In my experience at least talking to some younger people there is a clear dichotomy: despite all the talk about Gen Z being "digital natives", people new in their career are much hungrier to get back into the office because they don't yet have good career networks built up and they're eager for mentorship. It is older, or at least more established workers who are less keen on that.
I don't think FAANGs will have any trouble hiring a boatload of eager, hardworking college grads in September even if they lose multi-digit percentage of their current workers.
I experienced all of these to a much better degree during college. Are you sure you don't just want to live in a city that provides plenty of shared spaces? Relying on your employer for these items seems unwise.
> Relying on your employer for these items seems unwise.
Why? Work is where you spend one third (or more) of your time during your adult life. Why the hell would I not want such a significant portion of my life to not also provide great benefits like opportunities to make friends, meet people, eat great food, and have fun?
If you scoff at people who want to make their workplaces more welcoming and happier, no shit the workplace is going to turn into anti-social, work-only hellholes that nobody wants to go back to. This attitude is a self-fulfilling prophecy, and a root of the problem.
Because you might get fired or laid off or burnt out and leave and only then discover that you have invested too much of yourself into this faceless entity that does not care a whit about you. This is one of those things where peoples' warnings to the young come from hard won experience, but where it doesn't sound right to people who have not themselves yet gained the experience. So we fail to impart the lessons and each generation is forced to relearn them on their own. It can be maddening to know something is correct but unable to convince someone who must experience it themselves in order to see. But it's just life and humanity, it just works that way.
>This is one of those things where peoples' warnings to the young come from hard won experience, but where it doesn't sound right to people who have not themselves yet gained the experience.
Speak for yourself. I am very experienced. I have worked at many companies, some of which I left abruptly, and others where my close friends were fired/laid off.
But guess what? None of that matters. Just because a friendship starts at a workplace doesn't mean it ends when the employment ends. Some of my best, life-long friends are people I met at work. My current SO, who I will marry, is someone I met at at a past employer. My wedding party is going to be half-filled with people who I met at work, even though I no longer work with them. I currently mentor (and am mentored by) people from past jobs, one of which was actually fired.
This is also a self-fulfilling prophecy that I see in these conversations. People begrudgingly make nice with people at work, and restrict those relationships to only happen at work... and then are surprised when those relationships end when employment ends. If you only interact with your "friends" at your employer, then no shit those interactions will stop when your employment ends. But they don't have to, and for many people, they don't.
It's not any different than any other part of life. I'm no longer in college, but I'm still close friends with people I met in college, and I don't regret at all the fun activities I did during college. I no longer go to my old gym (I switched to a new gym), but I still keep in touch with someone I met at the old gym and I still benefit from the exercises I did there. I no longer live in my old apartment, but I still keep in touch with my friend who lived across the hall from me. Why should my workplace be any different?
You sound SO different from me. I really struggle to form relationships so easily, yet it sounds like you making lasting relationships wherever you go.
I find that kind of fascinating. As someone who just went back into the office with the whole intent on being more social, I still find that my interactions with coworkers are at "arms length" and are very sterile. Hard to imagine a relationship with them outside of work. That line is still very strong.
Kudos to you. But I would ask, is this an intrinsic skill or did you learn this over time?
Not OP, but I always try to watch out for opportunities to talk about other people's interests. When someone's eyes light up about a topic or they get an excited tone, I try to ask them open-ended questions to get them talking more. Its pretty affirming to get thoughtful questions about a topic you have strong interest in.
It works even better if you can manage to remember those things people get excited about. Even if you don't remember anything else about the person, it gives you something to revisit in future conversations.
I do the same, but getting people to open up to discuss that initial thing that interests them can be a challenge in itself. I think that's the art of small talk, it's teasing out information from someone, and gaining their trust, so that they eventually let their guard down and mention something close to them that you can expand on. I have no problem connecting with people past that point, but it's the initial small talk and trust gaining stages where I suck.
I've heard from people who are good at this that it comes from a genuine interest in other people. They're able to work through the small talk phase because they're driven by an intrinsic desire to learn more about the person. I definitely do not have that trait.
I can understand that; I think there's also hesitation at that point in any relationship, where both parties are unsure of how much to invest in further social interactions.
One thing I would say though: if you believe that this is an intrinsic trait that others have, rather than something that can be learned, then this belief may hold you back more than you may think.
You have to be careful, because work friends can suddenly vanish when you change jobs, but anyone with a bit of social awareness can navigate this.
WFH has changed work from a social experience into something boring. I get it, work is work, and maybe treating it as a more significant part of life isn't a shrewd move, but I am definitely missing out something in this current state.
(That being said, I do understand that I may change my mind in 10 years, assuming I have a family. But I can only talk about how this seems today.)
There are two different statements one can make: "don't make friends at revolve one's life around work" vs. "don't only make friends at and revolve one's life around work". I'm making the latter statement. Edit to add: I think you're also making the latter statement, so I don't think we disagree.
Sounds exhausting (and distracting) trying to maintain anything beyond a superficial relationship with so many acquaintances gained from all the vectors in the life described above.
Enjoying the convenient food, comfortable workstation, and low level social interactions you get from a good workplace is not an investment at all. If you get fired or quit then you just get the same thing at the next job. I speak from experience having done this multiple times.
Your point about not over-investing into a company that doesn't care about you is valid, but not relevant.
It is relevant because many people in our industry replace hobbies, diversions, and friendships outside the workplace with those within. If they instead merely augment them, that's great. But there can be many temptations to transition through augmentation into replacement.
I think a lot of the benefits you (can) get from this you can take with you after you leave the company. I have good friends I still hang out with from my previous work places 1 and 6 years ago.
If it would have been all/mostly virtual interactions, I'm sure things would have been OK, but I don't think it would have resulted in the same level of connection with some of my coworkers.
YMMV, different people form connections differently.
> Because you might get fired or laid off or burnt out and leave and only then discover that you have invested too much of yourself into this faceless entity that does not care a whit about you.
I think how much you invest into this faceless entity is independent from whether you WFH or the office, no?
In theory, yes, but in practice many offices are designed to draw employees into the company being a lifestyle rather than a place to work, in a way that is difficult to accomplish without the office. (This is why there is so much hesitance from these companies to ditch their offices!)
What I want to know is who's paying all these people to stand around and socialize while they're on the clock am I paying for that as a customer because fuck that what company is this. I'll take my business to someone who has employees who are efficient and keep my cost low.
Oddly nobody seems to wonder this about the golf and yachts of executives. Yes, very successful companies generate lots of free cash flow, and there are myriad expressions of this, like extremely wealthy executives, staff that enjoys niceties like socializing while at work, and lots of other stuff. Customers are not actually very sensitive to the size of margins taken, in many many businesses.
Let me be the devil's (to be read corporate) advocate for a moment here. You say:
> Why? Work is where you spend one third (or more) of your time during your adult life. Why the hell would I not want such a significant portion of my life to not also provide great benefits like opportunities to make friends, meet people, eat great food, and have fun?
I say: aren't you supposed to, you know, work while you are at work? The office is not a social club!
Jokes aside, I always wondered how much time people actually do proper, productive work while in office, in software engineering. My view is rather restricted to my own experience (personal + people around me). I'm asking because if it's, say, 4h a day, I'd rather just spend 4h a day in office, and spend the other 4h however I choose to (alone, with family, or with colleagues, friends etc.), instead of watching YouTube or listen to conversations I don't want to (thanks open plan office!), or whatever people do when they are not productive.
Maybe one day we'll collectively figure out the right amount of time we are actually productive, and get back the rest of the time.
Because if you live in a great place, all those things are available to you without discontinuity regardless of WHO you work for. The reason that there's such a disconnect between 20-somethings and everyone else on this issue is because everyone else has been through it already. Sure, there's a possibility that you will remain friends with people at your former place of work after you leave. There's also a VERY strong possibility that the people who are at that workplace are socializing with the people AT that workplace. The longer you stay away, the more people you DON'T know, and the less you fit into their social crowd.
>Because if you live in a great place, all those things are available to you without discontinuity regardless of WHO you work for.
And how is this an argument for not also getting those things through work?
I have many hobbies outside work. I live in a great place where I am able to spend my free time meeting people and doing things outside work. I still want those things from my workplace, too.
Because you have a limited amount of time to invest in certain things in life, and it's better to invest that time independently of your work environment. Not saying that you can't ever have it, just that some day will be your last day at wherever you are, and those relationships don't always follow you to your next job.
The fact that I have a limited amount of time to invest in things is exactly why those things are necessary to have at the workplace.
I like having fun, and I like making friends. Being limited on time, I want to maximize the percentage of time in my life that I spend having fun and I want to maximize the amount of opportunity I get to make friends. It's great that I have personal free time where I can do that, but why would I not also want 8 more hours per day at work where I can also have fun and make friends? It would be silly not to, that almost doubles the amount of opportunity I have to have fun/make friends!
>and those relationships don't always follow you to your next job.
See my other comment in this thread. I haven't found this to be the case. Sure, not every relationship follows you, but that doesn't mean I'm going to forgo the opportunity to cultivate relationships that will follow me to my next job, or even for the rest of my life.
And as I stated, things change as life goes on. I'm not telling you these things to piss on your parade. I'm giving you perspective that you clearly don't have yet.
Don't assume things about me, and don't condescend onto me like you're some wise master. I'm not some young fresh college grad. I've been around the block plenty, worked at plenty of companies, lived in multiple cities and countries, and seen my fair share of come-and-ago friends. Nothing about what I said changes.
I'm sorry that apparently you haven't been able to (or just haven't bothered to) build the relationships I have been able to, but work is unequivocally an indispensable part of how I (and many others) enjoy life and meet people. I absolutely wouldn't give up the friendships that I made at my workplaces for anything.
The root of the problem you descibe are incentives for why workplaces exist. They exist so employees can go there and work. There's nothing wrong with that, as long as it's an explicit contract between employer and employees that both sides agree on.
Some employers will be very happy with blurring work/personal life boundaries: employees make friends (but the real quality of friendships will only surface after you've changed jobs, unless you plan to stick to a single job forever), eat great food (because maybe it's cheaper than simply paying the employees more) and have fun (enough to make impression of a laid-back place but not too much, because it would hurt company's performance).
It's because all these 'perks' are built on completely different goal. I used to think they're mandatory for me to feel satisfied with the job - looking back they now seem artificial.
That's why I personally love WFH - it let's me focus on the essence of working which to me is providing value for my client. For everything else, there's time outside of job.
But part of the value of WFH is the ability to lower work-time to something even less than one third. I've always found it extremely difficult to foster worthwhile relationships and have truly fulfilling fun in a corporate PC environment anyway.
Well, that's the other side of it. If a company is paying you for 40hrs a week, they want to make sure they're getting their moneys worth.
Of course you can argue about how employees, despite being "in the office" are only productive for 2 or maybe 3 hours of their 8 hour shifts. But that's now how management sees it. Having a person visibly in a chair makes management feel like they are getting their money's worth.
I also don't get how people expect to get paid a full living salary for working less.
Ultimately, at the market level pay rates are tied to productive value. We have a theoretical assumption of 40h/week, but almost everyone understands that it's fictional (and more people are learning that). Most people who are going home and getting the same work done in 2-3 hours aren't working less -- they're working more efficiently, or doing fewer other things (e.g. chatting at the water cooler).
For many types of thought work, 3-4 hours is pushing it anyway; the default assumption of 8 hours doesn't make sense with the heterogeneity of what different types of work actually entail.
Your employer is not really motivated to provide those things for you. They have a different motivation, which is to get you to work productively on a job they think needs doing.
They may provide some of those either explicitly as an incentive, or as a side-effect of putting a bunch of people in close proximity, and that's great. But when profits are looking iffy, I don't think you can rely on it. It makes more sense to be less dependent on your job, which might go away, and to build those social experiences outside of work so you still have them to fall back on if you change jobs.
We've learned in this pandemic that for knowledge work the workplace is no longer a requirement for productivity. Work should be what you spend one third of your time doing, but it should not be where. During college I did my homework in the computer labs where other students were doing their work and we chatted and built a rapport despite working on different tasks. I look forward to working out of the office and out of my home and building relationships with people that are not contractually obligated to be with me.
I expect to treat my co-workers with respect, but that is no different than what Open Source projects have done for decades.
Totally agree - often it seems people take a transactional approach to work as a way to insulate themselves from social or economic harm, but then proceed to complain about the transactional nature of work that they assist in perpetuating.
But there's plenty of room to be critical of companies without sacrificing the positive things you've listed above.
and commute. even a 'quick' commute (and attendant 'getting started for the day') is going to put you closer to 50h/week. Then another... ~50h/week for sleeping, as you say. The 'commute to an office' is closer to a 1/3rd of you week, and ~1/2 of your waking life for many folks.
Friends are friends and workmates are workmates. A lot of people confuse these groups and think they are somehow the same.
Workmates might become friends but more likely they are work colleagues that vanish after a contract ends, especially if they didn't mesh with your network.
In my circles we as a group often get work at a company. At least do referrals etc. We also leave together to find new opportunities when the place goes feral. This is partly why we think office work is less than good a lot of times.
I'd argue most offices devolve into hellholes as management forget about people and treat them as things.
I'm more-or-less the person described in the GP, and I live in Manhattan. Being in a city doesn't mean crap if I spend the day sitting alone in my tiny studio apartment.
40 hours a week is a huge chunk of my life. I don't want to just be a robot during that time, I want to be part of a community of some sort. (Even as I do try to maintain connections outside of work too!)
Now that others are not working in the office, I hope that communities realize that we are drastically under-creating shared spaces and push for significantly more of them.
As these offices are sitting empty and are no longer required, instead of letting them sit empty, let them be free to all. Community involvement is the only way to get this done.
> Now that others are not working in the office, I hope that communities realize that we are drastically under-creating shared spaces and push for significantly more of them.
The lack of of "community" is not due to lack of concrete boxes, in my opinion. How busy is your local library? From the odd occasion I've been, mine is not very. And seemed to be almost entirely frequented by people who had come to use the free computers/internet and were pretty solidly absorbed in facebook / paying bills / online shopping / whatever.
I don't think people like to invest a lot in public shared spaces because antisocial behavior from a few can easily ruin it and is difficult to police without being extremely restrictive.
Private clubs, groups, organizations are much more successful, and those are everywhere and (in my small experience) have good community spirit. You just don't necessarily see them easily because you can't necessarily walk in the door and start doing what you want.
Or it could be people dont prefer to socialize at libraries (I have always been taught its a quiet place, personally)?
I agree with the person you respond to: we kinda haven't figured out the social spaces thing, nor had to figure it out, for a very, very long time. All of our current shared social spaces are conventions from a time past that we continue because they're still relevant (bars/pubs, clubs, private clubs, restaurants, etc). Not complaining about any of these -- they're fantastic. Just noting the absence of modern social spaces.
Its the reason I really love Summer where I live. Always a festival or event to go got and get lost in a crowd, meet new people and celebrate whatever's on display that day. Aside from those, there's very little of what I'd call modern "social spaces" around me. Seems like a void needs to be filled there in the community.
> Or it could be people dont prefer to socialize at libraries (I have always been taught its a quiet place, personally)?
People don't prefer to socialize anywhere. Libraries definitely used to be a much more social community hub though. But I'm not just talking about socializing but "shared spaces", as OP said. People working, meeting, relaxing just weren't there. And it is not for lack of room. The people there as I said using the facilities I didn't mean they were wasting it or using it other than its intended purpose, the opposite they were. They were there for a free service they didn't have, but almost certainly if they had a little bit more money they would have prefered their own internet/computer/phone and used it somewhere not in a shared space. Like everybody else who didn't have to be there to use the internet.
> I agree with the person you respond to: we kinda haven't figured out the social spaces thing, nor had to figure it out, for a very, very long time. All of our current shared social spaces are conventions from a time past that we continue because they're still relevant (bars/pubs, clubs, private clubs, restaurants, etc). Not complaining about any of these -- they're fantastic. Just noting the absence of modern social spaces.
There is no absence, they just aren't used as I said. And what do you mean we haven't figured it out? Everything is figured as we go continually. We have arrived here because there is actually less relative demand for these shared spaces than there used to be.
> Its the reason I really love Summer where I live. Always a festival or event to go got and get lost in a crowd, meet new people and celebrate whatever's on display that day.
Is the problem this meaningless new phrase "shared space"? We've always had festivals and markets and shows and concerts and things like that.
> Aside from those, there's very little of what I'd call modern "social spaces" around me.
I don't know why "aside" -- as I said those are not modern things. Would help to define what you mean, the first post didn't seem to be advocating for more crowded festivals but rather taking over empty office spaces and turning them loose to the public with some unexplained goal in mind.
> Seems like a void needs to be filled there in the community.
Sounds to me like the void is lack of community trust and cohesiveness and therefore willingness to share spaces. As I said, that will not be improved with more concrete boxes.
YMMV, obviously your locale and my locale don't suffer the same issue with shared spaces.
> Is the problem this meaningless new phrase "shared space"? We've always had festivals and markets and shows and concerts and things like that.
The point was that this is all where I live in terms of shared spaces and I seize those opportunities. The idea being, there is a need for shared spaces. For example, whenever a block party is organized here there's not really any public space to host it. Not enough greenery per district where daily activities of the locals can vary but special events, for said locals, are easy to put together. That's a void.
As for the term, I understood the spirit of it to mean public spaces to socialize, where any variety of activities can be done alone or with others. Examples include parks with chess tables, public pools and nature reserves. You can easily go to these kinds of places, socialize with perfect strangers or go alone and still be surrounded by people in your community. Again YMMV and that's OK. I'm open to any ideas so long as those spaces exist.
I agree and think it'll always be hard to trust strangers. But the more opportunities communities have to socialize, the easier it is to build that trust -- but they have to exist. When there's a lack of spaces, that just compounds the trust issue.
> YMMV, obviously your locale and my locale don't suffer the same issue with shared spaces.
Suffer what same issue? You said there is a void of "modern social spaces" around you. Is that the issue you're talking about? I'm saying opening up empty office space to the public carte blanche won't turn them into vibrant engaging places that the community will gravitate to.
> The point was that this is all where I live in terms of shared spaces and I seize those opportunities. The idea being, there is a need for shared spaces. For example, whenever a block party is organized here there's not really any public space to host it. Not enough greenery per district where daily activities of the locals can vary but special events, for said locals, are easy to put together. That's a void.
Isn't a block party specifically organized on the block for local people to turn up to without having to go far? Isn't the block exactly the desired public space for this? I don't see what the void is there, sidewalks and verges are public spaces.
If you think buildings anybody is free to go in and out of to have parties in would be a good idea, I'm not sure what to say.
People are perfectly free to open their houses and invite neighbors to have a party too (which occasionally happens on my street). Or you can book venues or organize to go to a partk (where do you live that has no parks in walking distance?). The point is this rarely happens because people don't really want to invest in this. A block party takes very little investment in time or money or location.
> As for the term, I understood the spirit of it to mean public spaces to socialize, where any variety of activities can be done alone or with others. Examples include parks with chess tables, public pools and nature reserves. You can easily go to these kinds of places, socialize with perfect strangers or go alone and still be surrounded by people in your community. Again YMMV and that's OK. I'm open to any ideas so long as those spaces exist.
I'm just saying they exist everywhere (including side walks and verges if you want a block party) and are under utilized. The demand is not there.
> I agree and think it'll always be hard to trust strangers. But the more opportunities communities have to socialize, the easier it is to build that trust -- but they have to exist. When there's a lack of spaces, that just compounds the trust issue.
Turning the public loose on vacant buildings I guarantee will not do anything to increase trust. The results will make people rightly very angry.
I think the big winner in the short-term is places like YMCA attempting to broaden into more and more social categories.
> entirely frequented by people who had come to use the free computers/internet
This is a problem with a lack of investment into the space. If half of NYC was shared space, they would find their space and you would be in another. I find Central Park to be mostly pleasant, and that's a shared space. When it's 0.01% of the space, there isn't enough room for the required segmentation of the different tribes and it ends up toxic.
> I think the big winner in the short-term is places like YMCA attempting to broaden into more and more social categories.
I might be missing something. You're making it sound like there is some short term or new phenomenon happening here. COVID certainly has not been the cause of the decline of community cohesiveness, and certainly not behind any rise in demand for people "sharing spaces" with strangers.
> This is a problem with a lack of investment into the space. If half of NYC was shared space, they would find their space and you would be in another.
Well I disagree with that characterization that it's a problem or that a solution would be to spend vast amounts of money on it. As I said, people don't want to share spaces.
The "problem" is not lack of shared space. If you don't like the lack of community or people willing to share and invest in their shared spaces, the root cause is completely different. A top-down decree of more will not fix it.
> I find Central Park to be mostly pleasant, and that's a shared space.
Parks are one thing that can work if they are quite remote or highly policed or in "good areas", but that's because people tend to go there for few reasons, there isn't much in the way of infrastructure or services to be ruined or hogged or stolen.
I don't see many people working, cooking, or gardening in shared spaces though. Sure there are some college kids, occasional professional who takes their laptop there for a few hours to work, sometimes people will have a BBQ and there is the odd community garden project. But even with the meager parks there are, I don't see a lot of them overflowing for places to sit and work.
> When it's 0.01% of the space, there isn't enough room for the required segmentation of the different tribes and it ends up toxic.
Dangerously bordering on anti diversity wrongthink... but true. However increasing space doesn't really help all that much when there is a lot of crime and not enough resources to police it.
Relying on your employer for these items seems unwise.
This is a brilliant sentiment and can be tide to multitudes of other items. The more that can be voluntarily decoupled from the employer-employee relationship, the more should be.
This is a lesson I learned in the last year. Even though I've made real friends with colleagues and I wouldn't change that, I would still advise caution. It can be tempting to make friends at work because spontaneous regular encounters and shared experiences are the natural basis for cultivating friendship. However, making friends at work has hidden hazards.
Most (but not all) colleagues are like fair-weather friends. It is easy to confuse someone being friendly with someone being a friend. If you couldn't imagine spending time with this person outside of work, they are probably friendly but not your friend. If it would be weird for them to call you outside of work to ask how you're doing, they are probably friendly but not your friend.
Why wouldn't you want to cultivate true friendship in the workplace? Don't expect workmates to continue to be friendly when you switch workplaces. If you're not engaging with them outside of the workplace, their friendliness will simply fizzle out. Secondly, confusing friendliness for friendship makes it easier to be exploited. I've stayed at a dysfunctional workplace far too long because I liked my "friends" there. However, when I finally did switch and these "friendships" fizzled out, it became much more clear that these were simply friendly people. This doesn't make them bad people, it's just a social lesson I learned. Finally, the last hazard of workplace friendships has to do with the insulating effect of selection bias. Especially in the tech sector, workplace friends will tend to be a much smaller slice of class, race, and gender and it's easy to have a narrow worldview as a result. Maybe the importance of that differs from person to person, but it makes it easier to wake up one day and realize, "Huh, I have only middle class white guy friends. What's up with that?"
This. So much this. Young professionals need to learn the difference between friends and colleagues. When working from home it's hard to blur that line.
As far as chatter goes, nobody wants that. It's distracting to those around you. When we were at the office we were chatting over IM to cut down on the noise. Guess what? We're still chatting over IM while WFH.
Besides, many companies are adopting a hybrid plan anyway. My team, which includes many young professionals, wants to go to the office once per month. Make good use of that time to build your network.
I interpreted "social chatter and engagement" not necessarily to mean people are yapping at their desk, but that people say hi in the break room, have lunch together, etc.
> Young professionals need to learn the difference between friends and colleagues.
I hear that a lot on HN, and I'm sorry if I have to roll my eyes a little. TONS of humanity make friends at the place where they spend nearly half their waking hours, and there is nothing wrong with that. It's fine that not everyone does, but this "rule" people like to spout about "your co-workers are not your friends" - well, maybe your coworkers are not your friends, but I've made plenty of deep, lasting friendships through work.
Not everyone you meet at work needs to be your "Best friend forever and always."
I just like talking to people. I like being able to go down the hall and solving a problem in 5 minutes that would take 3 days and 3 meetings WFH. I am "friendly" with many people in the office. I socialize with them.
They aren't dear dear friends but they are acquaintances that have helped me out of tight spots and I helped them. I can't tell you how many times I've been helped through these sort of relationships.
If you're introverted just say it. There's nothing wrong with it. But there's nothing wrong with socializing either.
I'm extroverted, actually. We have several slack channels for each of the departments and hierarchies of our org. People say good morning. You can "go down the hall" and ask a question. We still do pair programming. In short, not much has changed from when we were in the office.
Once allowed we'll be going out to lunch again. I always made it a point to go out to lunch with people - people I work with now, people I've worked with in the past, and people I've met through meetups. I like going out at a minimum every other week and prefer once a week.
Maybe it's company culture? We're in multiple states and have multiple locations within the same state - and I need to work with people from all these different locations and so we've solved this "working together remotely" problems ages ago. It's an important part of our corporate culture. WFH just solved the problem of working in a big, noisy area.
The point I'm making is that people are different.
Some people make friends at work, others don't. While you may struggle blurring friend from colleague in the office, others may struggle WFH with separating their house and leisure from work. Not everyone has a luxury office to walk into. Some work in their dining room.
There are pros and cons, and those pros and cons change depending on individual circumstances. But ultimately you are working for a company that needs to make money and they need to make a decision. You can choose to stay or leave.
They sound like colleagues. As distinct from other employees or friends.
Some of my best times were working in a university department. We did all this, though the talking to people outside your team was at proscribed coffee times in the staff lounge and sometimes over lunch.
But they remained colleagues not friends. Outside the few parties a year we didn't go round people's houses. We collaborated and fought over work, as that was what brought us together.
I make the distinction between colleagues and other employees as not all employees are colleagues. Colleagues help each other out of tight spots and talk beyond "Nice weather". Friends could be either, but in my experience once everyone is married and has kids, the closest will be "friendly" rather than "friends".
You can be friends with a colleague and also not hang out outside of work. And obviously in life you'll be closer with some co-workers than others, so it's useful to have the distinction of someone being a 'work friend'.
'Colleague' just refers to someone you work with who is of the same rank as you, and probably on the same team. It's closer to 'teammate' or 'peer' than it is to "workmate you have a friendly relationship with". You can dislike a colleague, and you can also barely talk to or really know a colleague.
>They sound like colleagues. As distinct from other employees or friends.
I think the point being made is that this is totally okay.
There's an undertone in this greater thread that "people you work with aren't really your friend" and it implies that these "not-really-friends" aren't pleasant to be around. But that's not necessarily the case. For many people, being around "colleagues" and making small chit-chat is enjoyable, desirable, and helpful, even if they aren't (and never become) your "friend".
Distinguishing between colleagues and friends in no way implies being being around colleagues is unpleasant. But merely pleasant interactions don't justify making everyone spend time commuting they could spend with friends instead.
This is just pedantic. I'm sorry in your experience you didn't meet lifelong friends, but many do (I have.)
My point is, there isn't a right or wrong here. It's frustrating see the WFH warrior brigade come out and diminish other's experiences just because they had a bad experience. It's simply not universal.
It's unwise to rely exclusively on anything, but if I'm going to devote half my waking hours to something, I'd better be able to rely on it to provide more than just money to spend on the other half.
Work, like college, provides directed activity and identity to bond over. Just having shared space isn't the same. Finding/developing institutions that provide that and aren't work is difficult and will take time
Most of my immediate team are in another continent, others 100 miles away.
I'm used to working 'remotely' to my team, but still from the office. The office is my social space, where the company culture is, where I go out for lunch with work friends etc.
I've worked at my company for a while, so luckily already know a good number of stakeholders around the business. I hate to think how bad it would be for new starters joining the company and only really being exposed to their direct team.
Meeting people at the coffee machine or at a lunch area may not seem important but it's what made me love my workplace.
The C level has completely changed three times in my time here, but our culture lives on in the people. If it wasn't for those connections and sense of belonging, I may no longer still be working here.
I don't want to be forced into going back to my 3hr daily commute, but I wouldn't mind easing back into the occasional office visit.
I'm not so young any more, but I miss getting out of the house more during the day. The separation between work and home spaces is pretty important. After almost 16 months of this, working from home has simply become old.
There's a huge difference between what we all did over the last year and a normal remote working situation. A lot of the worst part of WFH for most people really is a combination of WFH and pandemic pain, rather than purely being a WFH issue.
I've spent most of my career doing remote work. Since I planned on it, rather than being forced into it, I was able to do things like rent an apartment with space for an office and set it up how I like. That actually adds to my balance as I can "go to the office" and then "leave the office" when I'm done. A lot of people in the pandemic era aren't as lucky there since it was so unplanned.
More importantly to your point though is that remote work normally doesn't mean "only work from home". Outside of the pandemic I would regular take my laptop to parks, libraries, or other spaces for a change of scenery. With the pandemic that wasn't an option as places were closed. I'm hoping to continue this now that things are reopening.
Yes, this is true. It would be different if it were planned for. I hope to get back to coffee shops soon. I am somewhat hesitant at the moment given there's still a decent percentage of unvaccinated folks in the area.
> decent percentage of unvaccinated folks in the area.
Unvaccinated folks pose a potential risk to themselves and other unvaccinated people. So, if you're already vaccinated, why are you still hesitant to go out? Is it because you live with kids or with someone immunocompromised who can't get vaccinated?
Even though I'm vaccinated, there is still a small possibility I can get it, not know I'm infected, and pass it to the un-vaccinated. Some would say this is their problem, not mine... but, it just makes me uncomfortable.
I think there's different types of work/life balance. Temporal, spatial, social, etc. Some people strive to keep their work and personal locations explicitly separate. Others set timers and hard boundaries as to exactly when they're "working." Others avoid mixing their personal social lives with work social lives.
The person you're replying to is pretty similar to me, where I use the fact that I have a physical office as my work/life boundary. But I also don't shy away from having a social life when I'm within the work side of the boundary, and another social life when I'm on the outside. If you spend 1/3 of your life on the inside, you can have fun there without contradicting your personal work/life balance.
i'm not anti-social at work. i'm friendly and it can be fun to shoot the shit, but i've rarely had workmates turn into real friends. i don't know why, but the people i tend to connect with don't often work in the same industry. i know how to keep work and home separate (i have a couple of ways of setting work context for myself so i have a way to leave when i'm done).
the only good thing about working at an office is the free food, but food isn't terribly expensive anyway. i could probably use transport savings to buy myself a nice food every week or two.
Although I didn't meet my wife in the same office (as a developer 95% of my colleagues have always been male), if it wasn't for the office where I had to go every day, I wouldn't have met her.
She worked in the same building for another company and we often saw each other at a nearby restaurant at lunch time. Often as in every single day. After some time (months) I was able to find someone in the other company that told me her name, searched her on facebook add her and we started talking first online, then of course we went to lunch together since we were in the same building. The rest is history as they say.
Wow. As an introvert I find most of the items on this list to be sheer torture. I have quit jobs where it was a de facto requirement to aggressively socialize with my coworkers.
I have lots of hobbies and plenty friends through those. I also really enjoy my workplace and the social interaction I get there. Either one of those alone would definitely be insufficient for me.
I sort of feel like these discussions are just (oversimplifying here) extroverts and introverts arguing back and forth about the best way to find satisfaction socially when they just have profoundly different social needs.
Also FWIW I've never lived in an apartment with climate control past radiators and window AC units. I don't think that's too unusual if you live in older buildings.
Well, the PNW just had record temps for three days straight (100+ F is unheard of with avg Seattle July highs of 77) and AC is an uncommon residential amenity that is usually offered at large offices.
Does the office run the AC a bit cold? Yes, but to be honest when you reach almost too hot to sweat that's a nice problem to have.
This is regional. The Bay Area and PNW have a lot of buildings without AC, typically no need for it, and the landlords don't have any reason to install it.
I used a portable AC in the past but they barely work and are very loud.
It's not super easy. A lot of these are apartments that are not easy to retrofit. And a lot of Seattle buildings, houses or apartments, have casement windows that swing out from the bottom to protect the interior from rain, but also are probably the worst type of window to install any type of portable or window AC unit into because they don't swing out very far but the opening is absolutely massive.
There's also the matter of the fact that because Seattle doesn't get very hot or cold, there aren't that many people or companies that do AC installation. Anecdotally I've now heard that they're booked out for months, possibly a year, and with tight local housing and job market that is unlikely to change. You certainly haven't really been able to buy fans or portable units anywhere in the area since May.
Work is a decent place to meet people, but I don’t think it’s particularly healthy as your only or even primary opportunity for social connection. That might not be the case here but it sure sounds like it could be.
My own life improved immeasurably when I finally started having interests outside of pushing buttons into a glowing rectangle of light.
It is possible, much in the same way that making friends at school does not require you to be glued to a textbook all day. But it requires self control and thoughtful boundaries.
> - Sense of belonging - team outing, after hours beers..
> - Intra and inter company sports and games.
> - Meeting potential dates.
?
* "Single, young" "person" rips off its mask out of ravenous anger to reveal a 400 year-old lizardoid smacking its chops at the humans in it's vicinity.*
Work / Life separation doesn't mean "Work life" is devoid of social aspects, and while "Work life" is different from "Life life" it can share many of the same activities.
My take on HN is that there's a very vocal and fervent anti-office crowd here that cares more strongly about it so will dominate conversations about it, and that the "typical line-level engineer" employee will roll their eyes, not engage, and just continue waiting until they can get back to normal.
It makes no sense that employees exist, right? Why not just pay everyone as consultants, gig workers, piece-work, etc?
But employees do exist, possibly because the best way to manage most people is to pay them to be in a room where all they can do is work.
Do you have a great idea to save time? Well you tell your boss, and you're pretty confident that this won't result in you losing billable hours, because you're an employee.
Are the requirements kind of bullshit? Not a problem, figure it out, you're paid to be here.
Do you need a break? Have a break. Maybe chat to some colleagues, that might even add some value.
All the anti-office folk seem very set on believing that they should be paid for the value they add, not the hours they are in the office. This is fine if you're delivering pizza, but for a lot of jobs this just isn't easy to measure.
Yes, there's some consultants and B2B, not everything needs to be employees, but for a lot of work and a lot of workers and managers it's paid salary that ends up being fairer and easier.
A lot of employees became more productive in lockdown, but I suspect this is partly due to novelty (change often has short-term benefits), partly due to there being nothing else to do, and partly due to all the uncertainty that the business might have mass layoffs.
This is the exact sentiment I hold as well. I think the demographics of hacker news may be slightly swayed towards people who already have established networks and industry experience.
Also the HN audience is far more remote-oriented than I’ve encountered among my coworkers over the course of my career, including > 4 years working full-remote.
Anonymity probably accounts for a decent portion of the discrepancy (meaning some of your co-workers would probably be anti-WFH in person, and pro-WFH anonymously)
We’ll, I can’t prove or disprove that claim, but most of my coworkers have always been very candid with their preferences. I find it difficult to believe that there’s a large number of people who regularly say one thing while secretly believing the opposite.
I think you'd be surprised by how many people don't really engage in outside-of-work anonymous programming forums, vs their personal contacts/friends/coworkers/ex-coworkers.
The handful of Reddit programming communities I've seen are also very uninterested in returning to work. I have to wonder if the difference isn't so much "established career" vs "newbie" and is more simply self-selection, with people who are comfortable working remotely more likely to engage frequently in online communities, and those more interested in in-person work less represented.
Also anyone who has been earning a FAANG salary for 5-10 years should have enough FU money to feel a lot less pressure to conform to unreasonable employer demands.
Exactly this. The sudden all-remote arrangement last year wrecked my first big summer internship in every possible way. I take responsibility for a good deal of how it affected me emotionally and my subsequent lack of productivity. However, I also wasn't given the physical hardware lab projects I signed up for or any meaningful support. I felt deeply disconnected and unengaged, but pressured to pretend everything was okay.
At this point in my life, I'm one of those people who is screaming to get out of the house. It's a place of comfort to me for sure, but also distraction and stagnation. Couple this great start to my career with having a critical third of college plus youth in general being ripped from me, I think its pretty clear why I am against pure WFH. People in different situations and stages with different needs will want different arrangements, but I am not going to apply for remote positions as a new grad.
I’m 45 and have been working partially remote for 4 years and fully remote since the pandemic. I really enjoy working from home. Spending more time with family and finding a good work/life balance and not having to commute are great perks.
I have recently started a new job and was interviewed and onboarded entirely remote. The process was fine and in the future I am not required to be in the office a lot either.
However I am eager to get into the office to meet the new people, have them at hand to ask questions (not just on teams) and generally assimilate into the team.
The problem with teams and other such tools is that I can’t see if someone is available or not. Their dot might be green, but they might be in the zone or otherwise not easily interruptible. In an office I can see whether or not this is the case.
I’m not keen to work in the office 100% but I am also aware of some of the benefits of being in the office at times. Especially planning meetings etc.
I also don’t think each case suits everyone and IMO flexible location is a good compromise allowing people to work where they would like. Let people come in when they need or for meetings but also let them work from home as they need.
IMO what's great about slack is that you can send someone a message and they can choose to respond whenever they're free. If async communication is too slow, you can always ask do to a zoom call for a few min.
In an office I think it is pretty hard to tell when someone is actually available. If you make a mistake and interrupt someone while they are actually thinking deeply about a problem, you can cause a pretty big dent in their productivity.
In the office, I was distracted by coworkers massively more often.
Maybe if the "office" actually gave everyone enough space to have their own office the push-back against going back wouldn't be so bad, but it seems like no company wants to spend the money to have comfortable and productive working environments.
Assuming your kids are in HS now, and will depart for college soon, it'll be interesting to see how you like working from home when your home occupancy drops to only two (or to one, if your SO is often away).
I'm a soloist, and I've found WFH to be a mixed bag in the past 16 months. I love that I can set up my home workspace exactly as I'd like it. But I very much miss routine social interactions and don't care much for the daily isolation.
If I could return to an office/cube, I think I'd prefer that. But alas, my clueless F100 employer insists we IT-types occupy an open space without personal- or group- reserved seating, so I'll rarely be able to find or sit with anyone I know. NOT something I'd prefer.
Perhaps the exodus of those seeking greener pastures will include me too.
I've been doing it alone for years. It's just fine because everyone needs quiet work time where there's no random interruption. Do that for 3 days and go to meetings and interact directly 2 other days. I've done the full 4-5 days as well, and it's still fine. During the pandemic, when everyone was stuck together, it's actually much harder if you have younger children. It depends on what you want.
Do you truly want work life separation, is your work place your social venue, or do you want a mix of both? No wrong answers. Just pros and cons with personal preferences. I just feel that it would be nice to have that choice.
Yea, this makes perfect sense to me. I had WFH as an option at my first job. After 3 weeks the cool perk wore off and I was in the office by choice everyday.
Now I have a family at home and life is much easier working out of the house.
Vets with 5+ years of specific subdomain experience within the company's ecosystem (along with experienced engineers who have experience from elsewhere) are much harder to replace.
A big part of the rather documentation and process-heavy development model at FAANGs and other large corporations is to ensure that other people can take over a project if any individual leaves. Much as people will hate this analogy, "cattle, not pets" is a concept managers and HR knew long before the software industry stumbled on it. The people at FAANGs are highly-talented but, even at that level, only a handful are truly irreplaceable (and those people were so valued that they were allowed to work from anywhere they wanted even before the pandemic).
As an individual engineer, I think it's inherently valuable to make my projects easy to hand off (in addition to as maintenance free as possible). The company is less impacted if I leave, sure, and it also means I can take a vacation without constantly getting messaged. Long term, it means that I end up working on more bleeding edge "cool" projects, since I'm not bogged down with years of making myself irreplaceable, and folk want new work to benefit from the same level of redundancy and maintainability.
I believe that I have a perception of being irreplaceable, but it's because of my future value rather than past value.
I've never felt like I was being treated like cattle at work, though, so maybe I've just been lucky enough to work at good companies.
A lot of domain knowledge and momentum might be lost due to such reshuffling. Losing competitive edge and whatnot.
But maybe they have excellent documentation, knowledge sharing and mentorship, unlike all multinational corps I've ever worked for (where was generally a cost center and frowned upon).
Netflix engineer here. The portion of the company I work in has been hiring remote during the pandemic and we have a company wide permanent WFH policy (well guidance from HR) in place. The policy includes pay tiers depending on where you live, but the pay adjustment doesn’t take place until COVID WFH is lifted.
I work on a team that, post covid, has engineers in two countries. I personally live in PHX and won’t be returning to the Bay Area. My salary is currently 100% what my Bay Area was, and will be adjusted down to 80% once the offices fully open.
Yes. I’ve run the numbers several times. I have a 2 child family. Treating our house, child care, groceries, etc. as fungible I could take a 50% pay cut over SJC and “maintain” our quality of life on paper.
But details matter. I live in a community with 22 miles of maintained trail, some of the best school districts in the country (with no lottery system, we just pick a school), our grocery stores are better (better meat, better produce, better selection), etc.
After living both, I strongly suspect my current quality of life in PHX literally does not exist in the Bay Area no matter the price point.
Depends on what you are looking for and what your lifestyle is. For me, in PHX moving from a 3200 sqft place to a place in SF that was a 30-40 minutes commute (3bd, 1500sqft) would have changed my mortgage by at least 4k/month. But realistically it might end up more like 5-6k/month... because housing in SF is stupid fucking expensive. This is just on the mortgage alone mind you, not including taxes and other expenses.
To put in perspective of how little I pay, I pay about 1900/month for mortgage, taxes, insurance and HOA (which is like $150/month because we live in a gated area). I am about 30-45 minutes door to door from PHX airport.
On the low end, it would require ~75-80k before taxes just to make up the mortgage difference, and likely be more than that.
TL;DR: Yea, it can easily be 100k cheaper in PHX vs SF depending on your situation.
This. My observation (and mine alone) is that the FAANGs have commoditized software engineering roles, eg via standardized interviews, disregarding experience - unless you have a "creator" brand etc. This has increased the pool of candidates who are still clamoring to get in (and recent IPOs just made it busier). The FAANG calculus sounds like betting on all this. Infact they are probably calculating this attrition even contributes to some of the unregretable kind!
My purely anecdotal experience is kind of the opposite. My friends and co-workers who are eager to get back to the office are mostly the ones who have kids and want to get away from them during the day (which I am sympathetic to).
FWIW, I have a kid (and a second on the way), and I want to go to an office, my office - not back to the office. That is, I want a separate place to work from, to make work-life balance easier and better insulate myself from the kid-related chaos during work hours.
But this can be solved with just renting a separate flat and using it as an office; something I actually considered, except small flats are the new fad for real estate investors (at least where I live), so prices are ridiculous.
Going back to the office, the company building, removes a lot of the flexibility and freedom that are important to me, and bring in heaps of crap that I don't want to deal with.
Exactly, if I could go back to an office that was even remotely comparable to my home office I wouldn't be so resistant.
I don't want to go back to a small room crammed full of programmers shoulder to shoulder, stuck on depressingly out of date equipment, with shitty air conditioning and public restrooms.
I'm sooo much more productive and happy working from home
I like WFH better, but I wouldn't mind having an office within the company building, even if it's a shared office as long as it's shared with people who work on the same thing as me.
What I can't stand, and what I believe many people don't realize how much they can't stand it instead of something else, is having to share a space with people I have nothing to do with. Open floor plans prevent me from talking with my close colleagues, they force me to overhear conversations I have no interest in, strangers walking by all the time, the lack of privacy generates anxiety and so on.
Agreed. I'm a college student and have a remote job at a company out of DC, and I don't think I'll be staying there, at least in a remote capacity, after I graduate.
While I'm in school, remote work is actually super useful because I can work wherever, whenever, and working around my coursework is incredibly easy. When I'm not in the middle of a term though, it becomes more of a chore. Working 40hrs out of my bedroom isn't ideal by any means (I go out and work at a coffee shop for a few hours each day to combat this), but the work-life separation has been really hard for me to form.
I just got swapped from 1099 to W2 so now I'll at least have a work machine that I can keep separate from all my personal stuff, but I feel like it'll still have more of a blurred line than it should have.
I might feel differently about this when I eventually have a house with a dedicated office, etc. but living out of an apartment with no formal workspace is really difficult, at least for me. Definition of spaces is incredibly important to how I work.
They might be able to hire boatloads of new/early grads but attrition of senior staff is no joke. Maybe they’re large enough to throw people at the problem and survive, IDK.
Do they normally have trouble with that? Seems like anyone new to the workforce would at least try a job at a FAANG if they're offered it in a heartbeat unless you're totally full of yourself or somehow have better options. With the exception maybe being deeply held ethical concerns regarding any of them.
Not me. My career networks are online. Offices are full of people trying to give each other eating disorders through passive aggression, politics and generally pointless power games.
That's the perception we have in our groups. We meet up weekly face to face to share air when possible.
> Offices are full of people trying to give each other eating disorders through passive aggression, politics and generally pointless power games.
Seriously, does half of HN work in the real-life equivalent of "The Office"? Yes, office politics exist, but this idea that it's some sort of scheming, back-stabbing environment is a caricature I have never experienced in my nearly 30 year career.
Why would you ask that? I didn't imply that. No guarantees with WFH either.
Inserted edit: I notice you didn't comment on bullying. That's awkward over a zoom. At least one boss of someone I know has found out the hard way. Especially on playback.
The mind set changes when you start self organising because you're alone in a room. It's a different dynamic.
The gig economy has a lot of twists and turns. Less old guarantees but some interesting new ones.
The inverse is also true- I've found it significantly harder to get to know my coworkers over Zoom at my current shop than I have in the past. Granted, this is my first "office job," but at the jobs I've worked in the past it's been super easy to meet other people and get to know each other.
I get that some people want to put their head down and grind for 8 hours a day then move on with their lives, but I tend to prefer at least knowing who I work with. I work at a small company, well under 100 people, and haven't met half of them.
I think the future for a lot of businesses will still be in-office. Having the team in one room has its own benefits. Plenty of others will be remote since that also has benefits. A lot more will be somewhere in-between. I think that will be more common. 100% remote won't suit a lot of businesses.
But 30% of the time? Or 20%? For plenty of people this won't seem weird. Spending two days per week working from home won't be strange.
I work remote now. While I still see a need for in-person catch-ups this doesn't include any need for the classic daily commute. That, for me and many others, at least, is now dead.
Exactly. My ideal setup would be a flexible week where I could come in between 2-4 days each week and work from home the rest. Maybe have everyone on the team in on a specific day and the rest are up to me.
I don't think FAANGs will have any trouble hiring a boatload of eager, hardworking college grads in September even if they lose multi-digit percentage of their current workers.