I feel these discussions always go the same way. Working at an office sucks because of some combination of {long commute, open office plan, team not being there}. I quite like going to the office myself because my situation is the opposite: I bike to work, where I have my own office, and my team likes to come in too. Hating the office is totally justifiable given that my setup isn't common; most people are forced to deal with crappy built environments.
I worked at a place years back that was expanding; bought a second building - 2 stories. Downstairs had semi-open cubicles, and a wall of private office spaces (8 IIRC). All empty. Cubes were full. I was in the other building, told we were needing to move over the next couple months. I asked for one of the private spaces. They weren't really that big, and had no natural light, but... they did have a door. I'd been wrestling with being in an open cube next to marketing people (trying to juggle multiple dev projects), and routinely had 3-5 people on the phone around me. Very distracting.
"Nope, those offices are for managers".
"But... they're empty now".
"We're putting together the budget for next year to hire more managers".
"So... those will sit empty for the next 6-9 months and I have to work in an open cube environment, being distracted by the growing number of people around me".
"Looks that way, but don't be so negative about it. I think we're done here. Close my door on your way out please".
I don't even need a private office. One of the best environments I've ever worked in was a hybrid office/open model. Basically a bunch of conference rooms where each team got a room, and within the room the desk walls were low. Decorate it however you want, if you agree on style then you can have ambient music, etc. It was pretty great.
But then they knocked all the walls down and put in rows of desks because they could cram more people in that way. Within a year probably 25% of our development staff walked.
Post-covid WFH discussions have led to a collective amnesia about this. We also spent buckets of time complaining about offices before it because almost every employer made decision like yours. Most offices were terrible places to work and non-technical managers ignored common sense and science to cram as many people as possible into their existing real estate costs. We'd gone from yearning for personal rooms from our cubicles to yearning for cubicles from our loud open-plan spaces.
Worked in a place like that - mostly open cube space for around 80 inbound call agents, and a few 'side rooms'. Worked with 5 other dev/tech folks in one of those 'side rooms' - a suitably sized office for the 6 of us.
It was reasonable, in that we were generally all quiet or talking at the same time, and was not the worst place at all I've worked. Dedicated private space still works best for a lot of type of work (obviously that's "imo" but seems a standard POV from most colleagues today).
People here talk a lot about being able to have closing doors. My experience with private offices was, barring confidential conversations or rarely going really heads down for a few hours, the unwritten policy was you kept your door open. I've never worked anyplace where private offices generally had their doors shut.
Agreed, but having a door meant you could put the "do not disturb" sign up. Of course that's pretty specific to your companies culture, but if someone closed their door at my office, I'd stroll around later.
One of the biggest benefits of course is that you have a lot less sound travel. Doors open and you'll still be able to have a neighbor that has an open door meeting, phone call, etc and it won't interrupt you.
After moving from a private office with a door to a team space, I missed it severely. Now I'm WFH and when my kids aren't home generally my door stays open.
I don't have a large sample size but across multiple companies in both New Orleans and New England, closed doors sort of meant: "I have a specific reason not to be disturbed." Which didn't include I just prefer to be in "flow" or whatever. The situation is probably different if you're on a busy public corridor as can be the case in universities, etc.
One side-effect of the WFH period for us (and I assume a number of other EU companies) is that once we went WFH, we also went remote; previously we had two offices and everyone worked in one of those two cities and today we have (IIRC) five and people work all over the country and take rail into the nearest office when necessary.
This has... mostly worked out OK. In any given office there's some spaces dedicated for the people who work there regularly, at least a room or two with a half dozen seats for hotdesking, but then - three dedicated, closed-door single-person offices exclusively for the executives, who of course never show up outside their home office (if even there).
That's what we've been seeing. My team were all in one corner of one room. Then "one day", we were all sent home.
Someone left, and was replaced by someone in another European country. He's nominally "in the office", but since it's not the same office as the rest of us (and we're not in ours anyway), he's free to come and go as he pleases. It's not like it makes any difference to us.
Then our manager moved on, and was replaced by someone in yet another European country. He was WFH / fully remote before "this" even started.
By time they tried to sell us on RTO, exactly 50% of the team are still here. And going to the office now, just makes it less convenient to call the other 50% of my team. (Yes, call. Call me old fashioned, but I love a good bitchfest, and a good bitchfest shouldn't be in writing.) My manager genuinely advised we ignore the RTO missive and see what happens. (Spoiler: not much.)
Then my boss's boss moved on, and was replaced by another remote position - and now the murmurs of RTO have died down.
Now we're hiring and the net has widened yet again. They need to be in a country where we have a legal presence, and need to be willing to work European hours.
It's amazing how much has changed in relatively little time. It doesn't feel like that long ago I was trying to make the case for WFH on weekends.
I think that's the situation at many places. They've had three years of hiring and organizational changes where, by and large, they didn't really pay a lot of attention outside of gross timezone or language factors to where people physically lived. So now they're in a place where they really can't just undo those three years and move back to teams being mostly colocated. At least without a lot of organizational turmoil and at least some cost.
People evidently were ignoring the rto mandate at my company too. But the VPs noticed and said they'll start docking our perf if we don't start showing up.
Also, wfh weekends? What the heck man. 40 hours M-F tops. Even that I'd like to see dropped to 4 days but that'll never happen.
Why office sucks can be for any number of reasons, I think it's more of a long tail phenomenon with a myriad of distincts personal preferences and special needs.
For instance office drinks can suck, and someone drinking 3 to 5 cups of warm drinks a day, being able to prepare delicious beverages with specialized equipement is a godsend.
Or people who work sitting on their bed. Or want their pet around. Or don't want to wear makeup and get out of the house at all. Those who squat during the long meetings. Those who usually need an hearing aid but can instead just push the sound up if they're at home etc.
Sure, any of those could be addressed in an office setting, but you still only have one office for hundreds of people who probably wish for different things. Most will just give up on comfort, where WFH is an option to be in a better situation.
I worked in an office, then at home where I worked constantly, then back to the office where I appreciated closing my laptop and being done.
Now I've been remote for many years and am happy to say I've trained myself to watch my hours and leave work even though I'm home. I change my slack status, minimize all work apps and walk away. When I come back to my computer for something personal in the evening I don't look at work. It took some practice, but closing things down walking worked for me.
Now if I could only stop solving work problems as I try to fall asleep...
Right. I joke that my corner in my bedroom is my home office, workbench, rec room, music room, data center combo.
The use of vertical space is real. Family of four, 2bdrm 1100 sq ft divided across three floors. I'd love another room. Do they sell those at Costco? Can I put it on the lawn?
I work from home full time, and while it was harder in the beginning, the click of the KVM button and putting my work phone on the charger is enough of a signal.
That's cool. I've known people who have had something in that general vein built.
Given that this is probably something north of $25K by the time you pay for everything though, it's not obviously a better deal than just getting something custom built from some plans.
This is my #1 complaint for WFH, if you do not have a spare room / office in your home to do WFH, then IMO your productivity tanks and you are not really working from home... you are at home and maybe doing some work likely far less than if you were in the office.
If you are sitting on your bed, a kitchen table, or some other like space then i question how much work you can actually get done.
Also people are TERRIBLE judges of their own productivity, most people claim their productivity sky rockets when at home, were alot of data shows this not the be the case as time is focused on household items, cleaning, taking care of children, laundry, netflix, etc.
people that are successful at WFH and where doing it before COVID has a dedicated space for "work" in the home. With a Door they could close to block out all other household interruptions focusing on work, and would take defined breaks just like if you were in an office.
Good for you ! You have no specific reason to really want to WFH, and that's great, probably a strong asset to get hired.
Some people will also have no specific reason to want to live alone and can join dormitories or share houses. Some don't even need a stable home and can join military camps etc.
We all have different thresholds of what we want or can deal with in our lives.
> I appreciate a hard division between work hours and personal hours
Agreed--this is why I've got an office at home, and it's bigger and better-appointed than any company would ever allocate to me, with a better desk and a better chair (when I use it, because that better desk lets me stand).
I'll spot them the rent for not having to make the commute, but I need the firm separation.
One of the nice things about working at home is that async tasks can be taken care of during the workday. Laundry doesn't need a lot of hands-on time but does have a lot of waiting time. It's also easier to get local errands like grocery shopping done during lunch than if you're at an office. Even lunch itself can be easier, with a couple Instant Pots, lunch can be ready to eat right at lunchtime. None of these tasks take a consequential amount of time away from work but they do give you back quite a bit of non-work time.
So maybe many people just really hate car dependency and long commutes which should push us to move away from such a model of urban planning. More offices seamlessly integrated into middle density housing similar to a lot of cities like Stockholm where big towers and suburban detached homes are more rare.
The RTO discussions for us in Germany (30m train commute in/to a city center) definitely begin with a very different tone than my friends in the US (60m car to an office park with a sandwich shop across the street) seem to have.
I'm a remote working veteran, having worked in that arrangement for over a decade. Recently I changed employers, to a place down the street, and I loved going to the office before RTO (we're expected to be in the office 3 days a week). Most of the team voluntarily came in every Tuesday and Thursday. We had a lot of fun. Then RTO came, and it seemed to coincidence with every other large employer in the area forcing RTO, and most of the things that were great about it evaporated overnight.
Now the campus is crowded and noisy. Parking is annoying. The lines in the cafeteria and nearby restaurants are insane and simply not worth the wait or frustration of trying to coordinate timing. There's a lot of small battles being fought about temperature control, lighting in the office, etc. ~Half the team is still geographically remote to our main campus, at smaller satellites across the country or they have long term full-time remote arrangements. So we're on Zoom regardless. And I still between someone on my team and someone on an adjacent team, and frequently find myself sitting in between them while they're on separate calls. Even with headphones on, it is fucking madness.
It's just annoying again, and needlessly frustrating, and reminds me of why I originally sought out full time remote back in 2011.
I love the mandates to RTO to only get onto Zoom or Teams meetings with people in multiple timezones and offices all traveling to the office to fulfill the RTO mandate and yet...the only thing that changed was the blurred backdrop.
For my company, the worst thing is that we have hot desks, which wouldn't be a problem if there were enough seats if, say, 90%-95% of all staff came in on the same day and had their own seat. However, one of the floors that my company leases out is undergoing renovations and they shifted all those employees to other floors while keeping the same in-office weekly requirements. Way too many times, I've went into the office just to not be able to find a seat. We have a hoteling reservation system, but even if you reserve a seat, if you don't come in by 8:50 or so, someone will have taken it. I've complained to our corporate services team and have never received a response.
What is not okay is that the work-from-office people seems to want to force everyone to work from office. (not directed at you. This is directed at the company execs)
Meanwhile, the work-from-home people advocates for everyone to be able to choose. Akin to being the pro-choice side.
I know a few retired guys who pay their own money to rent office space away from the house. They don't even have kids living at home any more. If you have a nice office, it's...well...nice.
As someone who has been remote since '12, I absolutely agree. Nothing is better than having a cool/fun office environment close to home where you have things set up to an ergonomic ideal. I've been a member of many co-working spaces because of this.
The problem is 95% of the time it's not like this.
> Working at an office sucks because of some combination of {long commute, open office plan, team not being there}
Working at an office sucks because it is a massive constraint on where you can live, even if you can tolerate a long commute. If you live with a partner who also has a career your options are even more constrained. I find it miraculous such a situation works out for anyone.
Hardly. This is actually kind of insanely tone-deaf statement to make. People have uprooted their lives, spent lots of their wealth in expensive real-estate markets due to artificial demand, given up time with their families, etc etc.
Saying it's "worked out" is a really bland dismissal of the entire conversation.
Doctors are somewhat unique in the fact that they can live and practice in a wide variety of places. Anywhere there’s a hospital, you will have them. Where they will choose to work/for how much is a much wider decision matrix than it is for many white collar organizations which would have no reason to exist (physically) in a small town of 20,000 people. Such a town would require at least a single hospital employing many medical professionals, depending on how far it is from other forms of medical care.
Doctors are just one example and there are many reasons why a doctor may choose to practice in, say, the Boston area than in some 20,000 person town in North Dakota--though you're right than, in many cases, medical professionals have a pretty wide choice in where they live and work depending upon how choosy they are.
But a ton of STEM jobs do require access to labs and other facilities or may have requirements related to security clearances etc. A lot of skilled people can't just work from home and many others travel a lot even if they don't regularly come into an office.
In the context of the modern American nuclear family, the concept of both adults working is relatively new. The traditional arrangement was one breadwinner, one homemaker, and ~2.5 kids.
Which is still common these days, but not to the point of exclusivity: I work remotely, but my partner works hybrid.
I almost commented about how I bugged HR to let me return to office when it became available (having some months earlier signed a permanent work-from-home contract). I like walking to work and having the work-life separation. Not to mention my office is tricked out with sweet posters, mostly of the transit and active transportation propaganda variety.
The million dollar 360 views are a nice bonus though.
Of course I still work from home on days where it is really inconvenient not to, but I tend to not enjoy that nearly as much now.
If I could easily walk to or even take a modest transit ride to the office I'd probably go in once or twice a week for the change in scenery. But the only company office it makes any sense for me to go into at this point is a two hour commute each way. I would need to have a specific reason to do that and no one I work with regularly is in that office. (I'm a 30 minute drive to another office but no one I know is there, it's in a boring office park, and it's closing.)
Aye I'd happily go to an office every day if it was within walking distance. The problem was the commute and all the time wasted to and fro. If anyone ever comes up with working teleporters I'll go back to the office no bother
Also punctuality and butts-in-seats, but that whole thing turned out to be adhd (working from home gave me the time to figure that out!) so might not be an issue now I can get up early enough to not have a mad panic rush every morning, haha
I like both pretty much equally. I also bike to work and share an office with another dev, who is very easy to share a workspace with (in terms of habits, noise, distraction, etc). But I also enjoy working at home, going for a 10-minute walk around the block to clear my mind, opening my patio door and listening to birds while I work, etc. Hybrid works perfectly for me: a minimum of 1 day a week WFH, preferably 2, but no more than 3.
While your setup now is great, just know that it can change at any time. I know multiple people whose companies are finding a new address for their office for one reason or another. Some of them in completely different areas. My mom, who used to live a 5-10 minute drive from her office now has to drive about 30-40. My office being at home, I'll never have that problem as long as I don't change jobs. Granted I know multiple people who had WFH jobs where the carpet was swept right out from under them and they had to start coming into the office or be laid off, which is the flipside to my argument, though it doesn't really affect me because my company has no central headquarters so some huge internal changes would need to happen for my situation to change.
Anyway, biking to work is awesome, that's a cool setup too for sure. I used to bike 10 miles into one of my previous jobs (and then 10 miles back home.)
Agree - though from a personal perspective the first ~7 years of my work life was sitting on a trading floor layout, and then I got an office and hated it, still don’t love it. I think the personal office thing is partly personality/experience, partly job function, and partly convenient excuse.
Some people really dislike open offices (or just spending the day around a lot of people generally) but I'm betting commutes are the #1 reason most people have against going into an office. Unless you can walk or, for some, bike any meaningful commute is basically a not very pleasant hour+ out of your day.
I'm used to open office. Not sure it'd matter if I had my own room. I'd still get dragged into useless meetings that interrupt my flow. If I can even get into a decent flow because our DX is so atrocious.
Even if I lived next door to an office where I had a private room and my teammates there I wouldn't want to go at all, for many reasons. Off the top of my head:
- Even without commute there's at least 30-45 minutes of preparation to be decent for the office,
- The office invariably doesn't have the setup that I want and have at home,
- People are able to come "bother" you all day long.
None of those are things I'm willing to put up with.
