> For the small company CEO who relies on force of personality and everyone in the same room urgently working to get something done, WFH might be terrible.

Working remotely for a small company with a few people from around the world and it's going fine. We are in contact when we have to be. I can cut distractions when I need to. No open space office bulshit.

I was raised on IM. I'm fine communicating like this. If I need to talk I can always call someone.

In any case, you need a space to work. If you WFH you should have a space for work. I strongly believe that employers should pay you more so that you can afford an additional room. This should not be a cost cut for the employers. They should just pay you instead of paying the insane office rent.

WFH is simply different from working at an office. It will be hard for some people to learn a new way, but this major change could even redesign our cities.

> I was raised on IM. I'm fine communicating like this. If I need to talk I can always call someone.

It is not about you being comfortable with IM, it is about doing an A/B comparison of the 2 options. You don't know what you don't know, if you don't compare with being in the office then "being fine" does not mean "it's better", it can be worse and you don't know it.

I am working from home a lot for ~ 12 years, I still go to the office from time to time not because I have to, but because it is good to. Those days are a complete waste of time in terms of productivity, sometimes I don't open my laptop the whole day, but they are priceless for other reasons; I talk to people all day long, the kind of discussions you don't plan and send invites with an agenda upfront.

> I talk to people all day long, the kind of discussions you don't plan and send invites with an agenda upfront

For what reason? You say it's a total waste of time productivity wise. Imagine having this all the time, because it's how it looks like in an open space office.

This might be the reason why we are expected to work 8h/day. We simply waste most of our work time. It would be much better to be paid 2x more per hour and only really work 4 hours a day.

Also, working remotely does not mean my meetings have invitations or an agenda. You can call someone anytime. We have webcams on all day. I only have a calendar event if it is a planned meeting, like an interview with a new candidate, daily stand up, brainstorming session.

It's all about the context. I am a senior IT manager in a very large US-based non-IT company. I am in the top 1% in the company as IT expertise (and in the bottom half of the people here, for perspective), that makes me a technical guru of the local organization. I will never be promoted to the next level (Director), but I can be a fellow if I want; this creates the expectation that people can reach me for guidance and help and this is what I do in the days I go to the office: be there and talk to anyone that needs me.

The huge advantage for me is that it makes me almost intangible to people like the local Director (technically incompetent and an ass) and I don't have to spend time with bullshit corporate "organizational work" like going to recruiting events and explain why we hire and promote only women (because targets). My yearly evaluation is also just a formality that I never spend more than 15 minutes for and I have the flexibility to pick the most interesting projects we have. If spending a couple of days per month in the office is the price, I am willing to pay it.

> Why would they pay you more than the minimum anyone than they would for any other cost center?

Maybe because you're a resource and not a cost center?

It's not always the case - some job roles are fungible - but I don't think that's the case with a typical HN denizen.

Let me put it another way. Why is paying the CEO more a better use of money to paying an employee more? Doesn't that build in a lot of assumptions about untapped value? And (at risk of getting out of my depth) paying the shareholders isn't the always the right thing to do. Don't most tech companies avoid giving dividends in favour of using the money to improve the share price? Which brings us back to employees and their potential value...

> Why is paying the CEO more a better use of money to paying an employee more?

I think the problem here is the one who decides who gets more is the CEO.

They tend to believe the employee will keep working for the same amount until they leave.

It is not about what is better, but what the company considers to be better; it is not the employee's decision, the company may simply decide that raising CEO's bonus or the dividends is the best. The comment was not advocating this, just telling how it happens in the real world.

> Maybe because you're a resource and not a cost center?

You are providing a resource by consuming money.

Imagine a company as if you were playing a CEO in a "software company tycoon" game. Are developers something you like to have, vs. need to have? Would you allocate them more money than strictly necessary to keep the output at desired level?

So make it necessary by refusing to work without being paid for utilizing your space and equipment. It's a thing of culture. You are paid based on supply and demand mostly. Devs should be on the front of this movement. Anyone who is able to generate any kind of financial pillow.

If you are a pizza boy where I live you get paid extra if you use your own car. It's not a law. It's expected. That's the work culture. No one will drive for you otherwise.

I'm not saying that you're not a cost. That your are one is obvious. I'm saying that you're not a cost that can be reduced without any negative second order effects.

I get what you’re saying and business is often like that, but buying employees computer equipment for their home office is common for example. Tech is also on the cutting edge of pampering employees in exchange for better work. Why not an increased salary for more space at home.

I think WFH is particularly difficult for young people, not because they don't have access to seniors (or any other such drivel), but because they often don't have the discipline necessary for it.

For example, I've been doing freelance work for well over 10 years now and I eventually started insisting on having an extra office with a strict policy of the room is for work only (even if not paying work). The thing is, a lot of people will recommend things like dressing up as if you're going into work, taking a walk around the block as a transition, and so forth. But for me I can literally walk into that room completely naked straight from bed and have no issues.

But the thing is, what works for me doesn't work for you (and vice versa). But I've had over 10 years to figure out what works for me, young people haven't.

That's where their challenge is at, not in trying to learn from mentors, which can still happen even remote.

And some people just can't do it because they don't have the discipline and never will. Those people will fail, but that's on them.

Even when I was in my early 20s it took way more discipline for me to work in an open office than WFH. It's hard to concentrate on a task when your coworkers of all ages and ranks are talking about TV, sports, and politics all day long

Can I ask why you think that young people are inherently less disciplined?

I think it's been observed by many psychology studies that conscientiousness (the personality trait that determines self discipline and self control) tends to increase with age. Excerpt from https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2562318/:

"Agreeableness demonstrated a fairly linear increase with age whereas the pattern for Conscientiousness was curvilinear: scores increased up to a peak somewhere between the ages of 50 to 70 and then declined."

Accorindg to your link, mean Conscientiousness raises by only 16% over age, with the standard deviation stays the same.

Doesn't sound that large.

But intuitively, people who have families will work significantly harder than a teenagers. So i think we're measuring something incorrectly here.

> My rule of thumb is that if you're dealing with someone 10+ years older than you, it's generally good to assume they can read you better than you can read them.

This is giving a lot of people undue credit, is the problem.

...perhaps other than the breakfast part, that’s exactly what most teenagers do every morning (at least in non-COVID) times.

Certainly children don’t, if you’re only talking about prepubescent children, but they’re also not particularly relevant to a discussion about working from home.

I had covered teenagers earlier in my comment, and so I wanted to cover younger children with the rest of the comment.

Right but we’re not talking about children. We’re talking about recently hired software engineers? And if you’re saying “pretty much every adult”, doesn’t that include those engineers?

Are you claiming that a 21 year old engineer is obviously going to be as experienced at life as a 40 year old engineer?

Because that's what you're implying here, and I don't think any reasonable person would make the claim that's obvious.

I didn’t think we were talking about life experience, I thought we were talking about the nebulous term “discipline.”

And you’re switching back and forth between “young people”, “children” and now “21 year olds.” I’m trying to understand where this bias comes from, is all.

I will facetious say that it's (reverse) agism against young people by older people.

I try to fight my primal instincts of jealousy, etc. but it really feels like a lot of the 'butts in chairs' type people like human resources, various managers, etc. have slowly cut back to basically responding to emails/messages and maybe working a few hours a week. If that is your definition of WFH being great than it is definitely going great for them.

As a dev it has kinda shredded my desire to do large scale unpredictable projects and made me pick up predictable boilerplate type work. One is easy to demonstrate progress on, the other is more abstract. This is also slowly eroding my passion for engineering so I may need a rebalancing.

It’s coincidental to my section of the universe you mention what you did in the first paragraph:

You are the third person this week I’ve heard make some commentary to that effect or another: “anyone else feel like WFH has made work easier for everyone else BUT engineering? My tickets haven’t slowed down an iota yet support and product queues are lower than I’ve ever seen them on the (Trello) board”

Other than initially temporarily getting pulled in to work support for Citrix for our large organization converting from almost 100% onsite to 100% remote with almost everyone who had been desktop dependent getting Citrix access overnight, I feel like WFH has made work as a dev easier. It hasn't reduced expected velocity, but it has reduced meetings that should be emails, drop-in interruptions, distractions from people doing conference calls on speakerphones in an an open office, facilities issues, and commute stress.

I suspect it’s highly team-culture and org dependent, to be fair.

A friend in the American Southwest expresses just as you do: meetings have declined, “walk ups” have all but stopped and he’s more productive ever. My org? Literally the opposite in every listed factor.

In fact we had a meeting today as a functional team* about how we plan to put up some guardrails just for ourselves so we can get some shit done.

I am at least thankful to the Holy compiler our Director was on the zoom and has completely bought in and offered support because he sees the pain and agrees it’s a problem.

———

* it’s not as ironic as it sounds, this was our usual Friday afternoon “have beers and just vent about the week over zoom” meeting. It’s quite healthy for the six of us as a lot of good outcomes have resulted from the calls during COVID from a comraderie standpoint And have a Director who will go to bat where he can.

> I suspect it’s highly team-culture and org dependent, to be fair

Sure, absolutely. I was sharing my experience, but I certainly didn't intend to claim it was universal.

If so: Get promoted.

I love it, because it has cut my commute down 10 hours/week and my dedicated meeting time 10 hours/week. That's 20 hours. Now I can dedicate 5 hours of that to taking walks or naps or cooking healthy food. 5~10 hours of that for more work. And 5 hours for the company. Generally a win for everyone, I think.

> As a dev it has kinda shredded my desire to do large scale unpredictable projects

I understand the anxiety that drives this and have found the best approach to be bringing that up to my manager, verifying those types of contributions are still welcome, why you think they are important for the business, and your desire to make sure your keeping up with "core functions".

I assume those "boilerplate type" tasks communicate their business value outwardly much better and are known quantities, but do little for your development.

- For the working parent whose productivity has been slashed by 50% and stress has gone up by 50% due to parenting obligations, WFH might be terrible.

This is not only WFH. I've done WFH before the pandemic and it was fine. Daycare and nannies are usually an option in normal circumstances.

This seems like pandemic-from-home to me.

Agreed on pandemic-from-home making things hard for parents suddenly trying to work from home and homeschool at the same time. And here is another aspect the article author may not be aware of: "How our housing choices make adult friendships more difficult" https://www.vox.com/2015/10/28/9622920/housing-adult-friends... "Our ability to form and maintain friendships is shaped in crucial ways by the physical spaces in which we live. "Land use," as it's rather aridly known, shapes behavior and sociality. And in America we have settled on patterns of land use that might as well have been designed to prevent spontaneous encounters, the kind out of which rich social ties are built."

> And that's aside from the point that, when everyone is remote, you're also competing with the world who is also remote.

Yup... once everyone is remote anyway, won't take too long for some manager to decide to offshore work to cheaper countries. Even if that doesn't happen to you, if it happens to enough people elsewhere it'll bring salaries down for everyone.

They have had that option for twenty years already.

It hasn't happened because cultural fit is super important to a business if it wants to create a quality product.

Look at the areas where the services have been outsourced to overseas, it's support and maintenance of products and services, generally post-sales support where they don't care about the quality of the service or it's a company with a natural monopoly and they care more about saving money than providing a good service.

Having a hand picked team with unique interlocking skills is what creates a quality product, you can't do that if you are outsourcing entire teams overseas, you have no control on who you are hiring and quality.

Or at the least these problems are super difficult to overcome and probably the cost to overcome them is too much for anything less than a global company to get any savings out of doing.

PS I've totally generalised to make a point, there are 1000s of exceptions I am sure.

Offshoring is not a new concept, and everyone knows it doesn’t work. How come offshoring hasn’t eaten my lunch yet?

Because the pandemic is forcing literally _everybody_ to work their tails off to figure out how to make remote work succeed. Once managers master that (and they will because they have no choice), it's a tiny, tiny jump to offshoring.

Are you talking about hiring professional software engineers full-time from other countries? I think that is actually plausible and I've seen it work at multiple companies. Buying services from a "offsourcing" shop on the other hand - always a complete disaster or literally more time managing them than to build it yourself.

I disagree. Time zone, communication, and cultural familiarity are still factors.

Practically speaking if you’re an American dev, your biggest competition isn’t someone from Ukraine or India, but rather a fellow American that’s moved to Iowa.

The D community is all over the world. We're used to that!

I'm a working parent and I don't want to go back. The hideousness of commuting has been brought home to me, all the time I spend away from my kid shown up for what it is: wasted. If I have to quit and find permanent remote work somewhere, I will.

Ultimately I don't feel responsible for the careers of the juniors, and feel they're being used as an excuse - the main thing about the cities is it's possible to meet people you want to meet and do anything you want to do. This includes tech groups, which provide social and professional opportunities. I've been to plenty myself, and wonder if it couldn't be the mainstay of progression and networking now.

> For the small company CEO who relies on force of personality and everyone in the same room urgently working to get something done, WFH might be terrible.

I’d argue that this not working is a good thing. “Force of personality” isn’t a scalable thing, it tends to inexorably tie a company to the failings of one person, and easily transitions into a cult of personality.

> -- For the working parent whose productivity has been slashed by 50% and stress has gone up by 50%

Only up by 50%? That's impressive.

Another thing that got wiped out is the distinction between companies that have nice offices and those that don't. Some companies invested a lot in the workspace and now they are back on the same line with everyone else.

> -- For the working parent whose productivity has been slashed by 50% and stress has gone up by 50% due to parenting obligations, WFH might be terrible.

Why have kids if spending time with them is such a burden?

Because kids are a long-term investments in happiness. Also, they're not that big of a burden when you have access to institutions such as grandparents, babysitters, daycare, kindergarten and schools. All of which got shut down due to pandemic.

This of course I understand. My comment was just a remark that there must be something wrong with our culture if spending time with ones own children is so unbearable for so many people without delegating most of the duties to others.

It's been like this since the dawn of history. Parents depended on others for child rearing. It's been said that minimum viable reproductive unit of humans is a village. Parents aren't really supposed to be spending all that time with their children, 24/7, alone, with no support group. It's doable, but not pleasant. It never was.

People really don't seem to think the working parent thing through. Unless there is a stay-at-home parent, commuting to an office does nothing to eliminate childcare-related disruptions of your work time. It just makes you completely dependent on institutional child care, regardless of the pandemic related risks to your family.

And what kind of lame company culture only allows the proles to come into contact with Very Important Senior Team Members via "fortuitous" in-person collisions? For God's sake, just Slack them.

IME in-person meetings are so overrated. They always end up at "yeah we should totally do these things" and nothing actually happens.

Honestly people, there is nothing you can do in an office culture that you can't do equally well in a remote culture, if you take the time to adapt. But the people who don't understand or care how to adapt will continue to propagate their urban legends about the unique magic of fortuitous shoulder taps, hallway collisions and lunch meetings. Whatever.

》For the working parent whose productivity has been slashed by 50% and stress has gone up by 50% due to parenting obligations, WFH might be terrible.

And working at office with 1 hour drive home, makes those parenting obligations somehow easier?

Yes.

- Small children don't really understand "mummy's working, talk to me instead." Interruptions are death to productivity. Children can't interrupt you if you're not present.

- Most daycares are closed or at reduced capacity.

- Nanny services are harder to find and come with risks.

- Time at the office is time resting from the kids, and time at home is resting from the office. If it's all one place, there is no rest.

My wife and I are finding it easier to alternate childcare instead of try to do everything at once, and being out of the home during the work time gives rest and focus.

But daycare closed is a different problem. If childcare would be closed, and you still had to commute to office... WFH saved you in this case.

Sure, but childcare being closed and the requirement to work from home are being caused by the same thing this time. Childcare being closed in regular times is a rare occurrence; while it's annoying, people manage to work around it. Yes, that can be stressful, but it's just for one day out of however many. Right now it's every day.

If childcare was running at normal capacity but parents were still working from home, they'd be a lot more productive and less stressed out.

Not really, many people still have to go to work, even with childcare closed. WFH is a privilige, not burden.

Right, I'm specifically talking about the parents who are working from home, not those who aren't.

Those who aren't have extra things to be stressed about, like their increased risk of exposure to COVID-19.

As a parent, yes. I prefer an office because there are fewer distractions. If you hear your kid laughing outside your office, it's hard not to want to take a look. Plus, my commute is me time, where i get to listen to podcasts/audiobooks and relax.

Sure, if my commute were especially long, I might say otherwise, but that's a different discussion.

Commute can also be exercise/activity time.

That's less good than not-commuting and choosing when to have exercise time, unless you have low willpower

could do both too

I spend my commute on a train for an hour. No more.

Parenting is weird. Haven’t you ever seen the parent whose kid goes quiet, and then they jump up in a panic? They know their kid is up to something horrible if they’re quiet now....

There’s lots of thoughts like that and plenty to worry about as a parent. It’s more than just “Shut up Johnny!”

Its true. Dead silence is a sign of mischief in progress, but sometimes you'll peek in on them and they'll be doing the cutest, most harmless playing, all by themselves in some corner off in their own world, and for just that moment you'll think you have the best kid in the world.

Right but when 30% of the time they're about to eat a broken lightbulb or drop a bucket of paint on themselves it's hard to let (the checking) slide when you're busy.

Also just having your child survive is not raising them, people have gone from having an educational input from a trained teacher to being the sole carers _whilst they're working_. Sure whilst the kids aren't fighting/breaking stuff/eating badly they really like sitting on the couch all day but that's terrible for them.

I love home educating (far better when museums/parks/venues and things are open mind you) but I'm at work .. there's no education, not even childcare, it's babysitting level of care at best.

WFH parenting is made much harder with daycare workers and school teachers now WFH.

This is a covid problem though, not a work from home problem. In a normal world, possibly even next year, this will go away

Oh, and for a senior developer from a eastern europe with excellent english, communication skills and previous remote experience, this is a godsend.

The small company CEO is a big one. Motivating people remotely is tough

and here I find the fact I no longer have the stress of traffic to offset most of my concerns plus it really is beneficial to my wallet.

So yeah, there are pros and cons but the parenting one is not truly fair in that the arbitrary handling of schools across this country is maddening in its own right. people who tend to be good at managing their own time are usually good at dealing with the children being around.