Advancing tech was sold as a way to make all our lives better. Here is an instance of tech making our lives better, but instead companies dismiss it because the real purpose of tech for the capital class is control.
Working in an office for 8 hours a day costs me an additional hour getting ready and commuting to to work, an hour away from home for lunch, an hour commuting back home and unwinding after work, turning 8 hours of paid labor into 11 hours of doing shit for other people.
Working at home claws back 15 hours a week.
It’s also how I got into a head on collision when some oblivious guy who pulled out in a left turn with oncoming headlights (me) driving straight in the lane. Close to home like most crashes are statistically, had I not been made to drive down to the office building then the rental car and repairs would never have been needed. There are costs everywhere that can be factored into this.
Facts don’t matter anymore, get your ass to the office!
Mostly US companies
The only advantage to me being in the office is that I get free access to the gym.
Aaaaand See how people will deny scientific research for the sake of Control.
I’m fed Up on how much a workplace wants to Control anyones Life. And all the rights that have ever been fought for under a broad Attack every single day. And it kinda feels like we’re losing the battle.
Unionize!
It largely depends on if you can afford to have a room dedicated as your home office.
Working/relaxing cannot happen in the same space. Our brains are not wired to do such a dramatic difference in mental activity in the same location. That’s also why bedrooms should be used for sleeping and fucking ONLY. Once you start reading/scrolling in bed, your brain makes that connection, “Oh, I’m in bed, I should doomscroll for the next 3 hours” instead of “Oh, I’m in bed. I should sleep.”
As someone who currently sleeps, works, and relaxes in the same room these absolutes you’re throwing out come off as hilarious. I’ve literally always lived in a room with both my bed and my computer, always worked and gamed from my computer, always slept within a couple of meters of my desk chair and computer.
You absolutely can work, relax, and sleep in the same space.
Does that mean I prefer that? Could I gain some meaningful benefits from having more spaces to dedicate to certain tasks? Absolutely. And the moment we tax the ultra-wealthy out of existence and therefore make housing affordable again, I’ll make those rooms.
But working from home is not reliant on a square ft/m metric that the home must pass, nor how those spaces are organized or themed. I think saying it does only hurts my ability to stay at home, which is better for the environment, the economy, my productivity, and most importantly my life and mental health.
i will take sleep and work in the same room every single day, in every single occasion over an office.
Of course. Saving an hour of meaningless commute every day is a huge positive change.
God I’d love it if my commute were only an hour.
It’s 90-minutes each way if traffic cooperates. I put about 30k miles on my car in a given year.
My back was injured so they let me work from home yesterday, and other than the pain it was magical. I also got SOOO much done.
This is the wild thing, most people work better at home but no no, must be in office and have performance reviews…
In my case, I work for a municipality and I legitimately do need to be in the office to meet with citizens, attend public hearings, etc. abut I think they could come up with a schedule where I work remote on Mondays and Fridays or something. It would also make those days “no meeting days” so I could catch up on my actual job.
We get raked over the coals for how long development review takes, but then every developer wants to meet with us for an hour every week, so instead of reviewing plans we’re attending meetings 25 hours a week where they’re bitching at us for how long it takes us to review their plans.
Okay, here’s some unsolicited advice from an IT manager. Please take with a heap of salt.
25 hours is too many for 1:1 weekly meetings unless that’s your whole job description. That leaves 15 hours for overhead, project management, team meetings, leadership meetings, scrum-of-scrums, town halls, mentorship, breaking ties on MRs, performance reviews, etc. At that scale, and assuming you have other responsibilities, 1:1’s really should be monthly, optional 3/4 of the time, or cut back to 15 minutes unless there’s an ask for more time. Also: ya gotta delegate those plan reviews if you can. With a labor pool that size, you probably have at least a few seniors or principals that can take it on.
Also, with 25 direct reports you’re practically a Director without any supporting management under you. It’s entirely possible that you’re being underpaid, especially if this arrangement pushes you into overtime (more than 40hrs a week) a lot.
You’re managing 25 developers?! That’s way too many IMO!
You mean we had a worldwide event that proved to us that an incredible technology that allows us to work remotely could actually be used to work remotely, then our overlords chose to ignore that and now studies are proving what we already knew was true, is true?
Neat.
Sleep. Precious beautiful sleep. I can roll out of bed, rip a huge wet fart, log into Teams, pretend to care for 5 minutes, go right back to sleep (and still be able to smell that fart, thankfully), take a long nap, get up to take a big smooth dump, then put in the same 3 hours of actual work I’d do at the office, then play Sokoban all afternoon. All the while reducing resource usage.
This is the UBI/leisure society I was promised as a kid.
If you spend most of your day getting to and from work, then pretending to be busy at the office, you don’t have time to think or be a threat to the billionaires by starting your own competing company/product.
I liked working from home at first, but after so long it becomes harder and harder to leave your work at “work” when your workplace is also your home. Now I am back in the office and actually prefer it that way. I have the flexibility to work from home on weekends or when I need to be home for some reason, which is good enough for me.
If you’re working at home on weekends, it doesn’t sound like you’re leaving work at work.
Simple solution is to have a designated home office work space, and work only there.
Did the web site swap in a completely unrelated story about how swimming is good exercise for people over 55?
It’s probably just another clone of this clone of a clone of a …
LOLWTF it also swapped it for me
Which is why the ruling class has decided we can’t have it…
Is this linked wrong? The article is about swimming for health not WFH.
oddly, the link goes to the right article, then the site redirects to the swimming article,
here it is on another site
https://evidencenetwork.ca/remote-work-increases-happiness-4-year-study-findings/
edit: it’s someone elses take, looking for original
edit2: OK, the original article is from 2020, there are updartes in 2024.
This page does a better job covering the the couple of gallup polls and some of the criteria listed
though the site is sus to me :)
Every time this comes up i tell my personal and data driven experience as a middle manager in a company, and every time people trash me, but i keep saying it.
IT FUCKING DEPENDS!
From purely data point of view (note: this is from my place of work) workers whose work is purely executing more or less the same duties every day had their productivity have a nose dive when working long stretches from home. Also their works quality got worse. Its easy to reinforce bad habits whitout even noticing it, if the feedback comes from email and and not straight from the supervisor.
BUT with jobs like coders or artists where the job is more open ended instead of monotous labor there was no ill effects.
Then on the other side communication has gotten much slower with the people working from outside office. Where i used to just walk to the other room and ask something from my collegue i now need to message them in our internal and hope they notice it. Getting answers for questions have turned from 5 minute thing to 10-40 minute things.
Also from the point of more inventive things on my work we have lost a lot of changes to brainstorm ideas. No more throwing ideas around during lunch or coffee breaks
Where i used to just walk to the other room and ask something from my collegue i now need to message them in our internal and hope they notice it. Getting answers for questions have turned from 5 minute thing to 10-40 minute things.
Those rude shoulder-tap interruptions may have only taken you 5 minutes, but they ruined half an hour of productivity to the person you were interrupting. This is the whole reason people can be more productive at home without annoying bosses blathering at them.
Thanks for typing out my thought about this. /a SW dev.
Yeah every programmer I know loves not being exposed to the manager who just “has a question” or just want to “check in”.
Nah. Coders get slack messages. Only exception is if something is truly fucked and it needs to be fixed asap and for some strange reason i notice it before they do. Mosty happens when they push from test to production.
We have biweekly check ins with code team and thats enough.
The immediate interruption is good for management, but bad for the company overall.
That’s why we still have Jira/email.
Critical importance: slack/in person
Can wait but important: high importance email, P1 Jira
Not important: Low impotance email, P2 Jira
I have WfH for about twenty five years now and I will say the same thing I always say when this type of comment pops up, if people do not want to talk to you for some reason they will not respond as its a lot easier to hide on email/IM than an office situation. If you finding that people are hiding from you, then that’s as much a you problem as anything else for not directly addressing it.
I actually find it considerably easier to get hold of someone via IM than any other method short of direct dialing them as I can reach them in meetings or away from their desk or even in another country entirely, its only if they are intentionally ignoring you it does not work. If the person is presenting in a meeting or otherwise legitimately incommunicado then they aren’t going to respond F2F or IM anyway.
Not measuring output volume or quality consistently is a widespread problem for businesses, regardless of location of the employee. Consistent and accurate measurement is the only way to be sure you are getting the results you are expecting, for coding that means code reviews not commit counts, 360 feedback, and so on. If you are feeding back, and someones ignoring that, guess what, its also a you problem for not building in consequences and follow ups. It also applies just as much in an office situation as it does remote.
The article does have this caveat.
“Context still matters. Job type, home setting, and leadership quality vary. Yet the direction remains positive. Even with modest differences by role, the health and satisfaction curves point upward. Inside those curves, remote work behaves as a flexible option that organizations can calibrate rather than a rigid rule.”
Though I will say your argument is still centered around being productive and effective for the company (make money for the company), the article specifically centers around an individual’s well-being (sleep, family life etc.). So not the same metrics.
Other articles and research I’ve seen that did center on productivity did conclude that yes, it depends.
Out of curiosity, can you describe, with a bit more detail, the kind of work that was repetitive and became worse?
Whatever it was the people doing it deserve a more brain-stimulating job. If things are repetetive in a desk job, chances are that a lot can be automated.
Customer service and sales support. The work is on the basic channels. Phone, email and chat and its pretty much allways some variation of few same questions or complaints.
Both customer satisfaction and work effiency started to get worse the longer the lockdown went.
By the way we dont have mandatory office days. Everybody can work from home if they want. The split is now pretty much 60/40 with bigger part working from the office. (I think big part is because it has kindergarden and its in place with good public transport) During summer when parents want to stay at home looking after the kids or when bank holidays make broken week most of the people stay home.
How about the workers’ wellbeing? Is that ever considered?
Getting answers for questions have turned from 5 minute thing to 10-40 minute things.
That’s an administration problem. Sure people are busy, in meetings or at lunch. But if someone is always 40m away from answering a work slack/chat they’re a candidate for replacement.
You understand wrong.
I message somebody --> they take ten minutes to answer, with question --> im doing something else, it takes me few minutes to finish or risking losing my tough then i answer --> maybe with good luck they answer right back, but most likely it takes few minutes again.
In the office i could have talked to the person and resolve the thing faster.
For us, we use slack huddles when there will be too much back and forth. 30 second audio call, supports screen sharing.
Yeah we use huddles too. But its not like it always clear when this things is going to be involved or not.
In the field of organizational psychology (which research like this is typically done by), the phrase “it depends” is used so often among scientists that it’s a running gag at this point
middle managers are useless anyway
Time to repeat my topical story.
I worked for a startup that prided itself on being “data driven”. They’d talk about how other startups were doing stupid things because they followed their feelings instead of data.
One day in one of those all hands meetings, the CEO was taking questions. Someone said, “Studies are showing that four day work weeks are more effective on like every metric. Can we look into that?”
The CEO said "No, we’re not doing that ". Didn’t read the linked studies. Didn’t entertain it at all. His mind was made up, and the data was irrelevant.
Because he doesn’t really care about data. He cares about feeling smart and irreverent. He cares about being seen as a cool disruptive startup guy who’s going to grind his way to success.
The dishonesty makes me want to puke.
But you know what also makes me sick? All the sycophantic boot lickers that would gather round and tell him his every idea was great. The people who would work unpaid long hours to “get shit done”. Bunch of fucking wormtongues who would sell out their coworkers for crumbs.
Maybe he was a real person once who really did care about data. But by the time I met him, he was an empty suit
You just reminded me of a similar incident at a company I worked at. Larger than a startup, but still not huge. Same situation where it was a question at an all hands, the response from the CTO was simply that he had not seen that data and immediately moved on.
Funny thing was, the guy that asked the question wasn’t even adding about a 32 hour work week, he just wanted to option to do 4 10s over 5 8s but they moved on from his question so fast they never gave him a chance to clarify.
Lol, did we work at the same place?
“Empty suits” it’s the realest statement.
I resigned my position because I couldn’t take it anymore. I told leadership that I refuse to use my skills and talents for those who I do not respect, and they responded by saying that there was a lot of money on the line.
They can fucking keep it. Fucking ghouls.
maybe we all met. i worked at the same place.
except there wasn’t a lot of money on the table, just money shaped carrots they dangled in front of us to have us overworked to death.
That’s exactly it.
When they said that there’s a lot of money on the line they meant for themselves since they were partners.
They offered to share some of it with me in the shape of a very generous 3% contingent salary increase, which would come with strings attached like everything they ever offered me.
I’ve been learning to grow veggies, cook dry beans, and bake bread since money is tight after I resigned, and my partner and I are way happier because I’m not as stressed out from dealing with sociopaths and morons at work all day long.
