Civically we allegedly care about these topics, and note their solutions via remote work
- disabled accommodations: this article, and anecdotes from people we know in this situation
- finding some method for a dramatic enough state change in environmental conditions as to back up from disconcerting climate change barriers we’re pushing into: I can’t recall the specifics but within a week of COVID lockdowns and no commutes, carbon and pollution in atmosphere plummets
- preventing sexism, ageism, and other forms harassment at work: can’t sexually harass someone quite as easily in a fully auditable zoom/slack environment vs in office.
- accommodating parents and their child raising needs with policies that don’t come out of 1950: every working parent I know with remote jobs experience significant flexibility here.
- affordable housing space: office space conversions are starting.
The longer the debate goes on about hybrid/wfh and the above tangible proven benefits vs RTO for “The Collaboration” and “My Socialization Needs,” the more I speculate our society doesn’t actually care about the above topics, at all.
Or, if we do care, this should be called out over and over and over. Bc it’s not getting discussed this way.
Flexibility for parents is great. I've worked remote for a long time and having additional flexibility to take care of sick kids and still get some work in while they're asleep and later in the evening is great. Much better for everyone than forcing another PTO day just to stay home.
However, I've also been seeing remote work and parenting being pushed way too far since COVID. One of my friends cancelled daycare for their 3 year old, thinking they'd just watch him at home while they worked. Didn't take long to realize that they weren't getting much work done while tending to the demands of a 3 year old, and it became impossible to hide when the child would interrupt every meeting multiple times over.
One local company I'm familiar with went remote during COVID and had significant problems with quality of work and communications. The kind of quality problems that impacted customers (not a traditional tech company, their product required employees to do specific work for each customer). When they started narrowing down on the problem employees, one of the top causes they uncovered was parents of young children trying to do the job while watching their kids. It can work with a 13 year old home for summer break, but it just doesn't work for very young kids who need a lot of attention.
I'm going to have to disagree with this one. My friends in HR said the number of inter-employee problems went way, way up during COVID remote work. Employees communicate outside of official channels, in voice meetings that aren't recorded, and in chat rooms you don't control. Some people get extremely difficult to work with when they're arguing with a screen name instead of talking to a person face to face.
*reported
It could be that people felt more empowered to report incidents, but the reality is probably just that the nature of harassment has changed and is just different from how it was like in-person.
Or it could be that the number of incidents actually just went way up? I don't understand why everyone tries to inject alternate explanations to wave away inconvenient situations.
The point is both are reasonable explanations, and without further data, it's hard to say with certainty it's one or the other.
Dismissing uncomfortable things becomes so much easier when you can make up an alternate explanation (without any knowledge of the details) and declare them both equally likely.
Nobody's trying to dismiss them. If they're not equally likely, I'm sure you'll have no problem demonstrating that?
The parent commenter was absolutely trying to dismiss the core of the story by injecting an alternate reality into it.
The situation I'm referring to was not a simple reporting change. It involved employees quitting over bullying, and in one case there were issues severe enough that law enforcement became involved.
So, not, it was not a simple case of people reporting things differently. These problems did not exist pre-WFH at this company.
But if you're dead set on finding ways to reject this and substitute your own reality, I suspect even this won't convince you.
I really don't know why you're so aggressive. You did not include the context in your original comment that you did with this one, and so someone put forward a very reasonable explanation as to why reports may have went up.
I think you just don't come off very convincing.
And this is caused by wfh and doesn't happen at the office is the point you are making? We must stop wfh and that will reduce bullying?
I don't think you can generalize that to other companies or even other departments at your company.
It’s a lot easier to report a problem when you have screenshots.
Will HR do anything about a handsy VP in a he-said-she-said situation? Maybe. Will they do anything when you send them screenshots of a VP’s icky chats? You bet.
Actually, they will likely transfer the woman or otherwise screw over her career to protect the handy VP.
This discussion started with a hypothesis based on a second hand anecdote.
For all we know, it could be worse. Given the fact that a lot us have trouble separating work and home when we work remotely, maybe there is more pressure to let coworkers in that space more.
Because we fit facts to our preconceived notions
- so, again, no luck for parents of young children? Ship the parents back to the office and those issues you mention which have some sort of root cause forcing the home-rearing just… go away/out of sight out of mind? As I said, a mindset out of the 1950s. Also, hiring/firing is still a solution, wfh or not.
- I work in cybersec, all those alternative channels can be monitored or blocked just fine, and still better than “closed office door + handsy VP” which has plagued the workforce for years and years.
- you mention conflict resolution as the remote challenge examples. I mentioned sexual harassment and ageism. Very different.
I think you didn't read my comment. The problem was parents cancelling daycare because they thought they could take care of kids and work simultaneously without impacting their work.
They literally had daycare, cancelled it, and brought the problem on themselves after WFH was instituted.
You are deluding yourself if you think none of your employees are using their personal phones to talk to each other, or that groups of employees don't gather in personal Discords and chat app groups.
Why is that the company's concern? I genuinely don't understand what responsibility the company has for employees actions outside of work.
If we are both in the office, and I start using my phone to send you text messages that are harassment, and/or messages to our coworkers that make fun of you, is that the companies problem?
If we are now both working from home, does that qualitatively change the situation? When working from home, what even is "outside of work"?
Eh, some companies ( financial institutions, brokerages and so on ) may have regulatory requirements that puts onus on those organizations[1]. That is mostly the argument for keeping personal and work life separate, but that ship has sailed a long time ago.
If you find out that parents have no form of daycare, and are taking care of their child while doing their remote job they should be fired, end of story.
As a parent, taking care of a child is itself a full time job. Your friend is either an idiot or was banking on his work being stupid enough to let it slide.
Oddly, while I think the approach is overly restrictive ( and it would drive a good chunk of parents out of the market ), there are some benefits to one parent doing some actual parenting. I think your characterization is harsh, but I am biased.
It may, and I guess not every job has the same requirements. And 2 parents could technically split the care time evenly and squeeze out 8 hour days by using 16 hours of the day and maybe working all night while the child sleeps. Good luck structuring all your team's meetings around one person's schedule though.
Employees were arguing online outside of work channels, and HR became aware of it?
Someone snitched the logs from the non-work chat.
This is very common, even when working in an office. Has nothing to do with working from home
One parent cancelling daycare during covid one year (lets assume they went back the next year) seems like a solved problem (they tried didn't work for them and went back to other method).
Parents leaving work early and not staying late because of kids is an office problem you didn't mention.
Employees using a personal discord sounds positive. Work relationships are building remotely. When employees in person become close they call personal cells and go to bars to discuss how clueless leadership is. Leadership isn't capturing those conversation why is it suddenly a problem if a discord is used?
While childcare can be expensive, a "mother's helper" type nanny would be a better option if one parent can work from home. You still need to pay them a competitive wage but it's one person rather than all the admin and facilities overhead that a daycare has.
“Difficult to work with” is a totally different dimension from ageism, sexism, harassment.
I can definitely see the former going way up but the latter going way down.
As a parent of a toddler, I’m shocked they thought this would work. Kids that young need constant social interaction with their caregiver.
The Covid 19 situations were different since many people were forced into them by daycares and schools closing or “going remote”.
Lots of the daycares and preschools shut down during COVID. It was a shitty time and not exactly comparable to normal remote work for a lot of reasons.
Your friend, however, is an idiot. I know lots of people who have worked remotely for 10+ years, and none of them tried to work their job while taking care of a 3 year old - except maybe during COVID (because it was either that or quit).
Note that your HR friends is not a good measure of harassment. Maybe more people filed HR complaints because asshole and abusive behavior was easily documented over chat, etc. Whereas before, you had abusive behavior, for example, inappropriate touches but no witness that a person might not feel comfortable bringing up to HR especially if the abuser is somebody important.
Everyone knows that HR basically exists to protect the company. Unless you have ironclad proof, you may not want to involve them. Remote work would leave more of an undeniable paper trail.
Plus according to Jonathan Haidt in Happiness Hypothesis, commuting, noise and lack of control are among the most significant things that make people unhappy. All of them are manageable at home. And also these are rarely taken into the discussion.
If you are going to quote Jonathan Haidt, I suggest you take a look at his latest book, the Anxious Generation published in 2024. My reading is that reducing face time is definitely NOT a positive factor for happiness.
This is an extremely common problem for juniors in the mentoring program where I volunteer: They graduate college, take remote jobs, and then slide into depression while working from home. It takes a while to work with them to get to the bottom of their issues, but often they'll realize that they're much happier in the weeks following company on-site meetings, then they slowly decline again.
Remote work doesn't work for everyone. Many people struggle in remote environments, especially juniors. The way remote work gets pushed as being perfect for everyone can be very confusing for people who discover that they don't like it.
It's even harder because the internet tends to be very hostile to these people rather than supportive. The correct answer, obviously, is that some people do better at different types of jobs. Yet every time this comes up, people come out and try to criticize the person, blame it on their lack of hobbies, blame it on something else, and refuse to allow that some people need face-to-face coworkers to thrive.
It's a real phenomenon that gets downplayed on the internet.
I think -- on the basis of this same argument playing out for years at this point -- it's because the 2 views are talking past each other.
Sure, in office works better for some people and remote makes them miserable. They're real people.
But the side suffering economic compulsion is the remote preferred people being forced back to the office against their will.
If everyone can work how they prefer then great. But that's not the world we live in and to draw a false equivalence between the dominant (at exec level) RTO view and remote workers forced into unpaid commutes and time away from families gets our hackles way up.
The problem with this is that people's work preference doesn't always match up with the environments where they actually work well.
I've managed remote and hybrid teams for years. I've done this long enough to realize that a lot of the people who struggle to be productive at home will swear up and down that they're much more productive working remote.
The reason is simple: People aren't just expressing their preference for where they work best. They're expressing their preference for where they want to be. When it comes to low performers and difficult employees, they almost universally don't want to be at the office.
That's why it's not as simple as letting everyone work according to their preference.
Remote teams are hard for many reasons, but one of the biggest challenges is filtering for people who can actually work remote. Many people will claim they work well remote, but then you hire them and they're terrible at communicating, can't manage their own time, are constantly MIA during core working hours (a 4-hour window agreed upon by the team, in our case), and so on. It's hard to start removing these people from the company, but it's the only way to make it work.
All of those companies that switched everyone to WFH during COVID learned the hard way that you can't just take everyone and go remote. You have to build the team for it from the start. And it takes more than just asking people what they prefer.
So the best place for low performers and difficult employees is the office?
Why not hire people who have proven they have done something by themselves like an open source project or business? Seems like something that's easy to filter for. Asking someone can only tell you things about their judgement not if they actually can do it.
If you have by yourself done something you can assume they can do something else on their own. The on their own is the important pieces.
What about based on performance? Pre-covid, my company required ridiculous amount of politics to have remote approved. Eventually, one guy cracked the code ( basically be too hard to replace ) and just told the management he is staying remote. And I can see that management would love to get that carrot ( remote ) back to something that is either very rare or non-existent.
<< Remote teams are hard for many reasons, but one of the biggest challenges is filtering for people who can actually work remote. Many people will claim they work well remote, but then you hire them and they're terrible at communicating, can't manage their own time, are constantly MIA during core working hours (a 4-hour window agreed upon by the team, in our case), and so on. It's hard to start removing these people from the company, but it's the only way to make it work.
It is all true, but it points to crappy management. You want to fire people, fire them. You can't keep them motivated, you failed as a manager. I keep saying this, but management class has gotten really used to easy approach to motivation ( pizza and threat of firing ).
These people should maybe go to co-working places then. Can still work without the butts-in-seats managers over looking every move you make while also getting the social aspect.
I don't want to work next to random people. I want to work with my co-workers. I don't want to have to come in every day for no good reason. I want to be able to come in to a shared space with my coworkers and have a productive day with them. Trying to bring a group of people into a coworking space doesn't work if there are more than 2 people.
Yeah but you can't force people who don't want to come to the office to come there just because you prefer it that way. And in any case, I'm sure there would be more than just 1 person who'd prefer a social aspect / whose home life prevents them from being productive at home, in which case you could most likely band together into the same co-working, no? Most co-workings I know also rent out entire rooms for companies, not just individual desks.
Unless we're talking remote and international, in which case that obviously wouldn't work, but I assume you wouldn't apply to those jobs anyway.
That way you can get your office and some coworkers, and others can do what is best for them, and the company doesn't have to lease a huge office space. Win-win-win?
Ahh, but you see, as a certain communist era anecdote goes:
A: What if people could choose whether they want to live in decadent West or socialist paradise? B: Problem is, we want those who want to live here and ones that don't.
And that, in a nutshell is the issue with WFH. There are people who think they know better and feel obligated to enforce that view.
Yeah people forget that when you graduate college you go from an environment where you're surrounded by hundreds or thousands of potential social contacts who all have lots of free time and lots in common to being surrounded by whoever is on your block, and, if you commute, by your co-workers. I'm a remote worker but the only reason I make this arrangement work is because I'm married, have a family, and have things to do with my time outside of work. If I did this in my 20's I would have been totally unprepared to deal with it.
When I take a junior or mid-level on I try to make sure that we talk about remote work during one-on-ones and that I make sure they have stuff outside of work to focus on or at least that they have a handle on this type of arrangement. In the first year I started doing this in 2018 I tried spending a couple of weeks just working and not leaving my apartment and by the end of it I had gone pretty toasty.
People forget that just as individuals have to work differently to do remote work, managers have to manage differently to do it too. To truly transition will require different habits of mind and a good understanding of what we actually need as people to survive.
That's because the quality of juniors has changed. 20-25 years ago a junior was a self taught senior with no resume experience. Companies would throw you into something and you sank or swam. You were just happy to work with a computer all day. Most of the developers back than were men and you had to leave work to meet the opposite sex. Work was never going to meet all of your social needs.
Is the debate wfh is worse for these juniors or these types of juniors didn't exist before and won't with the rise of llms. Why cater to them now? Aren't they a product of over inflated salaries and expanding the industry too rapidly so quality of candidate drops? Isn't that correction going on right now?
A week has 168 hours.
I used to commute 1.5 hours each way until I got a car, then it dropped to 1 hour.
10-15 hours per week = 6-9% of my life - including time asleep.
Taking 16 hours of waking time per week, that gives me 112 hours to work with. Now that commute eats 9-13% of my conscious time.
Let's assume a standard 40 hour workweek - 35% of my waking time. Add in those compulsory daily highway joyrides, and conscious time spent on work rises up to 48%. Depressed yet? This includes the weekend. During the workweek you'll spend between (8 + 2) / 16 and (8 + 3) / 16 = 62.5-68.75% of your waking moments on work.
Now consider that car ownership + fuel + insurance could eat up to 30% of an average person's post-tax income.
Fuck all of that, a lot.
Employees can get together at quarterly / monthly off-sites, and juniors should be encouraged to get involved in community activities straight out of college. I'm not sacrificing my life and family time so you can stare at my grumpy face in the next cubicle.
Your primary source of face time should not be coming from your work.
Work is half of your waking day 5 days out of 7 - it’s probably your primary source of face time whether you like it or not. You might have more valuable face time elsewhere (family, friends, hobbies) but those 40-50 hours should probably be taken more seriously than they are.
I'd love to take work a lot _less_ seriously, tbh. I don't live to work, after all.
Then let’s have clubs and hobbies and so on again
Third Places really took a hit in the pandemic :( But yes, as someone who re-discovered them last year, I absolutely agree.
Replace work FaceTime with a third place FaceTime.
If you’re going to imply the office saves that, worth noting there’s a lot of non-forced organic face time from wfh available from your neighborhoods and communities, and that “Anxious Generation” screen time probably refers to teens and adults piping their lives into a phone, and not the important tradeoffs of staring at a screen in an office park or starting at a screen in your home.
Constantly the office is treated as the only existing socialization source and it really makes me wonder what people’s lives at home are out of work.
That's a good point. Eliminating commute let me play with my children after school. Even started to have a pizza together for lunch. Started to have lunch almost every day with my wife, instead of my colleagues or looking at our phones in the canteen.
There's a lot more noise from leafblowers and construction that penetrates my noise cancelling headphones at home, than I have ever experienced in an office. There is more in-office noise, yes, but that seems to be better managed by aforementioned headphones.
(FYI: A noise-cancelling headphone works best for hums and other "repeating" noise; construction noise is much less predictable for the headphone to get ahead)
It's not (often) workers calling for RTO. It's not hard to imagine why.
I see a lot of workers in HN taking that position, or at least some very persistent sock puppet corporate accounts hah.
I tend to see a lot of managers calling for it. I see some workers calling for hybrid (which is perfectly reasonable) but not full RTO. Just my impressions though.
I doubt you'd see many workers calling for in the office every day, no exceptions for in-office workers, which was mostly the norm (outside of travel and customer visits) for many professionals in, say, the 80s. However, there is a subset today that would like to see co-workers with a regular office presence.
Yes, hybrid work is a reasonable position to take, I think. One cannot deny the benefits of occasional in-office meetings/socialization while accepting the benefits of WFH.
Hybrid is a worst of both worlds in that you still have to live in a VHCOL but also spend half your weekdays in the kind of place you can afford there.
That was more because half the planet was told not to leave their homes. Sure, stopping commutes had an impact on pollution, but the roads were literally empty in major cities - that wasn't because people could suddenly WFH.
The roads being empty at their peak commute hours probably had something to do with it…
I think the point is jobs that can be done from a computer are not necessarily the bulk of jobs that require commuting.
Somehow, all those jobs got done without commutes for years during COVID. So a lot don’t seem to require commuting.
They all got done? What?
One could argue that in an ever so slightly better society all jobs wouldn't require commuting because you could live near where you work. Most of commuting comes down to the other side of the remote work problem, people can only find affordable housing that's so far from their jobs that it requires them to commute.
It's the same thing as everything else. Everyone cares about those things conditional on business going well. Do I care about Somalian kids starving? Yes. But conditional on my not starving. If I'm starving, and I have just enough money to eat, you bet I'm not sending shit to that kid in Africa. He's going to die. You can bill that as "This guy doesn't care about starving African kids" if you'd like.
Except all the topics/benefits I mention apply to our day to day lives and communities, not Somalia.
Everyone cares about those things conditional on business going well.
Or because the conversation is being driven by the banks that provide liquidity to the S&P500 and, coincidentally, own most of the commercial real estate.
This is the true reason for the push back to in-office work, and gets far too little discussion.
Anecdotal data but UHG one of the largest health care companies in the world had a huge stake in commercial real estate pre-covid. They owned virtually every building their employees worked out of all over the country.
Once covid hit, they saw the writing on the wall and have been liquidating their real estate holdings over the past 3 years or so. I live in Minnesota and they've sold five of their buildings here alone, including one of their older main HQ buildings.
They now have one HQ which is a three building campus and have gone to an almost 100% WFH model with an optional office arrangement where you can reserve a desk if you know you need to be in the office.
Many of the downtown Minneapolis buildings have also changed hands including the Wells Fargo and Capella towers. If anything, what you're seeing is a lot of the S&P 500 companies are divesting their commercial real estate holdings since it doesn't appear as though in office time is going to increase or be anywhere near what it was pre-covid.
The hypocrisy is that my company boasts about eliminating carbon emissions with all the solar panels and carbon credits, yet ask people to come in to work three days a week, some of which drive one hour one-way, as if that has nothing to do with the company (it's actually in the so-called "scope 3 emission").
There is nothing new here.
Ha yeah, my previous company had some "most green employee" award, and praising people who biked in or took transit to office - I was told I wasn't eligible because I worked from home..
revealed preference is for there to be minimal change in what people can do and material abundance
If someone says they care, observe their actions. This is the revealed intent. The words are meaningless, and cost nothing to speak.
If it is clear someone is being dishonest due to action speech delta, say so, loudly and in a manner that leaves a durable paper trail. Accountability dies in the darkness and silence.
Huh? Yes you can. Probably easier, but in different means. In the office it's much harder to sexually assault someone and get away with it. If you mean it's physically harder to sexually assault someone, well duh.
I don't deny the impact of lessening the number of people commuting, but how much of that was commuting and how much was everything being shut down?
I don't know that there would be as large an impact as people may hope.