new Meta Quest Pro for like a fifteen minute meeting every day. Or any of the various projects related to making remote work more social.
Or set up a weekly real life meeting at a coffee shop. Or playing some game online like Rainbow Six Siege. Or anything.
We are operating in a legacy mode of operation where those people were mixed up because it didn't matter - there was only one way of working so the fact that it was worse to some people than others was irrelevant.
I think the 'mixed' mode we're in now is probably a transition phase. Companies will move towards being more one or the other and employees will gravitate to companies whose ethos matches their own.
My guess is that we are giving up more than we realize by losing the actual human interaction. Same way that being glued to our phones keeps us from interacting with people. Not sure how this ends, but guessing "not well".
I'm 50 years old and my career is very much winding down. And I'm extra-glad about that given what tech work has become.
That additional hour or two a day that you can spend with your family might end up being worth more to you than the prospects of social life and building a carreer with other like-minded people.
I really agree with the sibling comment about people having different perspectives and priorities. Perhaps you could find what you're missing somewhere else instead of trying to convince your colleagues to come back to the office?
Sorry, I think most likely your old in-person workplace really is gone for good.
It sounds like you just need to find a company that's a bunch of extroverts who like working together. I get that part of your point is that it seems like a lot of those companies suddenly went remote and introverted, but, I don't think there's a lot to be done about that.
Alternatively, you could look for this kind of camaraderie outside of work, maybe at dev meetups, hackerspaces, or local volunteering.
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The WFH/WFO debate reminds me a lot of code style debates where the choices are deeply personal and no one choice will make enough people happy to really "win". In these kinds of situations, I think we need to take a step back and let people choose what works for them. In the case of code style debates, that's running your own personally-configured code formatter on your local machine whenever you check something out, and having pre-commit hooks to format it in the "company" style whenever you commit something.
In the WFH/WFO debate, it sounds like the best thing to do is let people find the kind of working environment that works for them. Trying to convince people that your way is objectively best is a losing proposition.
> Grabbing dinner with a few colleagues after a long workshop meeting in the evening
You can still do this! If you're close to any coworkers, leave the bubble of home and go out to eat. (Attendance will tell you how many people really wanted to be there) Alternatively, you can blend this with friends and partners along with coworkers.
> Discussing our team's latest Python problems over a coffee
You can still do this. Even over zoom. And hopefully not just talking about python.
> Then there are people who work mainly to get paid and do not care to invest themselves beyond what is necessary.
You can try to hire people that are more candid - or just be the shining example of someone eager to listen. (This is also true of all environments)
I hate commuting. It's wasteful and pointless.
I have many sensitivities that are difficult to manage in a busy environment. Managing them is distracting and cuts down the amount of productive time I can use in a day. When I'm at home or in a small office I get more done and feel less stressed out at the end of the day.
I don't spend as much time and effort making social connections through work as other people do. I'm past the point in my life where I need to make connections and instead prefer to focus on those I have and matter most to me: my children, my partner, my life-long friends and neighbours and my extended family.
Not commuting means I don't have to be exhausted and lose hours of my life each day waiting to get somewhere else.
Not being in an office means I don't have to wear noise-cancelling headphones, feel the stress of sitting under florescent lights, and all of the chaos from all of the scents. I can be in an environment that is conducive to me and feel "normal."
Not being in an office means I can work in my yard, surrounded by my garden, and listen to the birds. I can take a break and read a book with my cat. I can go for a walk to my local cafe and hear the latest gossip from the barista. I can drop my kids off at school in the morning. I don't have to own a gas-powered vehicle. I can just live where I am and not be pressured to be anywhere. That's a very nice thing to have and it has made my life 1000x better.
Over time I'm hoping the workforce will redistribute somewhat so that more office folks join the same pro office companies. For myself I'd prefer to join a company that has some office community even if it's a hybrid company.
I really don't think any job in the honeymoon phase is going to be soul crushing like most people that complain are complaining about. It's when you are at that job for years and you are one or more of the following: underpaid, undervalued, understimulated, hostile work politics, no promotion path, no ownership, micromanaging, irresponsible deadlines, herculean deadlines because of mismanagement, underworked, overworked, etc.
pick your poison but it's almost never apparent when you are a few weeks in what is lacking at said job(if any). I do enjoy going into the office but it does also grind on you when you have to commute every day for a substantial part of it, and you have the monotony of it all.
of course not every job is like that but the ones that are exhibit those traits imo.
Its a job, not a social club and if I could do anything else I would.
Tech also attracts a disproportionate number of introverts who would rather work by themselves then interact with other people. Have you considered that maybe people want to work from home because it allows them to focus on their work better? That they do love what they do, but the social interaction and noises in the office distract them from that?
> Have I been under some weird form of Stockholm Syndrom where I actually enjoyed something that was pure torture to most?
No, of course not. But just because something is enjoyable to you doesn't mean it isn't torture for someone else.
> Have a lot of people realized they don't actually like being among other people, apart from their closest friends and family?
Yes. There are a lot of people like that. It's called being an introvert. And for many, including myself, it isn't some sudden realization, we have just had to endure going to the office because that is the way the world worked. But the normalization of WFH finally allowed us to work in an environment that is better for us.
When your social interaction is limited to time before meetings start, you lose a lot of what you had in an office. I personally have never worked a job where I didn't like at least a few of my coworkers, and I always felt like it made my days a bit more fun when I could stop by Chris's desk to chat before we grab a cup of coffee.
Remote work attempts to emulate that, but a video call can have one real speaker at a time, where a physical room can have multiple side conversations that don't interrupt each other. We've done off sites and those are a blast since I finally get to talk to my coworkers in person, but those are obviously temporary.
All that said, I love remote work. I love that I can move back to my home town with low cost of living and be paid the same as I do working in a higher COL area. I love having no commute, and I love slipping out to do async tasks like laundry.
I feel like the social fix I'm looking for can be answered another way, but I don't know how.
Don't take it the wrong way: it's you. You are looking for friends.
You dont have to "slave at the digital conveyor belt" you are there to work. You are not there to substitute your private live.
Now what im not saying is that during your 8 work hours your arms and feet should form a rotating disc, but you know -its work-
And further more, ESPECIALLY IN BERLIN, people dont like remote workers too much and i have a list of startups in my linkedin, who would like it very much that i would be there in person.
Most of us are extremely happy that we can work from home that we DO NOT have to endulge the Self centered manager who after working 10 hours straight, would like you to have dinner with them because they are bored(and you agree because of social protocol and future potential maybe promotions).
Remote working is not dodging the commute, that is only really tiny part of it. Remote working is cutting out all the bullshit and focusing, you know, on the work.
While freelancing you go through a lot of clients over the years and would you like to know when we waste the most time? In the onboarding phase where a (middle) manger is checking out if you have actually not fallen on your head as a child.
Finally adressing the "face on the screen that can be replaced" imagery: you can be replaced as a person too. Just because you phsycially hang around somewhere does not mean you are any safer if you do not perform.
There is no gold at the end of your remote working rainbow, because you are actually looking for friends, which naturally works better in person.
- "Discussing our team's latest Python problems over a coffee" -- the problems I have to work on at work I am not at all interested in talking about. They are boring.
- "Looking over at their screen and then asking them why they look like they want to beat someone over the head with their keyboard repeatedly." -- I'm sure you are a lovely person, but I would find that very annoying. I am socially anxious and don't like attention being drawn to me in an open office
- "Grabbing dinner with a few colleagues after a long workshop meeting in the evening" -- holy shit, workshop meetings suck. I don't want to be stuck in a tiny, smelly, windowless room with 5 other guys for 3 hours, and then also spend my free evening time with them.
- "Have a lot of people realized they don't actually like being among other people" -- for 8+ hours a day, in an open office with no respite from them? YES!
Some are in-office, some are remote. As far as I can see, all of them seem roughly as happy and roughly as successful.
To be honest, I prefer the office. At my company we all work from the office. So it looks like people self-select into these categories and so it's all for the best.
In-office people work with in-office people. Flexible work people work with flexible work people.
Any company that thinks this way is a company I don't want to work for because they are incredibly short sighted. Assuming "1 developer" = "1 developer" is so incredibly stupid. Developers (all humans for that matter) are not interchangeable cogs in /any/ industry (and yes, I'm including factory workers). Some jobs might be able to slot in a different person with less disruption but there is always disruption, for a developer this is massive. Even if bean counters think it doesn't matter, reality will slap them upside the head (or more realistically the company since these short sighted thinkers often hop away before the consequences come back to bite them).
Shared language/culture/understanding/rapport is so important that I would hire a "1x" dev over a "2x" dev if I got along better with the "1x" dev. The argument that I'm replaceable by someone in a cheaper country has never held water for me, I've seen first-hand outsourcing fail miserably time after time. The top-tier talent in those "cheaper countries" demands top-tier rates but for businesses who think "1 developer" = "1 developer" will also hire the bottom of the barrel talent then act surprised when productivity falls of a cliff once what was already in the pipeline runs out.
So while I can't quite buy any sunny version of the act of "going to work," I do feel like something is missing. Maybe the miserable aspects were "character-building." The whole thing reminds me of recent high school graduates who are disoriented by the realization that their formerly rich social life was unnatural and enforced.
I think remote work is here to stay and I'm personally glad for it. But perhaps your opinions would sound less "controversial" if you framed what you feel you're missing out on as a mysterious je ne sais quoi of workplace life. I would never say, "Yeah, I miss seeing my coworkers every day," but I probably would say, "Yeah, sometimes I have an odd sense of Stockholm Syndrome for those freaks." And maybe creating a space to talk about that feeling is important.
To me at the end of the day people are optimizing for time and money. If we make offices more convenient and cheaper than working from home people will pick that option. But right now if you move to a cheap city and work from home that is the cheapest option with least commute by far. i hear a lot of chatter from vcs who think startups that work in person have an advantage, but in big companies maybe the calculus is different.
In the end remote work is here to stay, but companies will make the best business decision in the end whether that means seeing better results by paying people more to stay in office or getting outcompeted by companies that hire globally and remotely.
I'm always very torn between WFH and WFO because both have immense upsides and downsides and I can't really tell which I'm rooting more for. I also don't want to discuss these because it'll lead to nowhere.
> But are those really the majority? I always saw tech as the field where a disproportionally large amount of people truly love what they do. Mostly, because it takes so much grit and persistence to get good at it that most people wouldn't succeed unless they see something in it beyond putting food on the table.
Just wanted to comment that I somehow feel the same (also a fellow German) if I would've to spend 8 hours a day as a big part of my life with something I don't care about or have some kind of passion I would get depressed and immediately change profession or look for the things I enjoy and try to earn money that way.
My previous role had a hybrid policy WFH 3 days and then from the office. To a large extent it really didn’t matter where you worked, so long as work got done. I however rarely WFH. My office was about a 15 minute walk from my where I lived, that commute was never a challenge for me. I even used different routes sometimes just to walk a bit more. I did enjoy the occasional developer discussions as well, I was almost always in the office.
Fast forward working for new company now and I hated commuting to work. Having to sit through traffic is a complete waste of my time imo. After a few weeks I had renegotiate my schedule with my employer. If WFO becomes a hustle in doesn’t benefit any party.
Getting work done should be more important than being at work. Employers should be able to trust that employees will execute. Also always being at the office wouldn’t save my bum if my employer wants me gone. People should have the peace of mind needed to work.
You clearly have no close family, otherwise we wouldn't have this thread at all, simple as that. I've become parent of 2, 1 right before covid, 1 during. It took over my whole world and some (significantly some) more. I used to do tons of adrenaline/adventure sports in the mountains, now I do practically 0. I don't complain, life is about priorities.
Even if I didn't have kids, I wouldn't waste more time in the office than necessary (which is now 2 days/week). I would be enjoying life proper, which definitely doesn't happen in front of screen and on meetings. I've met people like you, but you are truly a tiny minority, most folks do IT for money and the fact they can't do any white collar profession outside it, and money are too good. Stop paying them, 0% will ever come again. Would you?
I've been working strictly remotely for 15+ years, and it takes a toll on you. When you couldn't socialise even with your close circle during the pandemic, it really burnt me out.
I do feel like hybrid is the sweet spot, or, at the very least, fully remote with 3-4 actual real-life meetups every year! That's when I enjoyed remote work the most, and if I had a local office to go to with a couple of other friends, that was even sweeter. All of that with the caveat that people do differ, and commute times need to be <15 minutes for them to be bearable (if we are talking hybrid; doesn't matter for 3-4 meetings a year).
I do think you are off on one point:
> why should they page a German wage for someone who is a face on a screen, when they can pay a fraction for that same face broadcasted from a few hundred kilometers further east or south?
Assuming you mean "pay" instead of "page", remote IT jobs have seen equalisation of compensation like no other field. This has raised salaries locally as well. I don't know exactly about the countries you refer to (I guess Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia are the ones you hint at), but in Serbia, which has a lower average salary than those countries, I've recently mostly worked for a yearly gross salary around 100k €, which is relatively high even for Germany AFAICT. This has also led to increase in local salaries (because software engineers have an option of working remotely for significantly more if local salaries don't follow suit), where local net monthly salaries of €5k are not unheard of (which is probably like €9k before taxes). "IT professionals" are, on average, paid better than any other profession in Serbia, including managers and financial sector workers.
Nope. We're all scattered over multiple teams where most of the people in that team are working directly for the client. A client that is stationed in a completely different country. Out of all the people the manager wants to see in the office only one person is someone I directly work with. The rest of the people from my team I will most likely never see in person, since they live abroad.
So, the value proposition for coming to the office is something like:
1) Lose an hour of sleep
2) Waste nearly two hours trying to commute using public transportation OR half of my daily wage by using taxi/Uber to save an hour of commute time
3) Sit in the open space office for 8 hours having no privacy whatsoever and being distracted by people who I do not even work with
4) Do all my work with a team who is stationed in an another country anyway, so I need to constantly use MS Teams or something similar to communicate
5) Spend significantly more on food (can't really cook for myself in the office) or have to go through the mess of packaging my own food (and never really have it as fresh as I want)
If I agree to come to the office on the regular I will do the same stuff I do at home, except I will spend more of my own time and money to do so. And all of that for what, some random conversations over coffee? Spending time with people I am not sure I want to be friends with? Pretending I will collaborate with that one other person more effectively? It makes no sense.
If they want me in the office they better give me a really good reason to do so. Reimbursement of time and money lost commuting would be a good start.
I'll admit I miss the camaraderie, but when I look back on places I've worked, how many of those were my actual friends and not just people I've worked with? I look at remote work as a way to acknowledge in my own life what really matters, and it's more the time I have with people I love. Not until the past two years did I really understand the execs who "made it" and then quit to just be a ski bum or open a coffee shop... but being one of the execs who "made it" absolutely makes me just want to quit and be a ski bum or coffee shop.
Friendly reminder that wages east of Berlin aren't really that bad anymore. Senior engineers in eastern Europe can count on ~€65k annually at current exchange rates.
We returned to the office part-time recently, and the sentiment of ‘I’d forgotten how great it was just seeing everyone in person!’ is often expressed. I’ve certainly felt it.
Would be interested to hear if that’s a common thought amongst folks here who’ve also returned.
You should try having fun and making friends outside of work. I suppose you can connect with IT people in meetups for example for OSS.
> As soon as a company's IT department is practically fully remote, why should they page a German wage for someone who is a face on a screen, when they can pay a fraction for that same face broadcasted from a few hundred kilometers further east or south?
I personally wouldn't want to be paid for being "A German physically present" - I prefer it if my skills are valued at my job. If your job is just showing up in the daily and spewing out some code from a ticket, then maybe you should take perspective on that. I think most of the positions that are like that, are already filled by foreign workers. There is so much more to a developers job than that, and mostly everything can be done remotely with a minimum of effort.
1. I am passionate about my work, both the process and the product, I'm an essential contributor, I care about my coworkers personally, and I do everything in my power to help my team succeed.
2. I come into the office every day.
In my opinion, these things just have no connection to each other. The company doesn't need me in the office. My coworkers don't need me in the office. My manager doesn't need me in the office. If any of these people or organizations think they need me in the office, they should explain why. Then I will tell them why they are wrong, because they are wrong. They can fill whatever hole my absence from the office left with other things, and they can do so much more easily than I can waste 2 hours a day commuting that is better spent on my family.
When you suggest having mandated WFO time, no matter how little, you suggest taking away some of their freedom. People tend to not like their freedoms being taken away.
And… Don’t worry about Eastern Europeans taking your job. In a WFH world they don’t have to settle for Berlin salaries.
EDIT: If you’re serious about social cohesion, do cool retreats and events. Having actual adventures make people bond more than water cooler chitchat.
On one hand, I am getting paid over 2x what local companies would pay me, the convenience and flexibility are wonderful WFH, I get to spend more time with my family, etc.
On the other hand, I miss all the things you listed. Plus I’m an advocate of eXtreme Programming, which means pair programming all the time. Pair programming with people who have very different schedules, time zones, etc is difficult.
So for now I’m working from home and trying to recreate some of the things you’ve listed. I work from a friend’s house regularly. I get lunch with former coworkers once a week. I’m active in our local tech community and we have meetups once a month, local conferences, etc. I work from a coffee shop sometimes just to have a change of scenery. It isn’t perfect, but it’s better for me
I would push back on your implication that "lonesome engineers just need to be forced to socialize" because that is not really the point and there is nothing wrong with have the preference and ability to work remotely.
I also think you are massively under-appreciating the value add of working in a walkable urban environment. I think we would all agree here that no matter how effective your home office setup is, you are essentially in a "bubble" that insulates you from interaction with the world. Leaving that bubble to commute to a slightly larger office-bubble is very different from leaving it for a good city.
My current salary accounts for competition from elsewhere. Could it be higher with no remote working? Yes. Might it be an issue for people in junior positions? Possibly.
For me, this is not hacking away at a well-paid branch because I've been in situations where we've had outsourced teams in low paid countries and my employer still opted to pay as much for me - 100% remote - as for a team of five in a lower paid country, and being close enough for the occasional in person meeting also serves as a barrier to outsource more.
Instead of anyone trying to meet in the middle, it seems more optimal for companies (or teams/departments) to say, hey, this job position is going to be permanently remote/hybrid/in-person. Remote employees can work from the office if they want, but it won’t be expected. Similarly totally in-person people can work from home occasionally, with exceptions.
There just doesn’t seem to be any point in arguing that people who don’t like remote work should, or vice versa. A lot of these conversations turn into holy wars where people say there’s something inherently wrong with a preference one way or the other, and I don’t see why.
Of course the commute wasn't always fun, but it was the norm, there was really no notion of remote work at the company and many other companies either.
Every person is different, but so is also every company and every office. If you don't have that close co-workers or never go out after work or go to lunches, and/or the office is super noisy and large and annoying and from a long distance, obviously you would prefer remote work at that point.
For a lot of people, certainly in my case, the benefits of remote far outweigh the benefits of in person. At least in the US public transportation is either nonexistent or so bad it's not even worth using which means we have long commutes. Hours a day in some cases so moving to remote work immediately frees up dozens of hours of free time per month. Lots of folks in IT have ASD or something close to it and noisy chaotic offices make it impossible to do focused work.
In any case there are certainly plenty of Companies that are back to fully in person so why not just work for one of those? No one is forcing you to stay remote if you don't want it.
- the office is almost always in the middle of a larger city, no nature nearby
- the office is almost always an open office space that is depressing as hell
- the office is hard or expensive to go to due to it's central location
- I am not allowed to bring my dog to the office
- the screens at the office has low resolutions and my desk is most likely located in a depressing part of the office and not by a window with a view
- the commute sucks and I have to go up 1,5 hours earlier because that I need to look nice and fresh and I get no reward other than perhaps some colleagues to speak to during my 30 minute lunch break
That's why I chose remote every day and hate going to the modern office.
No, buddy, just people like you.
If you really feel your job is slaving at a digital conveyor belt if you can't socialize with coworkers/friends, I just don't know what to say.
No offense, but you kinda sound like an asshole.
I've never liked working at the office, and the pandemic is not the first time that I've worked remotely for years at a stretch.
I resent the idea that, after working 40 hours a week (when your employer is not pressuring you to work 60, 80, or more, which is a whole other story), I'm supposed to spend the remaining time voluntarily hanging out with my co-workers. After a "long workshop meeting in the evening" (puke and double puke), if you want me to stick around for dinner, you'd better have brought a gun. I do actually hang out with my co-workers--the ones I like. I don't need my work to set my social calendar for me.
"There may be product managers that ignore the noise-cancelling headphone stop-sign", in the sense that there may be water in the ocean. And it's not just PMs, there are plenty of coders who see nothing wrong with looking over at someone's screen and asking why "they want to beat someone over the head with their keyboard repeatedly". Please don't do this. At least not to me. If I'm that mad already the last thing I need is someone interrupting my train of thought.
I wouldn't worry too much about outsourcing. People have been freaking out about it for 20+ years, and there's still plenty of jobs to go around. US programmers don't have a lot of trouble finding work, even as high as salaries for devs are here. (Of course, you can't do completely equal salary comparisons between the US and other countries, because of health insurance).
Finally, on a side note:
> we all like the same exotic progressive metal bands
IDK if this is your idea of "exotic" but in case you hadn't heard, Opeth is playing the Admiralspalast next month.
But not everybody likes these lifestyle choices. And most people have 'jobs' by necessity, to make 'a living' not just for themselves, but also their family and relatives. Unlike a hobby or play, this involves doing things under constraints they do not like and can't afford to just run away from.
This does not mean they must be obviously any less good or effective at their job. I've had strict 9-5'ers that were 10x'ers, and no-life office rats that loved the place but had near 0 net contribution. I does mean that they consider a significant, if not the most part of their 'life' to be outside of 'work' or 'the office'. That 'life' was always momentously impacted by 'the office' thing, even far beyond the dreaded commute unless you sacrificed your desired living place for 'living near the office'. Anything that otherwise takes a few minutes, taken a delivery, having maintenance done, getting the kids from school and fed, was made impossible by you being physically not near.
Technological roll-outs made remote possible. The pandemic drove widespread adoption. People discovered that 'the office' was no longer a necessary evil you just had to accept. After the pandemic, not just were they not keen to return, but they started to discover that they gained so much more social options thanks to non work time having significantly boosted. (ditching a 2 hour commute does nearly double your daily free time).
So it is very natural for this to be a very sensitive topic for most. If you truly want to work on 'fixing those things instead of making them bearable', compete on a level playing field and create an office people would pay for to work at, not force them through other means.
One last point: Your 'office' will not protect you from being de-localized. Even before tele-work, the offices used to move to the lower wages whenever they could. Your skill differentiation will have to be what saves you.
For me one day a week in the office seems like a good balance.
Other than that my office experiences are nothing like this. Place feels designed mostly for social control with its open plan offices and daily status meetings. it feels pretty oppressive. It's not fun and I'd rather stay home. What you get instead is people, even those in leading positions, claiming to be sick when they're not. I believe that's appealing and demoralising behavior btw, but it's what happens.
Maybe if people were better than they are then it wouldn't be such a big issue.
Most companies would allow for a day or 2 per week, but not much more. And I did not hear many complaints about it: my colleagues are also all happy to be here together. It was the same in my previous company.
Maybe it's heavily dependent on your company and I just got lucky (to our terms) where I was.
Working from the office will not protect you from this. Quite the opoosite, having an office makes Germany much more expensive (and therefore more likely to be outsourced). Have you seen how crazy expensive real estate in large German cities are?
Having said that, as someone who really enjoyed the startup scene + offices (in Tel Aviv) I now enjoy a lot more my work being remote. I feel I have enough social circles I need to maintain as of now, and I don't need more people to have deep connections with. I can now be effective at my work, while spending the extra time I have with the existing connections (family, close friends) instead of commuting, going to an office which binds me to new social circles which can be awesome, but it means less time for existing ones.
On business/project level:
Every project I've been on last 10-15 years had been geographically heterogeneous. I find such projects are working much better and more efficiently now. Instead of 2 classes of citizens, those who are in one of the main offices and those who are in satellite offices, we now all have to put in the effort and system to communicate, and we do. We're all first class citizens and all professionals who get work done and are aware of what's going on and what the process is. I dread going back to the hybrid office and the hated phrase "You guys on the phone won't see this, but we're sketching something on the whiteboard here", or when people ignore process or break stuff because 3 guys in a cubicle decided & did something and left other 100 people behind, etc.
On a personal level:
People come in variety of personalities, stages, circumstances, and preferences. You are not under stockholm syndrome for missing office any more than those who don't miss the office.
Personally, I don't miss the commute; I don't miss the inflexibility of hours; I don't miss the noise and distractions; and as per above, I don't miss the confusion that cliques in office can inadvertently create. I miss seeing some of the co-workers, but guess what - option to see them still remains. I spend a lot of time on video calls and phone, and feel I know and relate to my co-workers, with some of them even becoming friendly.
As for wages, sure... but there's no moral "right" I see to artificially inflate my salary due to made up benefits of being in an expensive office building. Either I bring something tangible to the table that's worth the money, or I don't. As well, I'm not convinced "body in the office" was ever any real benefit of local talent.
So, you're not alone by any stretch; and most executives for whatever reason are gung-ho on return to office. But for the project I'm currently on, I anticipate at least 20% drop in efficiency and effectiveness once that happens, and am planning mitigation strategies for my teams.
My 100 Croatian Lipa :)
The knowledge just does not propagate and all the colab apps in the world will not help if you have 3 shifts. Virtual meetings with cams off or even on, you dont know if the people follow.
I dislike paying for an office but it seems unavoidable.
I dont think half the team is doing nothing , I know for sure, seen the dev commits etc. And if they do something, they do not do it right or efficiently, despite procedures written down to the t and many training.
> the noise-cancelling headphone stop-sign
If the larger issues here were fixed maybe more people wouldn't be so dead set on never setting foot into an office.
Rip up most of the zoning laws and keep things dense with a lot of light rail to get people into the office and more people might find the commutes tolerable. Kill off the suburbia 45 minute single occupancy vehicle hell that most cities are build around these days in America.
Stop with the open office plans that for over a decade studies have been showing to do nothing more than increase distraction.
PS: European as well
I feel the same way, and also see that lots of people see it as a means to an end and respect that. So if nothing else I feel a little better reading your post and seeing there are other people out there who live for this shit :).
There are people who hate commute, and at the same time do care, and "invest themselves beyond what it necessary". It just happens that they don't want to invest themselves in their commute.
So my personal preference is (1) WFO for a Bay Area company in a non-Bay Area office to combine good comp and good quality of life, (2) WFH remotely, (3) WFO in the Bay Area, and lastly (4) WFH in the Bay Area.
I like the office—well, some offices anyway—quite a bit better but I don't like it to the tune of 200-400 hours per year and thousands to tens of thousands of dollars.
1. The daily commute, especially commuting with a large amount of people at the same time 2. Having to live in a city I don't want to live in with ridiculous rent 3. Having to be in the office when I don't need to be there and do busywork that was more tiring than real work
I think Hybrid is a decent model for most and very natural. I also think there's more space for satellite offices at major cities and interval-based offsites or informal work trips and syncs.
Don't get me wrong, I enjoy office work as well, but I realise that I'm not the youngest anymore and the world is changing, and it's not driven by my generation any more. It sucks to be a minority.
I've been WFH for nearly a decade. I invest in myself by keeping my skills sharp working on personal projects and having a social circle that is made up of a wide range of people not just tech enthusiasts. I invest in myself by not making me only what I do for a living.
Do I work just to get paid? Hell yes. If I didn't need money I'd only work on my personal projects.
Outsourcing was happening long before the pandemic. If a company wanted to outsource work to cheaper devs they've been able to for decades. There's nothing about WFH that changes that.
Now I'm in my 30's remote working is more of advantageous for my lifestyle (but not my waistline). I do miss the community aspect of the office.
Short answer: yeah, pretty much.
Or at least a large enough percentage to affect most companies’ retention.
I love remote working, but I also agree with you to some extent. Working in the office is awesome when you are working with genuinely smart and passionate people. It can be fun, very stimulating, and some extremely high quality work can get done.
Unfortunately, the benefits of WFH are just massive and they outweigh that in-person magic for most people.
I loved the idea of allowing more remote work. It seems people on both sides of this debate don't want to admit there's a grey area. There's pros and cons to both. Not to mention, so much disingenuous discussion.
I live (moving ASAP) in Northern Virginia where a drive into DC could be between 30-1hr. That's 2 hrs a day on the road. 2 * 252 = ~500 hrs of just driving. Insanity to me (hence why I'm moving).
I will just add an anecdote that at my company (Google) the office life has returned back to something like normality and I find myself talking with my deskmates, going to lunch, etc quite often. Perhaps the issue is with the company you work for and the answer would be to move to a less-remote friendly company.
Hasn't this already been going on for years, even before COVID?
I'm not sure how long the good days are going to last but I don't have a good feeling about this.
People who like being exclusively in-office work for company x, people who want only remote company y, people who like hybrid company z, etc.? I feel like there are a million possible legit reasons to prefer different modes, and now there are more choices available.
Asking people to work from home was a significant raise for many people. All of the sudden, commute costs vanished, and people often gained another hour or more they could work.
It was also a huge savings for companies that could stop paying rent and other office costs (as mine did).
You want all the employees, and the company, to pay a massive tax so you can socialize and enjoy work more. You shouldn't be surprised there is resistance to this idea.
Also hated the often pointless meetings/standups where that one coworker who never shuts the hell up rambles on forever and the person in charge doesn't do a damn thing about it.
Was it hard to find a quiet place to work at home? Yes. Did I eventually after setting up shop in a greenhouse, then at a family members house, then in a camper/rv. It’s possible.
Is in person interaction “good”. Sure. Is it better than the alternative. Nobody has proven that.
Corporations want control, and they are under the control of municipalities which was tax money for meals, coffees, parking tickets, the tailor, public transit, gas etc. I strongly believe that is what is driving talk of coming back. That and commercial real estate interests. Where does all that money go now? We decide, and we want to keep it that way.
Was open office layouts a crap show? Yes. Did it make us feel like our own voices weren’t heard (over others). Yes. We take that back now.
Do we want to waste time on commutes if we have a place in the country that’s comfy and doesn’t expose us to long commute times in subpar conditions, exposure to the flu and loud talkers and interrupt driven people? No.
Does in person help people who haven’t already done a 20 year slog of going into the office. Historically looking back sure maybe. But we evolve to the conditions.
There was zero reason why I couldn’t do my job remotely for the last 20 years. But management had their way.
Now the tables have turned, I’d say adapt, move away from the city, get some elbow room, and relax and enjoy. That’s what the rest of us are doing that approve of WFH.
Adapt, or lose out. Outsourcing isn’t replacing our jobs anytime soon. That’s a red herring.
Productivity is at an all time high, if you include work like balance into the picture.
Enjoy what Covid gifted us, finally the ability to push back on the crappy aspects in office life. Gave us a voice, the ability to make our own life choices. You can go back to the office, but many won’t be there. The world has changed and there is no undo button. Learn to find ways to turn a rainy day to your advantage. For example, I love skiing, so when it rains, it makes me happy. And I can actually pull off skiing on lunch breaks now so hey, my life is so much better without in office work.
Shareholders? Well, looks like they need to account for workers conditions, work life balance, and new measures, that they didn’t have to before.
Sorry, not sorry aboutcha!
I love going to my office, but frankly most people's jobs suck and their office environment sucks. Or, to put it another way, has no inherent advantage from a pure productivity perspective than a well-stocked home office assuming you are doing office work.
The tipping point for me though is the environmental cost. All those workers shlepping their body to and from work is a tremendous cost to the local and global environment.
I occasionally go into the office. But I regularly have 3-5 meetings with teams in different cities. Going into the office just to take video calls isn’t a great use of time.
It’s the herding cats problem re talent. What you can do with a “a few good people” can’t be done with a crowd. Read Brooks.
A lot of people always knew this, but were forced to anyway.
If i still lived in berlin, i'd probably be going into the office. Transit is good, the city is cool/fun, and although its gotten a lot more expensive you can still afford to live in a decent place close to work on an engineers salary.
In SFO bay the equation is different - unless you're already rich (or young and want to share small apartments), you cant afford to live close to work, so commutes are long and terrible. The city isnt as fun after dark. I LIKE the bay, like being in person ,and commuted for years, but the tradeoff isnt worth the commute/lifestyle hit for me now. Upper management/exec are pushing RTO, because guess what, they're already rich enough to avoid the commute/lifestyle issues, so they are a bit blind to the reasons for RTO resistance.
We have offices in other cheaper cities - they have a higher % of voluntary WFO for similar reasons. The SFO office is lowest.
But, whatever portion of us is employed by old stodgy companies seems more at risk now that most of them have figured out how to have productive WFH techies.
I would take a _significant_ pay cut to work in an office again. But around here, those jobs effectively don't exist anymore.
Because it's about a 3rd of what a San Francisco wage is.
How exactly would you propose that happen? In order for everyone to work on improving office culture, everyone would have to be at the office, right? Would the first step in this process be to force the people for whom the office is a bad place to go back to the office?
> why should they page a German wage
I totally agree. In the U.S there is a lot of discussion about most companies introducing location based remote pay, based on the cost of living in your city. People thing this is ludicrous, and want to be paid SV wages in rural America.
On the other hand, they have no problem paying Indian engineers a fraction. They use a lot random reasons that don't end up making sense. Work hours, ability to vet the engineering quality from so far away.
But then when I ask - If your star amazing Indian H1B engineer wanted to move back closer to his family, and promised to work U.S hours, would you agree to pay them a SV wage? The answer is always no. So I think there is definitely a double standard here, and in the very long term this will change, and wages will balance out to a bit lower than what they were during peak 2021 tech
To the first part. You're completely ignoring people having to commute to the office, wake up an hour or 2 earlier, only see their child ~30 minutes a day, not being able to cook their own lunch or go to the restroom without seeing someones legs right next to yours. Even if people value solving problems face to face, they can also value the above more
Just seems reasonable that the industry, location, talent pool and local infrastructure are all factors that make it impossible to generalize.
But not having the commute, and thus having over two hours per day that I can spend on more sleep, more time with my family and more time to work, that's just better.
And not having to deal with a noisy open plan office comes on top of that.
Certainly... but why are you conflating that with WFH?
Actually, you're conflating a bunch of things with WFH for some reason. If you sort some of that out you might not be so against it after all.
Yes -- it's not the same as doing this with coworkers. But the world has moved on. Acceptance is part of the process.
The endgame will be $$/feature paid.
Working from home is pointless, zero intrinsic reward. A video game instead of life.
After that people have kids or just might want friends seperate from work.
So what seems great to you might be meh for other people, and then you pile on commute, office noise, no privacy etc.
"I am altering the deal. Pray I do not alter it any further."
I'll come to the office if paid X times current wage to make it worthwhile, and the company wasn't willing to pay the premium.
I won't endure soul-crushing commute everyday out of fear of losing my job to third-world countries. I'll take my chances.
Sadly my company's office is being renovated, so I don't think I can go until next summer earliest, but I will be there as soon as possible.
Remote workers can go and pretend to work elsewhere.
There are no meaningfully accurate (which is to say, common) thing you can say about what "working in tech" is like. None.
It's so young and always shifting that literally every environment is very different.
This discrepancy makes sense but is by no means unusual. I think this line of work both draws introverted people, and encourages it through stress (deadlines, etc)
To my luck my company decided on a more office focused approach now. We only do 1 day a week remote, I don't even take that 1 day usually.
But that's just me. I don't have a wife or kids at home that maybe increase the benefits of working at home. Everyone has their own situation. Currently this is what works for me.
I would just recommend look for companies that encourage working from an office, if you want to work that way. You can't demand your workplace suddenly implements Rust everywhere either, you should probably switch jobs if that is so important to you.
Check my profile and email me if you like ;)
How do we bring that feeling of presence from video games to remote work?
Luckily there's a lot of hybrid arrangements now where you can have your cake and eat it so to speak.
I think if this were true for all of us, we’d all be ready to get back to the office.
I think what you are missing is that you’re in Germany.
So many people on this site are working for American companies or American offices. And let me tell you, compared to European office life, it sucks. It sucks so much!
In the McCountry, companies basically abuse you and the employees cry to be abused harder. Endless unpaid overtime, endless weekend crunches, endless peer pressure to not even use the meager time off you are given. Cities sprawled out for 100 km so that all commutes are hellish. A guillotine of health insurance and debt hanging over every neck. A legal environment that puts the company first and the employee last. It’s a hypercapitalist system designed to squeeze every last drop of blood before discarding the burned out husks that were once people. I tell friends in the EU my stories, and they gasp and say, “isn’t that illegal?!” My sweet summer children.
You cannot understand our aversion to the office without having spent some time in the juice press.
Enjoy your average of 28 vacation days and fewest yearly hours worked in the OECD, and please stop rubbing salt in our wound with your delightful office stories;)
I think discussions about 'fairness' in the context of location based pay will get eaten alive by mid-term market pressure.
It seems like one facet of this might be that you're more extroverted and social in regards to doing your job, whereas others prefer to work in solace or on their own terms (e.g. with a cup of cocoa in their pajamas), something about which I previously wrote: https://blog.kronis.dev/articles/remote-working-and-the-elep...
I won't hide that I very much fall into the latter category: working in person was a worse experience for me, hands down. Now, if I don't feel like talking with someone and having them interrupt me while in the middle of solving some issue, I can just ignore messages for a bit.
If they want to ask some questions, they can just write those down, or share them in a group channel for someone to pick up on what they need and discuss it, in a format that remains searchable in the future. This should also encourage asking questions better and not wasting my (or others') time in calls as much: https://quick-answers.kronis.dev/
I also personally don't always enjoy the culture of the workplace and dissociating myself from some nitpicky code reviewer who loves wasting time on pointless minutea is also better - instead of long winded discussions, I can resolve review threads in one go, leaving comments for when additional discussion is needed, instead of being held hostage in an in person conversation (a bit of an extreme example/wording, I guess).
> Have I been under some weird form of Stockholm Syndrom where I actually enjoyed something that was pure torture to most? Have a lot of people realized they don't actually like being among other people, apart from their closest friends and family?
That said, how you feel is valid. You might have had a healthier workplace than I do, maybe a better attitude, possibly a personality that is better suited for working in person, as well as one that isn't as suitable for working remotely. People's circumstances are different.
> And finally, I feel no one else is realizing that they are happily hacking away at the amazingly well-paid branch they're sitting on. As soon as a company's IT department is practically fully remote, why should they page a German wage for someone who is a face on a screen, when they can pay a fraction for that same face broadcasted from a few hundred kilometers further east or south? German is hardly used in business context here anyway and lower-wage countries within ±3 hours timezones abound.
This will probably displace some folks with varying results, however: outsourcing can lead to cheaper labor, but a plummet in code quality. Certain cultures have an expectation to say "Yes, we can do it" regardless of how feasible things are and deliver results, regardless of how bad they are, how insecure the code is, how unmaintainable it is and so on.
Of course, this will also be a net positive for some folks that would otherwise never make more than 2'000-3'000 euros per month after taxes in their own countries to escape being (comparatively) poor just because of where they live.
In situations where remote work isn't embraced, however, such initiatives (and remote working in general) would lead to pretty poor dynamics and having trouble getting things done. Some people incorrectly say that it's a problem with remote work, when in truth they have no idea how to do remote work well (and embrace async): https://about.gitlab.com/company/culture/all-remote/guide/
Throw in the fact that employers want more control over their employees (and sometimes to micromanage them) or perhaps make sure they're not working two jobs, or working on their own projects or whatever, or the employers wanting to underpay their workers with remote work being the scapegoat excuse and you have quite the multi faceted situation to deal with.
Personally, however, I like both the form of work, as well as no longer needing commute - right now I'm in the countryside, so I can get some fresh air, relax and play fetch with my dogs, as well as work in silent and comfortable conditions, instead of some open office.
Work events (e.g. going racing karts, playing laser tag, having a party or a boating event, some BBQ or something like that) are still very much welcome, as is occasionally showing up to office for some event/presentation/workshop.
Being in an office makes me borderline suicidal. I've been remote since before the pandemic and it seriously improved my life. I can turn off my zoom camera so I can sit back in my chair and listen/respond without the appearance of laziness. I can turn my camera on when I want someone to see my face, for example in an important meeting or a one-on-one. I can choose when and how I work and configure my environment exactly how I want it. I don't have people constantly at my desk, or work-issued hardware that is unacceptable, etc. Most importantly, I don't have to wake up early and commute to my personal version of hell where I am trapped with golden handcuffs. With remote work I can demonstrate my actual value without having to maintain appearances. I can go to the doctor, handle a quick errand, whatever, and as long as my work gets done that's all people can judge me on. It's beautiful. The meritocracy is beautiful. We spend way to many brain-cycles on the concept of appearances when work should be only measured by work.
If it wasn't for remote work I wouldn't be able to make a wage more than what my state offers. If it wasn't for remote work I wouldn't be able to take as many vacations, I wouldn't be able to go to school to pursue my passions, etc. It has actually empowered me to take care of myself first, as I should, in so many ways it really drives home the point that office work is slavery.
> I used to love going to the office. Discussing our team's latest Python problems over a coffee. Looking over at their screen and then asking them why they look like they want to beat someone over the head with their keyboard repeatedly. Guessing people's emotions in a heated Retro from their body language. Grabbing dinner with a few colleagues after a long workshop meeting in the evening and then realizing that, aside from all the differences we might have about static typing in programming languages, we all like the same exotic progressive metal bands.
You are probably generally a person who is energized by being around people. I am not, never have been, and never will be. People, in my opinion, are an unfortunately side effect of having to work in public. That's not to say I am anti-social, but rather introverted, and I prefer to control when and how I engage with people. Moreover, office politics in the "cancel era" made it so I didn't really want to talk to anyone anyway. At the height of this craze I wasn't even sure what non-obvious word would send me to HR. The office sucks, period.
> Many of these things that made my job much more than slaving at a digital conveyor belt seem to be gone these days
You were still a slave.
> I am just wondering if that is really the case for the majority or what it is that I'm missing.
Remote work benefiting people who take care of loved ones is a benefit to those in the relatively rare case of doing that. For most of us, remote work was removing the shackles of management and allowing true merit to shine through. If you can work effectively surrounded by your toys you can work effectively anywhere. Rather than playing politics and dealing with micromanagers I can just work. You can tell that a lot of people believe this because the amount of anti-remote propaganda coming out of major think tank companies is extremely high. If it didn't put the ball into the worker's court the propaganda simply wouldn't be necessary.
> . As soon as a company's IT department is practically fully remote, why should they page a German wage for someone who is a face on a screen, when they can pay a fraction for that same face broadcasted from a few hundred kilometers further east or south? German is hardly used in business context here anyway and lower-wage countries within ±3 hours timezones abound.
Remote work didn't change this. This is a misunderstanding of the market. Since before remote work so-called "import labor" formed the backbone of most major companies. It's been 30 years since country-first labor in tech was a thing. Infosys and cognizant have been around for a very long time.
> All in all, there is a gnawing feeling in me that Covid made a significant dent on the once fun (Berlin Startup) tech working culture for good.
There are plenty of ways to meet like-minded people that don't involve having to follow office politics and rules. You aren't looking hard enough if you can't find them.
If work starts at 8, I want to be able to sleep until approximately 7:55 and still be on time. I want to make the most use of time that I allot to things as is reasonably possible.
I don't want to feel self-conscious about how I look, what I'm wearing, or how my body or breath might smell - it's not that I don't manage those things, it's that I don't want to have to worry about those things.
I don't want to sit in a place that does not feel like my own. Sure, I can hang up funny cartoons or bring in my own mug or whatever, but if I want a better chair? Gotta get the company to buy it. Want a needlessly fancy desk? Too bad. Wish there was better lighting/less harsh lighting in your work area? Gotta go to facilities - they might do something about it, if they are allowed to do so.
There's also practical things like not having to worry about someone accidentally eating my food, or having to clean up the coffee area because someone else was in a rush, or didn't care.
It also seems like meetings are at least a little bit more purposeful. It's harder to setup meetings online than in person, so it seems like a little bit more thought is put into them, when they do come up. Having everything recorded also helps me refer to it later, if needed.
About the only significant change from working in-person is that I tended to get considerably less work done when I was in-person. I don't know if I would measure higher productivity from WFH as strictly a "good" thing. I think that socialization has its merits too. I always viewed things like birthday parties as a meaningless distraction, but, I also wasn't going to cry about getting paid to eat a small amount of candybread for a few hours. I didn't really enjoy those things, but I could appreciate that others enjoyed it.
I get the desire for comradery, I'm not saying it doesn't serve a purpose, however, I can't help but feel that office comradery is arbitrary and forced. A kind of "You are required to be friends with this person. NOW!" Most of the people I work with are people I would never choose to actively hang out with outside of work - nor would I want to do so. We don't share interests the majority of the time, and that is what I prefer. They are, in large part, a stranger. I do not wish to know more than that they are competent at their job, and do not do things to make my own job harder.
There are people I make a point of seeing in a social setting, and there are people I am required to interact with in a professional setting. I do not think it is appropriate to mix business and friendship. It isn't that I treat work-people like robots, but rather, I have a workplace decorum, and a social decorum. I do not reveal the unprofessional side to professional people, and vice versa. The environment of each calls for different sorts of interaction. I cannot respect a boss who I have seen weeping into a pitcher of beer. The idea of drinking with people I work with is something that I just find incredibly repulsive. Maybe that's not the right word for it, it puts a kind of sickness in my mouth I can't describe; it's like watching pornography with your parents.
Yes. People miss that.
> Guessing people's emotions in a heated Retro from their body language.
Noone misses this shit.
> Grabbing dinner with a few colleagues after a long workshop meeting in the evening and then realizing that, aside from all the differences we might have about static typing in programming languages, we all like the same exotic progressive metal bands.
Miss it.
> On the contrary, many are screaming in outrage if asked to come to the office even for a single day a week and threaten to quit.
Noone gives a shit if you go into the office or not - just like you shouldn't give a shit if they choose to stay home.
> Then there are people who work mainly to get paid and do not care to invest themselves beyond what is necessary. But are those really the majority?
This has nothing to do with WFH. You mentioning it here almost makes it seem like you think WFHers don't give a shit. I hope that you are not of that opinion, because that's very short sighted and won't make people happy.
> Have I been under some weird form of Stockholm Syndrom where I actually enjoyed something that was pure torture to most? Have a lot of people realized they don't actually like being among other people, apart from their closest friends and family?
No. Most people like positive, in-person social interactions. But people on either side should still fight for choice. It reminds me of access to abortion rights. The team that is fighting for choice here is not saying that either everyone gets an abortion or noone does. Its that each person can choose how they want to work. People need to learn to respect others who make a different choice.
> And finally, I feel no one else is realizing that they are happily hacking away at the amazingly well-paid branch they're sitting on.
Outsourcing has been a thing for decades. People need to be good at their jobs. Don't treat your location as a competitive moat.
> All in all, there is a gnawing feeling in me that Covid made a significant dent on the once fun (Berlin Startup) tech working culture for good. And worse, I suspect there is gonna be more consequences down the road for the tech job market at large that few people seem to see.
Covid is a pandemic. There is also a war going on. The current cycle of cheap debt is coming to a close. These are not fun times.
> I know that "the office" is a bad place for a lot of people. There may be product managers that ignore the noise-cancelling headphone stop-sign and make you lose your stack of thoughts just to ask if the dev app URL is still the same it was yesterday. There can be bad managers and unpleasant situations all around. But shouldn't we rather work on fixing those things instead of making them bearable by just turning off a camera in a Zoom meeting?
The fix is simple: allow people to choose to work from wherever they want.
Possibly?
I can't speak for others but I can say:
I find working for money incredibly alienating when I compare it to the many other places in my life where I work because I want a thing in itself.
When I compare the job I have taken to pay my rent to child rearing or the bands I play in, or the pro-bono things done to support organizations, or simple maintenance of my life, the job is profoundly alienating. I'm spending a big chunk of my life and trading it for the most-fungible-of-all-things.
When I was younger, I tried to compensate for that feeling by taking up jobs with which I could identify. I spent years teaching in universities and running recording studios and taking commercial video production gigs. All fun things, none paid well, but the pay was not the problem.
What I found was that no matter how much I tried to make that work, I never really fully could fully get that identification with the work going: I was never a good enough professor or engineer or technician, because there is always that other element of money as motivation.
What is worse, that identification with the work led me to have really bad boundaries with work: isn't a "good" professor researching literally -all the time-? Shouldn't a "good" programmer be constantly honing their skills and playing with code pens and new languages? Shouldn't a "good" small business owner be constantly on the grind and networking?
That is not a very sustainable view of work for me; while there are plenty of people who can do that for long periods of time, I suspect that constantly trying to make our personalities about things that we are essentially only doing for money is not a healthy mode of life.
As I have gotten older, I have found that while I want to have money for all the things that I do care about, that strategy of over-identifying with my job was more of a problem then a solution.
It's okay to say to myself: "I am just doing this for the money, they are getting XYZ and I am getting PQR and that is the end of it". I am not a bad programmer: I make the stuff and fix the stuff and do the tasks. But at the end of my work, I leave it and go play clarinet or trumpet or boulder or hike. Those are all good things, and I am not a good or bad person if I suck... they are simply things that are good to do in themselves.
Once I stopped trying to invest my self-peception into my job, it became much easier to setting appropriate boundaries on the work. I don't really care if I am a good software developer or not, I just care that I can do the tasks people ask me to do.
That leave a lot more time and room and energy to try and be a good parent or musician or caring member of a community.
So, no I think there are more fundamental issues at play than simply specifically bad managers or rude co-workers. I think there is a fundamental structural problem with over-identifying with our work, and in my experience creating greater boundaries (in the form of remote work or in the form of "leaving work at work") is the only long-term tenable solution I've found.
What I'm getting at here is that, when you;re working with a team of people who are all committed to the same end, who enjoy working with one another, and who believe they will share in the proceeds, you tend to create a sense of harmony. Working in that office in the way you describe - hours at the desk, quick over the shoulder help sessions, after work drinks and dinners - comes from that sense of camaraderie and common purpose. Take that away, and you wind up with angry people who feel their time and their lives have been exploited for someone else's gain - which is true for every single hierarchically structured company on the planet, which is, like, 90% of them. The sense of camaraderie can hide that feeling of exploitation, providing a false sense of community that is further exploited to make the investors richer. When that veil is lifted, as it was during the pandemic when people were expected to work as normal in the face of existential uncertainty all in the name of supporting the economy instead of caring for people, you;re left with a whole bunch of folks who see the whole system as bunk. That's where we are right now.
I refuse to work full time for another company now that I've realized this. But I am eager to get back to that sense of working with like-minded people for a common cause - that's something I think most of us crave. My answer is to find a way to build a co-operative business that allows all members to share in the proceeds equally and have greater control over their lives while truly working together toward a common goal rather than just making some VCs and their investors richer. I already do something similar with a group of consultant friends, which is cool - we pull each other in on jobs and charge each person's going rate, occasionally pushing each other to charge more since we're terrible at that sort of thing. I want to try and start some kind of co-operative business in my town as well and start to experiment more with this model - a coffee shop or a restaurant, potentially something small at first.
If we own our work and enjoy the full proceeds of that work, we tend to be happy. That is simply not how the corporate world is structured, and I believe that;s the source of so much work unhappiness.
One big factor, I believe, is age.
The younger you are, the more your colleagues may also be social partners. You're fresh out of university (or close enough that you remember the lifestyle), and having other people to do things with is a common need. But as you're spending most of your time in an office, the pool of potential partners (even potentially romantic) is essentially the people you work; you see them most days.
Also, when you're younger you tend to have fewer responsibilities. Most of us, once we have kids, find that all of our free time has vanished. And even if you spend 2-3 hours with your kid in the evening, you feel guilty that you're not giving enough time to them. That means you'll accept fewer of the after-work activity offers from your colleagues. That change will also affect the relationship dynamics with you and your colleagues, unless they all happen to be at about the same stage of life (in which case you may have playdates with them and everyone's kids).
And once you get old and your kids are grown, you typically have a million things you'd like to do or get done; so extra time at the office or with colleagues is very low priority.
Another big factor is type of company. Tech-first companies are probably more fun in general than "normal" companies. I would rank the companies in this order of fun-ness based on my personal experience: 1. computer game development shop. 2. wealthy finance company with big tech investment. 3. any gig where you work with other consultants who travel and get huge travel allowances to spend :). 4. all the rest - "typical companies".
In my almost 30 years of work, about half has been remote. Aside from the gamedev shop and the finance shop, the other office experiences were boring or horrible. Recently I got a very good offer from a bank to tech-lead a high profile project. But the second I walked in the door to do the interview, I felt that dread. Yeah the building was shiny, there were lots of glass walls, and I'm sure there was "free coffee". But there were also big open rooms, half height cubes, and a general feeling of The Office. I had to turn it down. And then I had to turn down the much-sweetened followup offer. They were offended, the recruiter was baffled, and I was relieved. I couldn't explain that such an environment made me hate life even before I had spent a full day there.
Location, climate, and commute also are big factors.
A nice 20min bike commute in good weather is lovely (and healthy!). But rainy windy cold weather means either an awful biking experience where you arrive sweaty and wet, or you fight everyone else with your car; or you take public transport and let two metros leave without you because you will not cram yourself in with everyone else who is dodging the weather.
Most people living and working in the US are stuck with cars as the only way to get to work. Years of driving 30-60 minutes each way to and from work, in heavy traffic, very negatively affects most people. You hate every motherfcker on the road with you, and you need half an hour to get over the simmering rage upon arrival. If you live in Texas, you also have to worry about that rdneck in the pickup... does he have a gun? If you take that little opportunity to get over, and it offends him, will he shoot you? Crap like this happens, even if you're driving politely. Many of the people around you are (also) very angry about the situation.
And if you live fairly far from the equator, winters mean very short days. You go into work while it's dark, and you come out of work while it's dark. I'm a happy night owl, but I also do need sunlight. You can't get that sunlight when there's barely any and you're trapped in an office. At least working from home, when that lucky moment of sun occurs, I can drop what I'm doing and go outside.
Freedom is the thing I value most about remote working now. I work from wherever I want, whenever I want (to a degree of course). If I want to dodge the crappy winter and work from an island in southeast Asia, I do. I get a nice breakfast with excellent fresh fruits delivered to me each morning, I sip my coffee on the deck just before the beach and ocean, and I get a massage at lunch if I want. I work a few hours here and there when my mind is ready, and I go enjoy life the rest of the time.
I'm not rich, and I earn a lot less than probably a lot of HN readers... for sure WAY less than the MAANG people. But it's enough to be happy and free and not burn money on overpriced housing and car gas to commute.
All that said, I do get that a lot of people _need_ a good amount of direct social contact more than they need the things I care about. So an office environment is great for people who really need that. But there certainly are those of us who need far less social, or get it outside the office and thus don't need an office.
Lastly, the older I get and the more full my head is with ideas and who knows what else, the more difficult I find to get into the "flow". Being in an office, _if_ I'm fortunate to get into the flow, there's a much greater chance that someone or something will break me out of that flow. But working from home, I especially find that 10pm-2am is my best time. The world around me is quiet, nobody is calling me or walking up to me, and I can do what I do. Put me in an office with a 9-6 schedule and you'll get about 30% productivity. What a waste of my time and your money.
Driving to the office in a car is bad for the environment (particulate matter causes allergies and sometimes cancer), it wastes everyone's time and it makes the cities worse. Detach a little from your individual situation and see how weird it was to commute to a far-away city and building and then usually use ssh to log in to servers that are usually not in that building/state in the first place. (And if you use public transportation, you can get coronavirus again for no reason)
>Have I been under some weird form of Stockholm Syndrom where I actually enjoyed something that was pure torture to most?
It's not about it being torture. It's about priorities. How and where you want to spend your days. We are mortal--that's what the past two years made crystal clear. Very mortal.
>And finally, I feel no one else is realizing that they are happily hacking away at the amazingly well-paid branch they're sitting on. As soon as a company's IT department is practically fully remote, why should they page a German wage for someone who is a face on a screen, when they can pay a fraction for that same face broadcasted from a few hundred kilometers further east or south? German is hardly used in business context here anyway and lower-wage countries within ±3 hours timezones abound.
It goes both ways. You can also work for companies for world-competitive rates. I have zero reason to fear someone from an eastern country catching up to my 20 year career and 10 year university education.
You should change your mindset on this unfounded fear of being replaced by a cheaper worker. You are presumably a software engineer. Capable software engineers are one of the most well-paid and sought-after professions in the world; seniors are earning way more than doctors now.
>I know that "the office" is a bad place for a lot of people. There may be product managers that ignore the noise-cancelling headphone stop-sign
Yep.
Also, open-plan offices/buildings which make you unable to focus on anything.
> I absolutely do get that for some people (fresh parents, people living at home to take care of their parents etc.) remote work is a real blessing.
For most senior engineers, remote work is a real blessing.
Also, if you do remote work, make sure that the company actually knows how to do remote work. Lots of companies are learning resistant and of course remote work sucks if they still want you to work synchronously, their video chat sucks or is non-existant, their VPN doesn't work half the time and they leadership suddenly disappeared at the beginning of 2021.
I don't want that to come across as aggressive or anything, that just the way I see it, and I think thats why its sometimes met badly. If what makes you happy is a condition in which someone else is unhappy, that person is unlikely to react well.
My father is such a person. I wanted to be just like him so I chose his career more or less (I'm DevOps; he's a DBA). It wasn't until later that I realized I was at a disadvantage because of my extroversion relative to my peers until I landed at my previous company. The culture there was very heads-down. I had to build in other social interactions in my day in order to survive.
If you thought your friends were bad, Hacker News is 10 times worse. Another great superpower of introverts is that they tend to be excellent writers. They love writing because it turns communication, a pleasant but otherwise taxing activity, into concentration work in isolation, which is something that lends them energy. All the while being able to feel like they are connected to their peers. Meanwhile, extroverts feel more disconnected when writing by comparison. Rather than write a long email, we generally would much rather just walk over and talk to someone. For these reasons, text based communication comment boards like Hacker News are disproportionately representative of my more introverted colleagues.
I lucked out because I'm a devops engineer, which requires the ability to code and do IT but it's also really central to several teams and so requires lots of communication. So that aspect helps me get through the long hours of coding. Coding is something I enjoy, but it's a bit like scuba diving for me. I'm having fun down on the coral reef floor but every once in awhile I just have to surface and fill my tank up.
I am squarely in the crowd that wants everyone back at the office. Yes, this is not fair to those who want to stay at home, but for me it's not worth going into the office if it's just me and two other people when everyone else is still home. Fortunately at my new company there's more social interaction and there's nine people instead of two. But again, it's not useful to me who needs social interaction to go so far to an office with nobody in it. I don't care about the actual office space, I care about talking to people. Maybe that's not fair to you dear reader. I understand that. But it is what it is.
I'm hoping that the recession will kick in harder than it is now and allow the managers to start requiring people to come back in. Those who threaten to quit will make the manager's lives easier so that they don't have to lay people off. This is sort of happening at Facebook right now.
Whether a manager is an introvert or extrovert, their job is communication. It's been shown by Microsoft studies that their workloads of doubled in the pandemic even though most people's have stayed the same. This incentive to get their employees back in the office together with a recession will probably put things back to where they were eventually.
That said, I realize the cat is out of the bag. Remote work works and people know it now. Some companies have gone the opposite direction, getting rid of their office entirely. As long as there are other companies that get people back together I'll be okay.