> Warning: Hot Take. I genuinely believe many people who prefer working in an office versus at home have unfulfilling social lives or bad home lives. The social dynamics, competition, in physical offices fills the void in their lives.
Warning: Hot Take.
I have similar logic, but reach an almost opposite conclusion. I genuinely believe many people who prefer working at home rather than an office have unfulfilling work lives and struggle to form meaningful friendships/relationships with colleagues.
I genuinely enjoy interactions with my colleagues during a work day, and wouldn't want to replace that with staring at a screen for 7.5 hours of my day or only talking to them via Slack. I have a great social group outside of work, but that doesn't diminish the value of enjoying the company of people I work with too.
Sure, it might technically be more productive if I just locked myself in a room and worked intensely on my own for my whole career and only communicated through a webcam, but that doesn't seem particularly enjoyable to me personally.
> I genuinely believe many people who prefer working at home rather than an office have unfulfilling work lives and struggle to form meaningful friendships/relationships with colleagues.
Absolutely not true.
I've been WFH since 2008. Many followed overtime and the company went full WFH in 2015 closing our office. We have a video call 3x a week and shoot the shit learn about each others lives just the same before we talk about work. I don't feel any less connected to my coworkers than my physical friends.
I also am part of a telegram group with ~10 old college buddies who live all over the country where we chat everyday and hop on voice to play video games or a monthly poker. This obviously isn't the same since we started out as physical friends and went to chat groups after going out separate ways, but again I haven't lost touch with any of them or felt less connected/meaningful because we are now remote only.
Not only that but with all the various video games we have added random people we connected with to that group, I don't even know what their face looks like but I know just as much about them as my physical friends. They are just part of the daily discussions about sports, politics, movies/tv, whatever.
I think if you are not connecting with someone you maybe aren't trying enough because it is totally possible. What exactly can't you talk about remotely that you can in person? I've yet to find a topic myself
> I also am part of a telegram group with ~10 old college buddies who live all over the country where we chat everyday and hop on voice to play video games or a monthly poker. I haven't lost touch with any of them or felt less connected/meaningful because we are now remote only.
If you all lived next door to each other, would you still do it over telegram voice? If not, why not if you can connect the same over voice chat?
My view is that something is lost on voice chat compared to being in the same room. I am part of a 10-year WhatsApp group with my university buddies too - but we were bonded with real-life interactions and experiences while being together at university. If those in-person, real-life interactions were replaced by a slack group with other people on my course, we wouldn't have built the same relationship.
It is different. Yes, there are some colleagues with whom I have regular online contact, some of them I really only got into contact with during the pandemic. We have regular calls and exchanges.
But I also have a lot of colleagues, which I don't have close contact with and contact to those has mostly evaporated during the pandemic. That are those people, I might talk to when meeting them in the coffee room, but really no reason to call outside of that or vice versa.
Speaking of coffee rooms, they have another important property: it is very nice, even healthy, to leave your desk from time to time and both take a break for your mind and your body from work. In the office you walk to the coffee room in that time and there you meet people in the same phase. They are taking a break and you don't interrupt each others work when having a chat. In a sense, online social contact can be very disruptive, as when you start an online interaction, you don't know whether your recipient is willing for an interrupition or not.
Of course, there are ways to arrange that too, but things aren't just black and white and interactions are complex.
> In the office you walk to the coffee room in that time and there you meet people in the same phase. They are taking a break and you don't interrupt each others work when having a chat.
Except those whose assigned desks happen to be close to the coffee room/kitchen. That's the problem with the way offices have been designed - there is always going to be some subset that has less than ideal conditions.
The worst open office setup I saw a year before the pandemic had a conference room with no door, just a big pane of glass and a gap in the glass to enter. There were desks outside this conference room (like everywhere else on the floor) which meant whoever had to sit there was subjected to meetings and speakerphone all day long.
Where I work, the coffee room is pretty isolated. My office is actually the closest one, but I can close the door. When I am talking about the advantages of offices, I am thinking of good offices. No doubt that bad offices are almost always worse than working from home. Unfortunately, many companies have no idea (at least their upper management), about what makes a "good office". Otherwise the nonsense of "open space" would have stopped long ago.
Our minds and bodies are made for "real-reality" and not for "virtual-reality". That is one of the reasons why you cannot turn a webcam on a beach and say you are on holidays on the Caribe. Even if you heard all the sounds and try to relax, is not the same.
Work and leisure are very different. When relaxing between work sessions I'd usually rather read IRL with my 4yo than chat IRL with same coworkers I've already spent the morning with.
While working I prefer control over interruptions and means of communication. And there are no emergencies in my line of work that require physical interruption.
Here's an even more radical thought. Hear me out: different people have different preferences. Forcing either way-of-working will be received with discontent by people who have different preferences.
I love a hybrid approach because I really enjoy the random conversations that crop up in the office… but my social life is so much improved outside of work in the last year or so that everything about physically being present feels tedious.
I have a coworker I call to talk shop for a few minutes and then bullshit for another 15-20 minutes almost daily when I’m wfh.
I’m very strongly considering asking my boss if my in-office/wfh ratio can switch from 3/2 to “whatever I want”
Better social life makes work feel like work. My drive to get stuff done has gone up, because I’ve gotta get out at a good time.
The problem with the hybrid approach is that I’d still have to live in the area. However I want to be geographically independent from my employer and prefer a quiet, low cost of living area as my home.
Yeah, in that case solely remote works best for sure. Maybe you fly to the office (if there is one) a couple times a year… though still nice for that to be optional
"(...) struggle to form meaningful friendships/relationships with colleagues."
Whenever you're forced to do something, yes you will struggle. My colleagues are my colleagues. And if I like someone, I will bond with them and it might become a friendship regardless of whether i see them in person or not.
Still, I'm at work to work, not to make meaningful bonds. Using the word 'meaningful' in a work context makes the word almost lose its meaning and make it seem banal. Meaningful bonds happen by chance, and most people we come across with, we don't make meaningful bonds with anyway. And whether we want it or not, work environment is not the same as hobby or home or relaxation.
I have good friends, who i have meaningful bonds with, and I'm happy with that. At work, i'm getting paid to do a job, not to form meaningful bonds with people. I don't need those, because I have those already.
Maybe you enjoy interactions with colleagues, who don't enjoy interactions with you because they'd rather be home where they don't have to talk with someone they don't have or want a meaningful bond with.
And for the last point of "Sure, it might be technically more productive (...)". Companies try to make us believe it is less productive to WFH all the time. Remove that point, and there's nothing more on the table to want people at the office, than the fact that some need social interaction and to form meaningful bonds at work.
A few days/week of working at the office for people who want meaningful bond making could be arranged, and you all could connect with each other, sing kumbaya together, and make life long friendships then. Just don't force others to do the same.
I have met people who seem to have terrible marriages and seem to spend as much time away from home as possible due to that situation. I have also met people that enjoy working on group projects and enjoy building relationships through that process.
I've worked from home for most of the past 17 years and would never go back to 100%, but I also miss making friendships at times.
Why? You'll spend a huge time of your life working, why is it not worth it to build relationships? You don't have to meet them in your free time to consider them friends.
In the US you may have to change jobs frequently or accept pitiful raises. If your healthcare and social circle become too tied to one employer then leaving or being fired could be a huge change.
Building a professional network is important, and some bonding is natural, so I don't mean to discourage them. Though I do prefer seeking most social fulfillment through other means.
I agree, but I'm not saying anyone should only have friends where they work, but rather that you can have both.
I don't live in the US, and almost all of my friends I meet on my free time are not through work, but I do have colleagues who I consider friends and it makes work a lot more enjoyable. That being said, there's only very few of them who I would be likely to keep in touch with if they or I quit.
This is unquestionably false for everyone I know including myself.
1. Many people already have built good relationships with their colleagues prior to WFH and talking to them over GVC helps the relationship. You are allowed to open up more when you know no one else is around except you and the person you're talking to 1:1. You don't have to be afraid that someone outside the meeting room or cubicle is going to hear you. A lot of the day-to-day frictions are also removed from the equation. Being completely honest, things like appearance, odor, height differences, physical presence, status symbols (watches, car keys, wallet, phones) all cause insecurities in a competitive office space. I find that in a remote work setting, you can focus more on the person as an individual.
2. Working remotely offers the flexibility to work from a location that better suits your social preferences. A LOT of my friends and myself were completely and utterly miserable socially working in the Bay Area. As soon as we had the option, we moved out and have built thriving social circles. It is not always the person's fault if they struggle to form meaningful friendships. It can also be the environment and whether it is a good fit. This eases social insecurity and allows colleagues to connect more authentically.
3. Working remotely offers the flexibility to detach from work and go do other things (if you don't have meetings etc.). This allows you to interact with people outside the office more and develop more meaningful relationships over time.
Remote work isn't about being locked up in a room and only communicating through a webcam. It is primarily about removing the unnecessary overhead that we previously thought was a prerequisite of work (e.g. commuting, "fake work", watercooler conversations, stressful and contrived socializing events at work, open office plans, can't work on other things during unnecessary meetings, running into people you don't like or who distract you, sexual tension with workers of the opposite sex, being exposed to people's bad moods, dirty public restrooms, walking to meeting rooms across the building, working from a cramped cubicle with smelly people, who can type louder and faster competitions, etc. etc. etc.)
I think your post paints a false dichotomy. It's not always a choice between working from home and commuting huge distances to an office in a city you hate.
I live 10 minutes from the office and live in a town I love. This isn't luck - it's a choice I have made.
Also, please don't take this the wrong way, but some of your comments make it sound like you might be in the category of people who don't find it as easy as others to form relationships with colleagues in real life (Comments such as finding socialising events at work stressful, and about experiencing sexual tension if there is a worker of the opposite sex).
It's naive and a function of serious privilege to posit that your home and job location are generally just a choice you can simply make. If you want a nice environment and a short commute, that substantially limits your opportunities. If you have a family or other ties with their own geographic restrictions, vastly more so. You absolutely were lucky to find something you liked. Saying otherwise is a textbook example of being born on third base and thinking you hit a triple.
> You absolutely were lucky to find something you liked. Saying otherwise is a textbook example of being born on third base and thinking you hit a triple.
Well I don't think I was lucky actually - I sacrificed for it. I could be based in London and have a better salary and different opportunities.
I'm privileged in that I have skills that are in demand in several cities/towns and no dependents, but I suspect lots of people are in that place on this website, and these things are choices. Not everyone has to choose to take the biggest salary with the biggest companies somewhere they hate.
If you are a programmer in the UK for instance, the best programming jobs with the highest salaries are in London, but there are plenty of opportunities in Leeds, Manchester, Sutton Colefield, Edinburgh, Bristol, Brighton, York, Oxford, Bath... All places which are lovely to live in and will give you jobs within 10 minutes if you choose to have that life.
> What junior engineer is going to turn down an offer from Google because the Mountain View area is a wildly expensive dump?
Well in my view that actually is a choice.
They are making a choice between commuting lots and living somewhere they don’t want to in exchange for career advancement / to work for Google.
That’s not to say that they might not be happier with alternative decisions. Or maybe they decide to suck it up for a while and move where they want later down the line? But these are all choices.
Perhaps 95% of people truly don't get that choice, but your hypothetical junior engineer certainly does, at least given the current market for developers. Unless you consider "taking the highest paying job above anything else" to be an irrepressible force.
Nope. Never said it is "always a choice between working from home and commuting huge distances to an office in a city you hate".
It is a counterpoint to the original comment that hypothesizes that most people who enjoy working from home do so due to some social deficit.
> people who don't find it as easy as others to form relationships with colleagues in real life
If you read my comment carefully you would notice that I mentioned I already have great relationships with my colleagues that have persisted through remote work. So not sure where that inference is coming from.
Second, I am not going to take it the wrong way, but your comment makes it seem like you have some insight into a complete stranger's life without any information to go off of. I would probably not be so overconfident in making such statements about someone else's life.
Putting that aside, your reasoning seems incomplete. Why does finding socializing events at work stressful imply someone doesn't find it easy to form relationships with colleagues in real life? Surely it depends on how the colleagues behave in those settings and the nature of those events does it not?
For example, grabbing lunch with a coworker is very different from contrived board game events where everyone is trying to compete for who the smartest person is and people make awkward comments linking their board game talents to their work competence.
> experiencing sexual tension if there is a worker of the opposite sex
I don't feel the need to debate this point at all. If you are a human with a healthy mental and hormonal profile and are around someone you find attractive, you will inevitably find yourself in a situation where you need to suppress certain feelings that may be sexual in nature in order to work with them. It can be done and is usually done without a second thought, but it takes effort and is a lot easier to do over video conferencing. It is human to have certain impulses, be it sexual, status oriented or fight/flight related when you're physically surrounded by people. They need to be dealt with effectively in order to be productive and even keeled.
> Second, I am not going to take it the wrong way, but your comment makes it seem like you have some insight into a complete stranger's life without any information to go off of.
I mean it was just a hunch, but looking at your comment history definitely implies it too.
For instance, while your response states that you are comfortable getting lunch your post history says this:
> Feel like a social failure during lunch and forced to sit passively as a couple douchebag workers on adderall dominate the conversation? [I] Feel like a bitch for a few hours.
Which implies the opposite.
> Attractive coworker or someone I want to impress within sight? I can’t concentrate on actual productivity and try to overcompensate by typing more and acting zoned in.
> I find that I get more emotionally jerked around working in person and can insulate myself from it working from home.
I mean all this seems to follow the same idea. It’s totally cool, each to their own and it’s fine, but to me this matches the trend that some people working from home don’t seem to have the same ease at forming relationships in work in real life.
You have no way of determining that unless you're in the same environment. For someone who's usually successful socially, it is an utter shame to have to sit through the lunch and be forced to listen to a couple of idiots hopped who can't shut up. Would you want to be in that situation?
The other two comments have no bearing whatsoever on your point.
The first one describes what it is like to be distracted. Replace attractive coworker with anything else.
The second one is a natural response to the frictions present in real life.
Sounds like you're desperately trying to cast someone into a role so that you can feel better about yourself. You sound like you might have social deficits you're trying to overcome yourself based on your comments that show a lack of understanding of what socializing at work feels like for a lot of people.
> [...] based on your comments you show a lack of understanding of what socializing at work feels like for a lot of people.
So you agree that socialising at work is more difficult for some people than others...
And you agree that it's one of the reasons you work from home...
And the part of my premise that you were disagreeing with was that I said some people work from home because they struggle to create relationships while at work...
But you have stated is true for you when working in an office environment...
So... It sounds like you at least partially agree? Or is there something I am missing?
> So you agree that socialising at work is more difficult for some people than others...
That statement paints an incomplete picture of my views. It is the combination of the person and environment. I'm sure there is variance among peoples' inherent ability to socialize at work, but in certain work environments, people who are otherwise good at socializing don't have the desire to socialize or don't find it meaningful.
> And you agree that it's one of the reasons you work from home...
Nope, I have no problem socializing at my current job. Most of my comments are about prior workplaces. I mention them because I can empathize with a lot of people who might be working in such environments. Like I mentioned, I can and do socialize with my current colleagues well remotely, which I consider to be "socializing at work" too.
> And the part of my premise that you were disagreeing with was that I said some people work from home because they struggle to create relationships while at work...
Nope, I never disagreed with that. I disagree with your characterization that that is the reason I work from home.
I would summarize your comment as “just give me the money and don’t bother me.” Easy to say that when stronger people than you have put up just with the things that your delicate character is unwilling to put up with, to build great thriving businesses and afford people like you the luxury of WFH. I say ‘grow up’! Face those aspect of the office work that brother you. Became a stronger person. Be more courageous. Our society does not need more incels working from home because ‘they don’t like the person sitting next to them’. Don’t be a leech on society. Get out and contribute.
This is me. Doesn’t help that I’ve been the youngest person on every team I’ve worked on, usually by at least a decade. I’m polite and friendly with my coworkers, but I’ve never felt enough of a connection with any of them to want to continue the relationship outside of work.
I prefer working from home for other reasons as well, but certainly avoiding the annoyance of coworkers I don’t like all that much is part of it.
> This is me. Doesn’t help that I’ve been the youngest person on every team I’ve worked on, usually by at least a decade.
This tends to be me both at work and basically in every social setting. I’ve also never really formed more than a highly casual acquaintanceship at work with usually doesn’t follow a job hop.
I prefer remote now. It lets me squeeze in a little more sleep that would otherwise be used to get ready and go to an office where I’d have to sit in the morning and listen to people around me ramble on and I just gets tiring.
At home I control everything about comfort the setting and I’m not losing much I’d gain in-office.
I still go in to my office occasionally. Every time I do I get very little actual work done. I chat for hours with my colleagues, we play board games over lunch, and we generally just show each other our side projects and discuss pain-points about our work
This is great one day every couple of weeks, but I get way more done at home and in far less time. So that I have more than enough left over to exercise and appreciate my day
My experience with programming is that if it's not happening, staring at a screen in an office won't make it happen faster. Stepping outside to go for a run, enjoying nature for a bit, picking up my kids up early so I can spend time with them (and then working at night when they're back to sleep) feels far less wasteful of the time I have on this Earth than commuting to a building where I am essentially stuck for eight hours before I can do anything else
> I genuinely believe many people who prefer working at home rather than an office have unfulfilling work lives and struggle to form meaningful friendships/relationships with colleagues.
I infinitely prefer working at home because I hate commuting, I particularly hate open-plan offices which is all they offer us, and I like quiet when I write code.
Right now my two coworkers - both remote, one in Indonesia, I have never met either of them in person - are amongst my closest friends, but often this is not the case. I nearly always like my coworkers, but outside the work, what do we necessarily have in common? Are they going to go to noise music concerts or vegan restaurants with me?
You can learn to maintain friendships without being in the same room, and mitigate some considerable portion of your footprint on this Earth by giving up commuting.
Saw this at a hybrid company. Chat wasn't required over Slack. Though if it was a work topic requiring a remote coworker (like myself) then sometimes they'd use a conference room and call to bring in remote folks, or everyone would go back to desks for the call.
Occasional all hands conferences provided some IRL a few times a year. IME these weren't strictly necessary yet did provide a chance to bond with the people on the other side of the glass.
Career wise I do think that fully remote can be a boon to shorter and less attractive coworkers, since it reduces or eliminates some of the tall+beautiful biases.
>I have similar logic, but reach an almost opposite conclusion. I genuinely believe many people who prefer working at home rather than an office have unfulfilling work lives and struggle to form meaningful friendships/relationships with colleagues.
People who fill a void through work are the unhappy ones. Even when I was in the office I made meaningful connections with Indian coworkers who I never met but spoke to almost daily for years.
Instead of talking to coworkers I get to see my 2 young kids grow up.
> I have similar logic, but reach an almost opposite conclusion. I genuinely believe many people who prefer working at home rather than an office have unfulfilling work lives and struggle to form meaningful friendships/relationships with colleagues.
This take makes no sense at all.
If people had unfulfilling work lives they would not be threatening resignation to preserve the work life they loathe, and they would definitely not wait out for diktats to return to the office to switch jobs, specially in a supply-driven market which is today's job market.
More importantly, if people had a hard time forming meaningful friendships at the office then they would not stay remote, where it's easier to get ignored, nor would they stick around a toxic corporate environment that makes it difficult to be integrated and feel welcomed.
> I genuinely enjoy interactions with my colleagues during a work day, and wouldn't want to replace that with staring at a screen for 7.5 hours of my day or only talking to them via Slack. I have a great social group outside of work, but that doesn't diminish the value of enjoying the company of people I work with too.
Your personal anecdote is great, but ignores the fact that even in the office the majority of us are paid to stare at screens for over 7.5 hours a day, and are criticized if you spend even 0.5 of that time doing anything other than staring at the screen.
The foosball table recruiters are always boasting about is just for show, and is always unused.
> Sure, it might technically be more productive if I just locked myself in a room and worked intensely on my own for my whole career and only communicated through a webcam, but that doesn't seem particularly enjoyable to me personally.
That's precisely the point that the OP stated: people who prefer working in an office tend to have unfulfilling social lives or bad home lives.
They need the office because it's their way to fill the void in their lives and escape their personal problems.
In the office they surround themselves with people who, for the sake of keeping things professional, have no alternative to exchange pleasantries and treat them cordially, something they don't get anywhere else. Thus they waste hours per day commuting just to have a shot at those irrelevant social interactions they fail to get anywhere else.
In contrast, those who prefer to work from home do have far better and more fulfilling things to do at home. They don't need to waste precious personal time commuting, and instead spend it in more meaningful ways.
More importantly, let's not forget the age old trope of retirees finding themselves in the pit of despair because by losing their job they lost their life and reason to live.
> Why does having a fulfilling social life mean I can’t have a fulfilling work life too?
Those who already have fulfilling social lives don't point out their shot at having a fulfilling work life as their justification to return to the office.
Also, that chance of using work as a way to fill in the void in their personal life comes at a steep expense: hours of their personal life wasted in long commutes, and constraining their choice of places to live as a tradeoff between how far they live from the office and how much they are willing to spend for a home.
> Everything is predicated on it being an either/or, but I feel lucky enough to have great relationships both in and out of work.
It is an either/or. The time, money, and energy you're forced to waste every single day just to commute to work is ripped out of your personal time.
The two hours you spend in traffic every single day are two hours you don't get to spend with your family/friends. Either you spend those hours playing with your son/daughter, or driving from the office.
Warning: Hot Take.
I have similar logic, but reach an almost opposite conclusion. I genuinely believe many people who prefer working at home rather than an office have unfulfilling work lives and struggle to form meaningful friendships/relationships with colleagues.
I genuinely enjoy interactions with my colleagues during a work day, and wouldn't want to replace that with staring at a screen for 7.5 hours of my day or only talking to them via Slack. I have a great social group outside of work, but that doesn't diminish the value of enjoying the company of people I work with too.
Sure, it might technically be more productive if I just locked myself in a room and worked intensely on my own for my whole career and only communicated through a webcam, but that doesn't seem particularly enjoyable to me personally.