Someone always misses the memo in a large organization.
We have had two cases where a system was replaced with company-wide announcements and we received questions about where its predecessor went over a year later.
Did you bring it up with your manager? How about your colleagues. You can significantly affect your chances by talking about it, making clear that you see this as a major benefit (that doesn't cost the company a dime and, in fact, opens up for saving money on office rent), and highlighting that you can be as productive at home as you can in the office, if that's actually the case of course :)
Several of us where I work have been doing this over the past year, and in my last conversation with my manager I got approval for working from home permanently even after the restrictions are pulled back. It's hard to say for sure, but I don't think I would have gotten the same answer if we hadn't been very clear and vocal about our preferences. And of course it helps that the company outperformed its pre-COVID19 projections :)
Amazon seems to be bending over backward to prove they are a place no one should want to work. Not that working in an office is bad, but refusing to entertain a hybrid model, even a mild one, screams "we know best, our way or the highway" to employees.
I’m curious is they have any metrics on worker productivity that are informing this. They certainly seem to be pushing out features and making money still
Haha nice ! Your bad attempts to doxx me are nice. Are you tweeting in favor of Amazon too ?
It took a pandemic for Amazon's perks to be equal to other companies lol. Just go to blind and see how every Amazon employee bitches and moans about the perks at Amazon. Even at your "concert" people were allowed "2 sodas" lol. Nice.
Flamewars like this are obviously not what HN is for. Since you've done this before and have a long history of violating the site guidelines and ignoring a shocking number of moderation requests to stop, I've banned this account.
Flamewars like this are obviously not what HN is for. Since you've done this before (including with the very same partner, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26407601), also have a history of breaking the site guidelines, and also have ignored our moderation requests, I've banned this account.
Not sure why the person below with the office rental was downvoted, but it's a reasonable compromise. Having a space to go to can be really important, as parenting can really eat up headspace.
My first contract/WFH job overlapped with when my first child was born and it was hell and I ended up just packing it in and returning to full-time in office work. Just too distracting.
I've been working from home for even longer and working from home when my children were born was awesome. Being able to be a bigger part of the first year for both children was great for our whole family. Having the flexibility to do so was great. I definitely adjusted how and when I worked but I wouldn't have traded that for anything.
As someone a few years ahead of you, what you may want the most is flexibility - the flexibility to decide to work from home when you want, but the option to hot desk in an office when you just need a break or distance from hectic home life. The most attractive employers may be the ones who strike this balance.
I think companies should let employees to choose. People should work where they feel more productive. For some people it's in the office, and others is home.
If companies had to pay even part of the externalities of commuting they'd have stopped this antiquated modus operandi long ago.
As it stands I feel like we're going to have to wait until all Silent Generation/Boomers retire before we can see real progressive change in this area.
Honestly it really speaks to poor management in general. If your only measure for project progress is "butts in seats," then you have no idea what is going on below you. It isn't like slacking off while physically at work isn't basically a meme already.
Companies would actually be more efficient if they communicated progress/expectations in a trackable way, telecommuting just forces that issue, but it is an issue regardless of where people are.
I'm 28 and can't wait until I get back to the office. A lot of people like the social aspect of the job and not everybody decides to live a miserable commute away from their office
I'm 41 and glad to see the back of it. My commute was never miserable, but it was always wasted time. A lot of people also don't like the social aspect of the job, and the fact that it's been the default since basically forever has meant that those people have been under what I might call (somewhat hyperbolically) the tyranny of extroversion. I've been noticeably less stressed since I noped out of the office last year.
It's also worth bearing in mind that if you do want to be social, you can be social outside office hours no matter whether the job's in-person or remote. I can't choose not to be social in a face-to-face environment without suffering professional consequences.
Depending on the job, team building and social trust are important aspects of a well functioning team. If you truly do work alone, fine. But most people don't.
I don't work alone. Most of what I do involves getting other people to change what they're doing. It's high-interaction work, for the most part. And it works just fine remotely.
This impacts the cost of parking lots, and basically because we tax property rather than land value, parking lots are generally pretty cheap if you already own the ground, but expensive enough that buying new land to meet a parking minimum is one of the single largest line items in many development projects.
Property taxes contribute to local road building and maintenance at most. They do not (here at least) contribute to roads located in other towns or states that an employee may commute on.
It seems like that externality would be relatively straightforward to identify and de-incentivize. Just change the rules to allow workers to expense travel to their regular reporting location and then tax companies based on the total number above a certain floor.
It's more than just travel, it's also the cost of owning and maintaining a vehicle, the space to park it both at home and at work, the cost of insuring a vehicle.
Or the cost of a bus pass/transit at least. But the time cost of transit is generally higher than the time cost of commuting by car. And the time cost of commuting in general is pretty high and will never, ever show up on an expense report.
It's silly how much of our lives we give up for a full time job and kind of a lot of it isn't compensated in any way.
Also: maintaining a work wardrobe (more important for some than others), dealing with meals (packing, transporting, etc), forced social interactions that have no work value (Larry stops by every morning 15 minutes after you are in the zone and won't leave), pets being left alone for 8-10 hours a day (again, many people won't have this), traveling to the office when roads are icy, and so on.
to internalize those costs for most workers, as most workers are hourly, you can just make the regular commute part of work time (perhaps using average commute time to exclude abnormal variances). that avoids using tax law, which can convolute incentives and create unintended loopholes.
It's not an unreasonable assumption that innovation, specifically, thrives in a face-to-face environment, because the opportunities for random circumstantial collisions of ideas are higher by default. That would explain the emphasis on office-based work without appealing to the terribleness of management. For most companies, most of the time, though, that's not what matters, no matter how much they might wax lyrical about it.
What most companies need most of is competent execution of ideas they already have, and that's perfectly possible in a fully-remote setting in a large proportion of orgs.
> If companies had to pay even part of the externalities of commuting they'd have stopped this antiquated modus operandi long ago.
I personally lost money by working from home. My transportation costs were negligible, but I lost access to free food/drink and have to consume much more electricity at home.
I'd say it heavily depends where you are. When I was in CA, it was ~$300/mo for Caltrain+gas, ~3 hours of my time per day, plus neither lunch nor coffee was free, so ~$60/wk for that. The pandemic would have been a net benefit to the wallet there, I think.
As it was, I moved before the pandemic, because I got tired of fighting that very commute, tired of fighting to get CA to see the light on housing. So my commute was ~2 hours and ~$80/mo and lunch and coffee was paid prior to the pandemic, and I'm definitely in your bucket, since the loss of lunch significantly outweighs not paying for the commute. (And my commute was optionally biking, and I miss getting that in as much, too.)
I don't know where you live but is it possible to write at least the electricity off as a work expense? Sure it won't offset it but at least dull the cost a little.
There are plenty of boomers at companies that aren't last-century-model worshippers like Apple and Amazon that have recognized the insanity of offices.
I think this is more of a failure to adapt to the internet than anything related to one's age.
They do though, they pay me around $180 a month for an unlimited transit card (that I can’t use) and a transit debit card for Uber (that is currently capped because I also cannot use it). For most other folks that pays for parking.
I'm definitely burned out on wfh for a number of reasons.
Mainly, my productivity has gone through the floor. I have a significantly harder time focusing at home. Home is supposed to be my safe space where I don't have to worry too much about external things, but now my job has been brought in and I still really haven't figured it out. Surrounded by all the distractions I've accumulated. Maybe I have ADD, who knows. Maybe I should talk to someone.
I understand that there are people who are the opposite because they'd rather be with their families or not face an awful commute. I chose to live a block from the office to avoid that. Having a clear divide between work and play space was working for me.
I don’t care how people do their focus time, and I’m fine with Zoom for broadcast/presentation style meetings, but I’m excited to have my coworkers physically present again when we’re discussing and troubleshooting things together. Zoom fatigue is real, latency kills interactive conversation, and the avatars on my screen are at this point pretty disconnected from the real people I once knew.
It's a bit hyperbolic but... yeah, the general idea is "the pain extroverts have been dealing with in the past year is what introverts have had to deal with all along" and so on but there's no way to really prove that, and I think we are more social creatures as the common baseline.
I’m not in GP’s boat (I unexpectedly love WFH), but if part of what I miss is the effectiveness of shared analog whiteboard discussions, those are hard if you’re the only one at the whiteboard.
Right I'm pointing out that being glad everyone is being forced back into the office against their will is being glad that other people's happiness is being sacrificed for your own. Which doesn't sound so great when you say it like that.
It seems like that fully in-person, fully remote, and hybrid teams will all exist, and most people will be able to get their preferences satisfied. You also can’t show up to a startup and sling COBOL or to a bank and cowboy Elixir. People will sort themselves into jobs that match their styles. Perhaps it is “unfair” that remote work partisans will have to go through a job search and I won’t, but you win some and lose some. My job does not optimize my personal happiness either, that’s why they pay me.
Or it's being glad that company leadership is, using their best judgment, optimizing for the effectiveness and competitiveness of the company that ensures you have food with your meals.
It can be (and likely is) neutral/ignoring of other people's happiness rather than actively glad that they're not getting their way.
At the start I was. My work never had enforced work at office and there was people who were flexible so there is no mandate to go back.
Now that the office is open, honestly I don't go in as much as I thought I would and seem to miss it less than I imagined. I like the flexibility and do enjoy going in on the occasion to see people but honestly I think I'm going to stick to WFH for most of the time.
Honestly, I can't wait to go back, and I have a terrible commute. I am not enjoying this, and my productivity is not great. And despite having lots of time at home, my home and hobby productivity has been terrible, too.
But I do think I'll probably settle into a routine where I'm only in 3 days a week. Or hunt for a job that is much much closer to home.
No, there are lots of extroverts who like social interaction in the workplace, and bad managers who think their main job is to observe and ensure butts-in-seats.
I don't think I qualify for either introvert or extrovert (that is, I tend to be self-reflective about some things and outgoing about others).
There are plenty of other reasons too. It is much faster to communicate face to face (for me) and I tend to be much better at resolving micro-miscommunications that can blow up in hours of days of work delays when I'm face to face than when I'm remote. Compounded with the fact that I am not good at reading people in general (but much worse so remotely), in the WFH setup I end up having a lot more situations where I don't know exactly where a coworker and I stand on a certain issue, which even if it happened in the office it would be resolved in < 5 minutes face to face.
I think it's because in the office, interrupting someone with a quick question is a much lower barrier/less hassle than asking them to join you on a short video conference.
