Remote work will never been an absolute thing. It depends on context, personal habits/preferences and most importantly: experience doing it over time.
I personally cannot work from home. COVID has made it worse as kids are home BUT even if I had the whole house to myself, I just cannot work from home. I NEED a dedicated office outside my house (yes I already have an office room in my house). Reason is simple. I don't have the discipline to work from home. I get distracted too easily. So I m not a good candidate for WFH. Do I want the flexibility when needed ? Of course. But do I WANT to work from home all the time ? Hell no.
I would say the future of work is not just remote. The future of work is "employers allowing more flexibility in work location" but as an employer myself, I am personally not in favor of 100% remote. That's me I know but sorry, not everyone is cut out for remote work.
Could this office be remote? If so, you've missed the difference between remote work and working from home. I work remote and have an office 5 minutes away in town. I share it with others, but before that I had a personal office in town. Both versions are better for focus than being at home.
Yes I know what you mean. I also do need to work closely with my co-workers/team as much as possible. For me, that face to face appeal is just too important. yes not always but I would prefer it at least 70-30.
You claim that you can't work remote because working from home doesn't work for you. When it becomes clear that working remote doesn't mean working from home, you clain that you actually can't work remote for another reason.
This is a common phenomenom, though I don't know a name for it. You seem to be finding justifications for your preference (in this case, to work at a company office), but my experience think there is some other real reason. What is it?
I would note that working closely with co-workers can be achieved with text, voice, video, and shared whiteboards/screens. It is probably less efficient, but are you going in to work because you truly can't afford that loss of efficiency? Do you have an quantitative estimate of those losses, and a quantitative estimate of other efficiency gains/losses due to working remote? Do they take into account that it takes a while to readjust? If not, you just have a preference, and it doesn't need to be justified or defended.
> You seem to be finding justifications for your [ ... ] but my experience think there is some other real reason. What is it?
People _can_ have multiple deal-breakers, multiple reasons for not liking something, when you try to ask why, they usually give you _one_ of those reasons, instead of writing an essay with multiple bullet-points on why they don't like it. This is most likely just in the interest of saving time, and not to hide or avoid the _real_ reason. Also, sometimes, people take position by an intuitive feeling, hard to put into words, an understanding built by absorbing evidence and confirming hypotheses in the background over a long period of time. This, probably, is especially prone to confirmation bias if one's not careful.
> I would note that working closely with co-workers can be achieved with text, voice, video, and shared whiteboards/screens. It is probably less efficient, but are you going in to work because you truly can't afford that loss of efficiency?
For many people, this is about maintaining a healthy psychological state, for which, social interactions _are_ essential. It is _not_ about measuring efficiency. Productivity is hard to quantitatively measure in a lot of contexts, but it is easy to notice when your mental state is deteriorating in loneliness. Also, in general, worse mental state will likely mean lower performance.
Communication using video and audio and text can get you far, but for some reason it is not a substitute for the subtleties of face-to-face interaction. The communication bandwidth is just not there, a real life office is just much more immersive. Not to mention that online interactions tend to be more limited in duration. You'd be around people for an hour, and alone for seven. While in an office, you're around people _the whole time_.
> you just have a preference
Yes this is true. People are different, and prefer different environments. People vary in background, temperament, responsibilities. Some are more extroverted, some prefer longer periods of alone time. Some are mentally stable and resilient, some tend to easily spiral into depression. And some jobs just lend themselves better to remote work. Between an active extroverted salesman, and an easy-going introverted software developer, you know who's more likely to prefer working remotely.
> and it doesn't need to be justified or defended.
This is a challenge at the moment, as those who do work outside of their homes have been forced back into them due to travel restrictions (which is what most of the suddenly-remote workforce is also managing).
Oh jeez, it's sanity-inducing to hear someone say all this. 100% agree. I'm jealous of all these people who rave about remote work. But every time I've tried working away from my coworkers, I've felt like a massive failure.
I'm mostly going to write this next bit in case it resonates with someone else, because reading your message made me feel validated, and I'd love to pay it forward :)
Back when I used to work in an office, even one day WFH would make me start to feel unhinged from my normal office reality. I'd come in, expecting people to be mad at me or disappointed in me for some minor thing -- or having something I'd felt frustrated with that I now needed to resolve -- all things that never happened when I'd work in-person. But when I'd come in on the day after, no one would ever be mad or disappointed with me as I'd thought they were, and if I asked, they'd say there was absolutely nothing to worry about.
It's something about my propensity for cycling on async communication when I can't get realtime feedback -- I'm so proud of my soft skills in-person, and I'm very tuned and empathic, but working remote... I freeze up, or misread signals or just feel apprehensive and make myself frustrated in seeking clarity, to the point of being a pain for myself or others.
Also, I'm much more accountable to myself when people are walking around me, and interrupting my distractions. Every mild "disruption" (even just a person passing through the room behind me) actually gives me a chance to recalibrate and refocus on my desired task.
Just wanted to chime in and say never is a big word in tech, VR/AR might be good enough in 1-2 decades to provide 99% of the benefit of a shared office environment.
That said, I can really relate to the challenge of keeping personal and professional separate when working from home... I keep thinking of setting up a separate room or taking a laptop outside but it is painful giving up comfortable the multi-monitor setup on my main workstation.
That can be solved, by renting a desk or dedicated office in a co-working space. I work remotely FT, and if my company paid for it, I would get a spot in a coworking space. I have a dedicated office at home, but I work from coffee shops, breweries wherever I feel like.
Well, in many parts of the country that additional room would not be very expensive to build or you could just buy a place with extra bedrooms. In the bay area though, it's definitely a luxury.
Nobody minds if that's what works for you. We object when you force it on employees because it's what works for you, regardless of what works for them.
I imagine the GP also objects when remote work die-hards force remote work on people like them. According to the article, almost half of remote workers want to work for a company where all workers are remote, leaving people like GP commenter out in the cold.
It seems large groups from both sides are unwilling to meet in the middle.
And that's for good reason, really. The reality is that in-office workers have an inherent advantage when it comes to activities that require interaction between people, such as promotions or work assignments. People who want to work remotely are going to want everyone to work remote so that they aren't disadvantaged when it comes to those things, but then we are left with the problem of one group forcing their way of working on the other group.
> The reality is that in-office workers have an inherent advantage when it comes to activities that require interaction between people, such as promotions or work assignments.
I don't think those two things are an inherent advantage, rather, it's the reality of managers that don't understand how to remote work.
If "work assignments" require in-person communication, it seems like something is severely broken with your work assignment system and/or process. For software development, to me, that is basically tickets, kanban/scrum/whatever, and the regular communication that takes place to discuss. This communication doesn't need to be "in-person" to work, which brings me to the next point: meetings.
Having remote people exposes many problems with meetings. One is having too many meetings, ad-hoc meetings, or agenda-less meetings. These are problems in-person too, but they're not as directly noticeable.
The other meeting problem comes more from how the meetings take place. The most remote-friendly orgs have a rule like "one person remote, everyone remote" which basically means everyone does the meeting with a webcam and headset, even if they're in the office. At a minimum, meeting rooms need good audio/video (as in: no PSTN speakerphones, and no laptop mics or webcams allowed), and all meeting invites are always sent with an online meeting URL, at a minimum the day before.
There can be inherit advantage in being in-person both for ad-hoc technical discussions and building personal relationships, but if those are job advantages I think it's also a management failure. Ad-hoc technical discussions should quickly be moved online and inclusive of remote people, and that's something a manager should be constantly encouraging/enforcing. It should also without saying that a manager that favors employees for promotions with whom they have better personal relationships isn't doing their job properly (and note this isn't directly a "remote worker" problem).
> People who want to work remotely are going to want everyone to work remote so that they aren't disadvantaged when it comes to those things, but then we are left with the problem of one group forcing their way of working on the other group.
> We object when you force it on employees because it's what works for you, regardless of what works for them.
I think I'm a bit old school. My outlook can be summed up like this: If you like your job, and you want to keep your job, you'll do what your boss asks unless it's illegal or immoral.
So if my boss told me I had to work in an office, I'd weight that against the "if you want to keep your job" portion of the above, and decide if that's for me. If not, I quit and go find something where WFH is an option. If so, I go work in the office. Most likely I'd work in the office until I found something else or management realized that they were losing employees and changed the policy (I suppose in that way we can "force" the business to conform to our whims).
Perhaps that's a privileged point of view, or makes me a drone. But my life isn't work; I work to live, not live to work, so minor inconveniences at work don't derail my life; it's just a job, something I do to afford more important things.
For the record, I've worked from home for the last 9 years, and I have coworkers who had a really tough time adapting to WFH; they had to weigh if the trouble to change was worth it for them. Some felt it wasn't worth the trouble and left, many found it was and stayed.
Sure, nothing strange about that. But having to quit a job because management can't get their heads around remote work is inconvenient for everyone involved. It would be much better if that weren't necessary, no? That's the "objection" I meant.
My last org had a really bad wfh policy, inconsistently enforced across teams. I ended up leaving over it (mostly). There are a lot of things that won't get done because I'm not around to do them, and they'll lose a good bit of money over it. Seems like a weird hill for them to die on, but they did so. I wish they hadn't.
> you'll do what your boss asks unless it's illegal or immoral.
As an employee your primary obligation is not to your boss, but to the owners of the company.
If your boss is ordering you to do something that is detrimental to the company, you should fix the situation. But not necessarily follow the orders of your boss.
I understand that, but for too long the narrative has been exclusively controlled by people like you, even though your views are in the minority, apparently. Remote should be the default, with occasional office presence so people can get to know each other. Please stop trying to enforce your views on people. Of course there will always be some amount of person to person contact, but that should not be the mandated "normal". In fact, if everyone who couldn't stomach working remotely were fired, the increase in productivity and the unmatched health benefits to everyone else would probably more than make up for it. I do not wish to live my life as a serf, I want to be a free man. If that sounds so horrible to you, maybe you're the problem.
I personally cannot work from home. COVID has made it worse as kids are home BUT even if I had the whole house to myself, I just cannot work from home. I NEED a dedicated office outside my house (yes I already have an office room in my house). Reason is simple. I don't have the discipline to work from home. I get distracted too easily. So I m not a good candidate for WFH. Do I want the flexibility when needed ? Of course. But do I WANT to work from home all the time ? Hell no.
I would say the future of work is not just remote. The future of work is "employers allowing more flexibility in work location" but as an employer myself, I am personally not in favor of 100% remote. That's me I know but sorry, not everyone is cut out for remote work.