I solved this by joining a co-working hub that offers offices to remote workers / entrepreneurs. My employer pays for the hub membership.

I drive to our offices around once a month, but rest of the time I sit in a room with an accountant and gym owner. They are fun to chat and go to lunch with but they don't interrupt me with work related things.

As a bonus I get to meet and hang with professionals in many different areas and I find that really satisfying.

If I change company I work for, I just get the new employer to pay for the office. If I need to move, I prefer cities that have this kind of co-working place.

This is quite doable, here in Finland at least and while it has some downsides, it has worked for me!

Working around a bunch of strangers is better than being alone in my apartment all day, a bit better still if we're in similar industries, but the real thing I want is being physically present with the actual people on my team that I'm working with.

Right now I'm working from my company's local office, but my team is located elsewhere/working remote. It's definitely better than a coworking space IMO, but after one week of flying out to HQ and working with my actual team in person, even just 1-2 of them for most of the week, I realized working from my local office doesn't even come close to how much I enjoy actually being physically present with the people I work with.

Coworkers spaces are basically micro remote offices for 1. Much of the remote discourse has been about avoiding offices and commutes altogether, not replacing it with a different micro office that you commute to alone.

It’s reasonable to assume that remote and work from home are the same thing unless someone explicitly says they’re working in a satellite coworking soave.

1. "99% of remote workers are working from home" - we're in the middle of a massive pandemic so it's hard not to.

2. "(...) avoiding offices and commutes altogether, not replacing it with a different micro office (...)" - if you happen to cowork, there is a massive difference between being able to choose the location of your office (or whatever we'd like to call the place where the work happens) vs being dictated one by your employer. You're in charge of your physical location and you have the freedom to optimise your commute and context that works best for you. Cutting your commute by 1 hour a day and assuming that you do 260, 8 hour working days a year yields over a month of work freed up (~32 full-time working days).

3. "It’s reasonable to assume that remote and work from home are the same thing" - I think that this way of thinking is not only grossly inaccurate but will also hurt remote work trends in the future. WFH and remote work are two sets that sometimes intersect but are not equal. They're not the same thing. To clarify that, a couple examples:

- Most of my family are artists (painters) working from home. They're not working remotely because there is no remote entity that they are answering to. They have their art studios where they live. It's WFH, not remote.

- Let's say I have a client, employer or any entity that I answer to that's in a different location. I have a contractual agreement which states I don't need to appear in their place of work and everything happens over the internet. I choose to work from an office that I have rented. I am working remotely but not working from where I sleep. It's remote without the WFH.

- I got stuck at home working remotely for my employer because we're in a nasty lockdown or I simply chose to do so. In this case, those sets intersect. It's WFH and Remote.

I don't know why this is like this, but it is true for me.

That sounds odd. Pity is usually expressed when you're in an unfortunate position you had/have no control over. Most people (should) understand that most people work from home not out of force, but out of choice.

I do remember when enforced work-from-home started almost two years ago, a lot of people didn't have a ready-made space like a home office and complained about exactly that problem.

Yet the [zero covid] approach has largely cut off Hong Kong from both China and the world - a severe blow for a place that built its success on global connections. Even more than recent political changes, the authorities' refusal to adapt to living with the virus is eroding Hong Kong's viability as an international city, according to almost two dozen diplomats, chambers of commerce, recruiters, pilots and other expatriates. ....

In a survey released this month, the British Chamber of Commerce found that 70 percent of respondents hoping to add staff in Hong Kong had encountered difficulties, with many citing quarantine restrictions. ....

Jan Willem Moller, chairman of the Dutch Chamber of Commerce, said that about a quarter of Dutch businesspeople have left this year, and that the departures would "increase significantly" if the quarantine rules stay in place ....

At least 240 Cathay pilots have quit since May, according to employees who reviewed internal numbers. The carrier is reeling, with staff morale at "rock bottom" after hefty pay cuts last year and more departures imminent, several pilots said ....

Resentment spilled over last month when more than 120 students were ordered to a government quarantine camp known as Penny's Bay after they were deemed to be contacts of a pilot who was among three who tested positive on return from Germany

https://www.yahoo.com/news/hong-kong-clinging-zero-covid-132...

Being in co-working space/office gives you some social interaction, less chance teenage neighbor is blasting latest trance tunes on really loud speakers on one side and another neighbor is tearing down/renovating his apartment with loads of jack-hammer action, perhaps you just don't have enough desk space at home, maybe it's easier to switch between work and personal life by having some (short) commute ...etc. Some of those might be all the time - and some might be every now and then.

Meanwhile not being in same "central" office with colleagues give you more independence/autonomy. Beyond having less interruptions (e.g: it's easier to avoid/ignore a chat/email than a physical shoulder poke), some people prefer (or actually perform better) when interactions are less "real time" and more async, or perhaps they just concentrate better at 4am or 10pm ...etc.

And in general idea is that co-working offices don't need to be as big/crowded nor as far as big company offices.

Though I'm not sure how much last part applies to places like Hong Kong (many people, relatively short distances)

So my thought is that in my job hunt even if I find something that's remote (likely given where I live) that I will rent myself an office space nearby where there's other humans, better Internet, and no distractions from wife, kids, dog, garden, skis, bed, living room, TV, etc.

While I like the idea of shared co-working, the reality is that my current job works best in a room on my own. And it doesn't even involve more than 10 % meetings plus some ad-hoc calls with coworkers.

If it is a customer meeting, then I go to a phone booth that has a standing desk, and for longer ones I book a meeting room where the setup is little bit better.

In previous co-working space was this big hall and distance between tables was something like 5 to 10 meters (15-30 ft.) and almost everyone made their calls on their desks, even though phone booths and meeting rooms were available.

One's mileage may of course greatly vary :)

A mental checklist when looking for one (not necessarily in this order)

  Need:
  - good internet
  - own desk
  - place to securely store laptop after hours
  - fridge
  -  phone booth / meeting room

  Plus:
  - coffee, tee etc.
  - tableware, washing machine, someone to operate it
  - 24/7 access
  - printing

> Is it not as bad as I think? Are there places out there for weirdos like me?

Preferring in-office work is actually very common.

Take the news headlines and internet comments with a grain of salt. Even many of the big companies that have temporary WFH are still moving back toward in-office work.

The internet comments and anecdote-filled news articles would have you believe that office work is dead and everybody loves WFH, but my actual experience with companies suggests that a lot of people are realizing they aren’t cut out for WFH or they prefer being in the office. It’s just unpopular to say as much online these days because the people who do prefer WFH are sensitive about any suggestions that it isn’t universally superior.

Frankly, looking at job listings lately I still see far more office jobs than full remote jobs. If you’re looking for a normal office job it shouldn’t be hard to find. However, if you’ve been convinced that non-remote jobs are “red flags” by some of the recent internet hyperbole, this could be clouding your search.

Maybe it's because people WFH don't care at all if you want to spend 2 hours commuting, or that you don't mind getting covid by staying 8h a day in a closed office with tons of people. But people who doesn't want WFH, not only want to be in a office, they also want the other people in the company at the office too, because otherwise "I worry I'm going to go in to the office and be the only one there".

It's not that one's superior to the other, it's that one wants to force itself on the other.

Of course I can be flexible about things like covid variant surges or natural disasters.

I think of this the way I think of full-time pair programming: nobody should be forced to do it, but it's perfectly fine to form a team where it's a key part of the culture, as long as it's made abundantly clear to new hires before they join that it will be expected of them.

If the in-office people would just go into the office together and then deal with the remote people as we are, things would be fine. But no, the in-office extroverts want to force us all into their mold.

We could easily rework this kind of statement:

> People who like working from home want to force me to spend hours on Zoom, and subject me to constant Slack interruptions, just so they never have to "see" me, or interact with me as a complete human. No thank you.

> If the remote people would just work remotely, things would be fine. But no, when a single team member is remote, everyone has to adopt their preferred ersatz remote practices.

Of course, this is silly, nobody is trying to force anyone into a work environment that they hate--why would I want my colleagues to be miserable ?

I believe we'll end up self sorting, so everyone can be happy, and to that end there is absolutely nothing wrong with asking advice on how to find your preferred work environment, whether that's in office or remote.

Personally, I’m glad that people who like WFH have increased opportunities to do it now, so long as I never have to do it again myself. Worst two years of my life.

I don’t think its evangelical as much as protective.

I for one have had to endure grueling years of working in open office environments. I’ve got pretty severe adhd and anxiety, that’s not a good place for me.

With covid, the world shifted to working how I prefer. I’m terrified it’ll go back to how it was.

So I’m sorry it’s been a rough couple years for you, but please understand that it’s been a rough lifetime for people like me.

Because office work is still the default mentality for most people, this new world that’s aligned to my needs is in constant jeopardy.

If people like being in the office, fine. I don't understand it, but that's okay. I have ADHD and have a large startle reflex - I hate open plan offices, I dislike commuting, and I get more done from home.

If the office people stop trying to force me into the office with them, we can get along. Otherwise, no. For once in my life I can work in an environment that works for me. I'm not going to let some extrovert ruin it if I can avoid it.

The WFH people are probably the most vocal online (especially on Reddit as subreddits tend to create echo-chambers), so it feels as though _everyone_ wants to work from home, but ultimately I think/hope most people understand the social benefits of working in an office.

As far as I'm concerned, there aren't any.

But you know what? At the end of the day I don't care where someone works, as long as they extend me the same courtesy. The last place I worked at (before the lockdowns) gradually eliminated WFH, converted to an open plan office, and generally made life miserable for software devs who prefer peace and quiet over socializing at work. I'm much happier working from home, although I have some uncommon advantages there: no kids and amazing internet.

If an extrovert gets energized and inspired by working in an office, great. But don't expect me to do it just because they want company to talk at. There are plenty of extroverts that can share the office with you.

IMO, all the extroverts can drive over an hour a day to yak at each other in open plan petri dishes, but count me out.

I think this is the most pragmatic way forward.

Given my own company, I suspect that there are about 10-25% of tech that want to work fully remote. That is, never work in the office again, save for specific times (internal conferences, and the like) equally there are 10-25% who hate working remotely and want to be in the work office.

The rest are either ambivalent or want something truely (ie 1-3 days a week, but with the autonomy to choose)

However for that to work, there needs to be a revolution in how we share knowledge, spread ideas, and plan. At the moment none of the tools we use appear to be particularly efficient. VC is largely half duplex, slow and draining. 1:1 video calls feel invasive, so you don't want to start them unless you really have to. Where I work we have "workplace" but the signal to noise ratio is really quite terrible. I suspect that half of that is down to culture of present $company.

Slack is a much better at instant chat, but workplace has better layout for semi ephemeral messaging. None of them are good for longterm documentation.

Mentioned this in another comment, but I'm working from my company's local office while my team is mostly elsewhere/remote. We had an in-person onsite at HQ recently though, and I realized even working with other people at my company is peanuts compared to working physically with the actual people on my team I work with day-to-day. (Obviously this distinction is only meaningful at larger companies).

I think the discourse is heavily biased towards pro-remote. We've been working from offices for years, so the pro-remote crowd has been vocal for a while, whereas most pro-office people are only just beginning to realize that they even prefer an office, let alone how much.

But so basically I think it's a completely false notion that preferring remote work is the norm. That sense comes purely from noticing percent of talking.

FWIW I'd generally described myself as pretty introverted, in the sense of finding that social interaction is draining, but I'm considering moving across the country to be closer to my teammates.

Gives that sense of camaraderie, we’re-in-this-together feeling, if it’s with the right people.

I also think it’s about 20x more productive if in a high-stakes, high-uncertainty regime.

But the median remote work is probably better than the median in person work, even if the very best work is in person.

Try to imagine starting SpaceX or Apple as a remote company… I think that kind of magic just wouldn’t happen.

What makes you say that?

But the best offices/teams are awesome, and you can’t replicate that remotely. I worked on a team like this once, you get that platoon-in-a-foxhole, us-vs-world vibe, people are pushing hard to make the team and mission succeed, there are always interesting debates going on, the team is going out together as a crew after work, or on trips etc.

It’s awesome but it doesn’t last forever, and it’s hard to find. But I think on a team like that you accomplish 10x, and you also grow as a person and become much smarter.

If you want a 5 days/week mandated in-office in Jan 2022, you’re going to have slim pickings. If you want that in Jan 2023, I sure hope that’s fairly common again (just for the implications on C19 endemic status, not because I want to go to an office).

Additionally, I think "undoing" the remote workforce transition is going to be nigh impossible for many companies. How do you get your employees back to the office? You probably tell them their employment is contingent on being in the office; that's the only leverage you really have as an employer. Many people have moved since the onset of the pandemic, and with the labor market as tight as it is, few companies are going to be able to stomach laying off employees who moved away and don't want to move somewhere near a physical office location.

So companies have a Hobson's choice: declare an "on-site" culture and axe all the people who no longer wish to be on-site (with no guarantee that you'll be able to hire replacements in a timely manner), or declare a "hybrid" culture and allow people to opt into coming into the office instead of having it mandated (with no guarantee that people will actually show up to the office and make your real estate expenses worthwhile).

I think a lot of companies are going to choose option #2 now, and a lot of those who choose #2 are going to reevaluate that gargantuan office lease expense in a few years' time when comparing the cost with the actual utilization of the space. I think a not-insignificant portion of the option #2 companies will end up being "full remote" companies as a result, it'll just take them a few years to get there. I think the option #1 companies will probably be fine if they're in cities where there's enough talent, but their long-term success is kind of a toss-up in my opinion. It truly depends on whether the social benefits of in-person interaction gives them a competitive advantage versus world-spanning remote companies who can be more selective with their talent.

It means the virus is found at a baseline level without external inputs (wikipedia).

What you're suggesting is that people accept that the cost of avoiding COVID and "flattening the curve" isn't worth it, and that we just let the curve do its thing. Hopefully the result that it will either become endemic or extinct, but neither of those are certain.

There is some speculation that the "worker shortage" is due in part to workers with long COVID who want to return to work but can't. I do not know how large of an effect it is, but I can promise you it is real.

My perspective is we are living in a time of crisis and we must muster the reserves to forcefully challenge the problems of our time. Furthermore, COVID-19, a mass disabling event, may take years to resolve. If it takes 5 years to avoid catching it, I will have decades of healthy life remaining.

Long COVID symptoms range across many body systems including pain, fatigue, brain fog, inability to stand, heart damage, tinnitus (one CEO to the point they committed suicide [1]), kidney, and pancreatic damage. More results are being found routinely.

Your attitude is quite callous. I hope that if you were on the receiving end of the stick, other people will not dismiss you the same way you've dismissed them.

[0] https://s3.amazonaws.com/media2.fairhealth.org/whitepaper/as...

[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/ninashapiro/2021/03/21/texas-ro...

Things aren't going back anytime soon.

Anyway, at this point of the pandemic, I'd still not feel comfortable having lunch with coworkers in a closed space. I just prefer to have lunch myself alone, or at home, than risking getting infected.

But lots of remote-evangelists will say things like "If anybody is joining a meeting remotely, everybody needs to call in from their own separate computers". I might able to come in to the office but it still affects my experience.

I see no reason why I'm required to be miserable to enhance their "experience".

I have to say, this setup has set the bar pretty high. I manage to go the gym before work, have lunch outside with coworkers or have a beer after without being too tired from the commute or too isolated in my own apartment.

It helps a lot when you're living in the center of a city.

Depending on your job function and industry. For tech, yes, those days are over for at least for another 5 to 10 years, is my guess. COVID has generally proven to both employers and employees that productivity doesn't drop that much. It will also weed out bad people managers who need to "see" people physically who need to "get a feel" as a management metric.

The only major factor that would swing the pendulum back into offices, is when future diseases get under control much more quickly - whether that's corona virus or the next version of it, H1N1, avian flu, MERS, covid-19, etc. When the population is smart enough to win those battles quickly, and that there's a company where in-person teams outperform remote teams by a large margin, that's when in-person will be back and the pendulum swing again.

I know this is the popular sentiment pushed by remote work fans, but in offline contexts I hear the polar opposite: Productivity struggles are ubiquitous during COVID WFH.

Even the most pro-remote people are quick to admit that COVID WFH is not like normal WFH. Some places even had school closures which meant parents were juggling kids schooling and their jobs. Maybe you worked in a company that didn’t have a lot of employees with these problems, but it has been a significant challenge for many people and companies in the past year and a half.

I managed remote teams long before COVID and even I wouldn’t ever suggest that remote has no effect on productivity. Remote is hard and I’d even say that most people aren’t cut out for it, at least not without significant mentoring and additional management attention.

Certain phases of work and types of teams do alright remotely - typically a team with a lot of senior engineers in mid-project flow with few external dependencies. But a team with a significant number of juniors, faced with multiple blockers or external dependencies will underperform badly compared to in-person working.

Whole days will go missing because of a lack of effective communication - the simple ability to lean over and check or ask how someone is doing. Not to mention the inability of learners to just pick up information through incidental conversation and overhearing other people talking.

A friend in the construction industry has been dealing with this since COVID WFH started. He works with a lot of different architects, designers, suppliers, and so on that have to coordinate work. He also has to track the costs of mistakes and extra time lost due to drawing issues, errors, missed change orders and so on.

As soon as COVID WFH started, the rate of errors spiked upward. It didn’t decline until companies brought their employees back into the office. He now goes out of his way to work with companies that have gone back to in-office work because it’s the simplest and most predictable way to reduce the amount of money he loses to simple errors.

So, like every corporation.

Juniors need seniors more than they need docs.

It’s very possible to just shoot the juniors a DM asking how they’re doing. or having an active team channel where people can ask for help or offer direction.

The screen context switching is a killer.

over chat i have the opportunity to take a minute to wrap up what i’m doing. I also walk away with a written record, so if ive asked for help, i have reference to go back to. which can then serve as a starting point for documentation. or others in the chat can read and passively absorb information. or contribute to the conversation.

Is that a personal observation of yours, or has this now become "fact"? The reason I ask is that I would like to find studies - not just surveys or anecdotal evidence - that attempt to quantify the quality and productivity of WFH since the recently pandemic changes.

At work, we've had countless discussions about this and the jury is still out. The introverts claim to be no less than twice as productive, the extroverts claim they are lying and they really miss leaving work early on Fridays to go to the pub - somehow that makes them better employees. Management hate not being able to peer over your shoulder (although they have recently installed "security" software on everyone's laptops for "security purposes"). But I have nothing to point to other than my own experience managing a remote team of devs.

I've yet to come to a solid conclusion as to how it works for others. I only know that my productivity and depth of work has never been greater. So if there are any resources you could point me to I'd be grateful.

Early in the pandemic ( Mar 2020 ) -> no one knows how to WFH as a team. There is insanity in the world and work takes a backburner for most people.

Mid-Pandemic (Fall 2020) -> Companies push workers to get back to productivity and deliver. Workers are used to the remote world and productivity returns to normal.

Current ( Fall 2021) -> Workers just seem tired. Retention is through the floor, leadership is skiddish of pushing new projects in case people leave.

I'm not sure where we'll be in Summer 2022, but my suspicion is that workers aren't getting something they used to have in the office. Personally, I'm probably signing up for a co-working space in the new year to have something vibrant to look forward too and hopefully some other engineers to chat tech with on occasion.

I do miss the whiteboard and "bouncing idea" conversations.

I agree with most of your assessment. I particularly like the focus on fatigue. I think this tiredness (in oh so many ways) has yet to be fully understood - not to mention, addressed. If I may be so bold, I'll go one step further: something has got to give! People can't be tired all the time. Something has to (and will) change. Here's hoping that in 2022 it'll be largely for the better.

As for the whiteboard, I humbly offer our team's answer: https://sharetheboard.com We too couldn't bear to be whiteboard-less and have come up with at least a partial solution. If you have time to kick the tires on it, I'd love some feedback.

All the best in the New Year!

0) What data is shared through your servers?

1) What video conference tools does this support?

2) Can I use a mobile phone to capture the whiteboard?

0 is the most important part for my current employer as we can't use any tools which share any data with third parties without a lengthy approval process. If there is a guarantee that the app doesn't share data with a third party then it can more easily be tested at a team level (somewhat of a unique requirement for large tech companies).

Feedback on the experience: I tested out the tool from my personal linux machine (Razer blade 15) using a hand written note pad.

0) The experience is really promising

1) I can't hold a notepad steady enough for the video to capture the text appropriately, flipping the notepad around to write more text removes the existing text from the space.

2) I had to hold the notepad within ~6 inches of the laptop camera to have the pen/handwritten text appear clearly. This could be due to the quality of the laptop camera - which is certainly inferior to my iphone 12 pro's camera, and my work machines MBP 16 inch camera.

3) Overall I'd give it a proper test with my coworkers if not for the data sharing/video conference requirements of my current employer.

Thanks for taking the time to test out the app. Really appreciate the thoughtful feedback. In answer to your questions:

0) In short, unless you volunteer to share data - to get a discount or to use the free version - no data is shared (for your company test, simply use a Trial of the Starter version and you should be good to go).

We do track (anonymous) UI clicks, essentially to make sure the app is working. If this is prohibiting you from a broader pilot, contact me and we'll figure something out.

1) "Integration" with video conferencing currently relies on screen sharing: so.. it supports all tools! We are working on a few platform-specific integrations and would love your feedback here.

2) The primary use case is board (whiteboard, blackboard, flipchart, etc.) sharing - usually via a laptop or some external camera. We will be supporting a mobile version but to do it justice we'll need to release some apps. The amount of real-time processing going on already is quite ambitious; adding a useful image stabilization or surface detection to be executed in a browser has proven too heavy for most devices. That said, we may release a thinned-down version for mobile capturing before we do the apps (waiting on some POCs to inform this).

To sum up, for your broader test, I'd recommend: - using the Trial (of the Starter version) - using a laptop (or external cam) pointed at a whiteboard

And contact me at "marcin" [at] sharetheboard.com if you have any special requests or follow-ups. Would love to get feedback from your team!

Lockdown has certainly damaged some industries, but it has also taught a generation of people tech things they probably would have retired without learning, and the value of that may exceed everything else long term. It is very difficult to isolate things like this, and we wont get another sample, even if we get another pandemic later. I totally get its been good for some, but it was bad time for me, though people are terrible at self evaluating stuff like this.

I know that students at my university did worse the past two years than they did the year before. And by worse I mean substantially beyond the typical variance. This is in terms of student results like course completion and grades. As well as mental health metrics such as surveys on stress etc, and in terms of the number who seek aid through uni services. But there are confounders everywhere. The way they did worse differs in character more than magnituide as well. It looks like the majority did just about normal, with what looks like a small minority doing very badly. However, this is just one uni and it will be another few years before it gets collated, anonymized further, and published. It also may not apply to real work.

Leadership overall seem to be somewhere between cautiously neutral and rather pessimistic in the organisations where I have insight which is a bad sign, as except for the ones who personally wanted to work from home, no one seems to be happy with it, including showing up in management stress level surveys. The snooping management meme does not apply. Most of us researchers had permission to work from home before we started too.

I used to have this when I was employed (about 20 years ago). Somehow my personal take was that it gets tiring pretty fast. I've had enough friends outside of employment and wit the very rare exception would very much prefer to socialize with them rather than coworkers.

I then went on my own and have never looked back. The fact that I am doing quite ok means that I am productive. I design and implement new software products for my own company or for clients.

This might be over-estimating the numeracy and relative risk-judgment of people.

(I am commenting outside of the constraints of the pandemic. Covid obviously makes it much harder.)

It does really boil down to if your company has a culture of documentation, reading and writing, before needing to interface with someone in real-time.

Anyone who’s contributed to open source software understands this style of “remote” working, as that’s the default.

Over here in France, most French companies (as opposed to US companies operating here) have to be dragged kicking and screaming into WfH arrangements.

Ever since the pandemic started picking back up steam this autumn, the government was "encouraging" companies to allow people to work from home, but there were no firm directives.

Most companies figured having their employees pile up in the metro (yay covid!) and congest the highways (yay pollution!) wasn't that big of an issue.

They also asked companies to try to stagger arrival / departure times to reduce the number of people in the metro. Didn't work any better.

In my opinion, if OP is living in France (or willing to relocate here), it should be extremely easy to find in-office jobs.

This may be true, but the issue I usually have is that they seem to not do anything about it. Not "rocking the boat" and "yessir" are quite common approaches here, to the point that a lot of people are under very high amounts of stress.

Disclaimer: I've never worked outside of France, so I don't know how people here actually compare to other places.

I'm kind of wondering are half of these comments from an alternate universe. Most tech companies either are planning to reopen their offices or have already reopened their offices. There are a few companies going remote-only, which I suppose is nice if you like that sort of thing (I would quit immediately) but most companies do plan to go back to the office, albeit likely with more flexibility and some permanent-remote employees.

I think for a good percentage the option might be forever except some once in a while gathering in some local bar / event place / rent a temp workspace / whatever else can substitute

Don’t hold your breath.

Note: a lot of companies are advertising themselves as "100% remote while corona lasts" though.

This is the thing that gets me...Haven't people in tech figured out how exponential growth works? Covid isn't going away, ever.

Mostly, it doesn't. Pretty much all initially-apparent exponential growth in things that aren't human-created abstractions is, at best, logistic if conditions are constant, and usually is just the net of a large number of Ransome events that averages to that growth curve, but features gambler’s ruin and collapse to zero eventually, or collapse to zero due to changing external conditions before it hits gambler’s ruin.

If you look at hospitalisation and death figures from heavily vaccinated countries, each wave has generally been less severe even as variants get nastier and restrictions are eased (you’re not seeing March 2020 restrictions pretty much anywhere today). It remains early for omicron, but initial signs show the same pattern.

I do think that places with this kind of politico-cultural objection to vaccines (parts of the US and Eastern Europe, for instance) may struggle.

No, two years of half the population refusing to wear a fucking mask did a number on people. “Some crazy dystopian new normal” would actually be an improvement.

What are you even taking about? We have marvelous vaccines that knock Covid to the level of a cold or mild flu for most people in the “office worker” demographic.

Did you worry about “exponential growth” of the 2019 flu season?

Because part of saying “Covid isn’t going away ever” means “get on with your damn life”. If Covid is here forever it becomes just another minor risk in your life like driving, swimming, or catching the cold.

> We have marvelous vaccines that knock Covid to the level of a cold or mild flu for most people in the “office worker” demographic.

And now we have omicron, which is still quite infectious in spite of the vaccines. Thankfully it seems less dangerous than delta. Who knows what the next variant will bring.

> Because part of saying “Covid isn’t going away ever” means “get on with your damn life”.

Part of “getting on with your damn life” includes accepting that there’s a new endemic virus that the population has no natural immunity to, and changing behavior appropriately.

Sorry, but time marches forward — 2019 is a thing of the past.

I think over time the market will discover what percentage of people want remote and which percent want in-person, and then whatever that percentage is, the distribution of companies going remote or not will match.

BTW, pretty neat trick to help with culture fit for a start-up.

My team is primarily remote but I’m actually hiring an on-site person for IT.

One bonus is that a lot of these places need IT help, and you may be appreciated more. Plus, a greater diversity of backgrounds among the people you work with.

Our challenge, as I'm sure you've guessed, is finding smart, motivated people like yourself who would prefer to be in the office. We are finding that many people, even those local to our market, would prefer to WFH.

Believe me, it's easier to get an in-person job than a remote job! Most positions that I see still want staff primarily in-house.

Do you live in the Bay Area, or in a generally high cost of living area? I suspect the push towards remote in those locations is actually cost-saving, and not a "perk." When I lived in the Bay Area, every job I worked involved working with a lot of remote people who lived in cheaper areas.

If you're willing to move, there's a LOT of on-site work in Massachusetts in and near Boston!

Maybe it's a northeastern thing? I saw it a bit in Philadelphia too but much smaller sample size there.

But... There's also a weird "prep school" attitude where someone's thinks they're "the boss" instead of a manager. (These are usually people who micromanage and have bad leadership skills.) These are the managers who insist on no remote work, or put weird rules on it, because they just can't trust their team or won't hire people they can trust.

Fortunately, the shift to remote work has made these kinds of bosses easier to weed out.

If it’s any consolation, that’s not strange at all. Full remote jobs are actually very rare still, despite all of the headlines and comments suggesting that office work has been ended by COVID.

In-office or partial in-office is still the norm for the vast majority of jobs.

On the general search, “EU” might not be specific enough, as different countries in EU still have wildly differing employment policies, some of which are uncompetitive when an employer can easily choose to avoid them. The Netherlands and France are both “EU” but worlds apart in terms of employment policies.

I also found other coffee shop that are more work focused. They are usually more spacious and with big shared tables. They mind less if you don't consume regularly. Of course, that's always as long as they don't get overly busy. In general you will notice if your presence is a "problem", you will be asked if you want to consume more.

Edit: I'm located in Prague, CZ.

But it could be kind of expensive if you're an entry level developer at Paris or Nice salaries.

I feel similarly about remote but with a couple of differences:

- I'm not extroverted all, I still vastly prefer office over remote.

- It's not about socialising, I find the work itself much better when I can meet my coworkers in person.

Yeah I think this is an important point. I would still kinda call this "socializing" I think, but there's a huge difference between "just having people to talk about random stuff with" socializing and "interacting with the people I'm spending most of my time working with, talking about the things we're working on" socializing.

Now the job market appears to be reversed and the in person jobs are not the best. And, after a year and a half it seems evident that I don't really like remote work as much as I thought I would.

(However...I really would prefer a hybrid mode. But after having the economy jettison me in 2008/2009 it's definitely past time to exploit any competitive advantages for me...)

This is a wild overgeneralisation but in descending order of fun levels/friendliness of HFT teams it goes Chicago, London, Singapore, NYC.

Seems to hold across most HFTs I have met/worked at. Not sure about hedge funds or other finance roles.

Edit: Crypto HFT firms also abound but they are generally more remote-friendly than TradFi (the latter have regulators that need you to have an office and stuff).

(Source: worked in finance/trading for 10+ years before jumping ship.)

There are definitely some things I miss about having the option to go into an office, but I think any enjoyment I may have derived from that in the past would be negated if myself and coworkers were masked at all times, and ate lunch separately.

I do think that's the responsible thing to do though. Unless working with a very small group of people, I imagine that would be the expectation for in-office workers now (especially with the Omicron variant spreading). Which makes me dislike the idea of working in-office even more.

At HQ in the Bay masking indoors was still required by the county, I believe. Though people are still able to eat lunch together.

It’s very very hard to replace sitting with all your teammates and rapidly working through a problem. When everybody is remote everything has to be scheduled and calendared.

I dunno where I’m going with this ramble but I strongly suspect two years from now will look a lot like it did back in 2019. People will still WFH some days like they did in 2019 but all these companies trying to go hybrid or whatever will discover that it just doesn’t work.

This is simply bullshit.

I work on a remote team of ~6-7 across all 4 continental US timezones, where most (not all) work from home most of the time. There is almost always a video bridge open for pairing, chatting, “rubber-ducking” and so forth - especially across the common hours. It’s the most productive environment I’ve ever seen by a very long way (and have run the gamut from in-person-on-trading-floor to remote-first).

If I were to go to the office, it would be the same since the team itself is distributed (the SMEs live where the SMEs live), but with more ambient noise and an hour each way for the 7 miles to the office. Nothing would make me quit faster.

If you have trouble beyond that, look at any big company not in tech, where they returned to the office in 2020.

I do various hobbies, take better care of my home, spend time with family and pets. Before the pandemic, I would go to events, happy hours, brunch, parks, etc all the time. Not to mention the extra time for side projects.

I'm loving the cushy life remote work has afforded me - things really change when you spend < 3 workdays a week intensely working. Your week becomes majority yours again.

So I guess my question is, why do you want your job to be such a big deal in your life?

I'm having trouble finding a new job that has employees on site. I appreciate you posting this.

You go to an office full of strangers that you don’t work with, just to fight over a few private phone booths to take meetings at with your distributed team. There’s still a JIRA sprint board where you have to write bloviated stories for everything that you do. And then weekly, monthly and quarterly status updates. You still get hundreds of emails a day from automated management tools. You still have to live on Slack or Teams or whatever. Your day is still consumed by pointless 100-person meetings.

But now you’re stuck in an office. Woohoo.

There is no in-person work anymore for white-collar professionals. The good news is that blue-collar work now pays more, you get lots of people to talk to, as long as it’s about athletes or exes or politicians, and you don’t have to worry about getting fired for anything you do say.

I’ve considered the possibility of a strict office-only policy. As in, common hours, in-person only, no laptops, no phones, no remote meetings, no chat rooms, no management tools other than maybe GitHub, no social media, no non-work at work. I realize that you’d probably have to do on-site daycare, and today that implies liability.

I think you'd be overwelmed by offers.

Going to work every day is such an spectacularly awful way of spending resources just so that you can be in an office sitting in a workstation that is inferior to what you have at home.

I'm not. My motivation suffered. I need contact and engagement. And driving in 45 minutes to sit at a desk with nobody around didn't help. So I put in my notice and after 10 years at Google this week is my last and I'll be looking for a job where I can be more engaged again, which unfortunately also probably means compensation cut.

Even the BigCorps are stuck in a remote morass. But even worse because they're not fully committed to it.

That said, most people are choosing to continue being based at whatever office they were based pre-COVID and will return to office once the public health situation permits (some already have been choosing to come to the office, though the situation is obviously highly location-dependent and fluid).

[*] In my case to relocate to an office of my choosing, though the outcome would have been the same had I applied to permanently WFH.

big companies have a _lot_ of baggage.

even a 5k company, its perfectly possible to change the company in one specific way. (Even I managed it, by accident)

at a 25k company, that's hard. 50k+ almost impossible, unless you have a posse of cheerleaders.

Maybe you need more extroversion sources outside of 9-5. Places like gyms, classes, sports clubs, cycling clubs, hiking groups, hunting and fishing with others, I'm just spitballing some COVID-friendly solutions. It doesn't matter if you're bad or noob, just getting some shared time with others having fun, that's the rub.

I'm no extrovert but I love leaving my home every day after work, either to buy groceries, play music with friends at a folk jam, go for a hike, see family, see friends, anything to get out of the house, really.

Last point, ask your HR or managers to set up in person events. We meet IRL about once a month and it's just right for my job.

We offered hybrid and remote options to all of our employees once lockdowns ended. All of them (except for one) wanted to come back full-time, with some notable exceptions for hybrid. Some employees have kids so they went hybrid, but once schools reopened they all went back full-time in the office. The lone person was extremely freaked out about COVID and still wants to do full-remote, and he's now working hybrid where when he's in the office he's in an isolated room away from us.

All of them disliked the lack of communication while remote. We implemented Teams, had our daily/weekly standups over video chat, and talked a lot using remote tools. But that significantly slowed things down and it was hard to figure out what people were doing.

Remote does have a place, but I think hybrid is the way to go.

We had the same opportunity to choose at my workplace (130+ employees) and ALL BUT ONE of the tech-team chose hybrid. Most of us are effectively working full-time remotely still, but have the option to meet at the office when we want (this is currently discouraged until we see how omicron pans out).

The sales and management teams were more in favor of working at the office, but even there many chose hybrid. Amazing that two companies can have such a totally different outcome - although I must say the company I work for is an exemplary example of a diverse workplace, with a great mixture of young and old, parents, and singles of all genders and from a variety of cultures and backgrounds.

Pre-covid, most people were around multiple other people for most of their waking life. I don’t think it’s at all surprising that a mode of working where you spend every working day without seeing another human is causing some people difficulty.

It is hardly fair to expect people, especially who dont want it themselves people or aren't even friends with to not work from home for such reasons. Though it may well be that many introverts need on this more than extroverts, despite often wanting remote. My point is that leadership is primarily ensuring a social environment where people work well, and the ones who figure this out will benefit greatly.

Our company also is on the older side (in longevity), even though we're a small business the company has a lot of systems in place that's not equipped for remote work. I'm really trying to change this since I firmly believe hybrid seems to be the way to go moving forward.

I’m not sure that’s true; most companies do plan to re-open their offices if they’re not already open.

It probably is harder to find an in office job that is in-office today. Virtually impossible in some places, depending on government guidelines. But generally the intent is to go back.

I’m in the same boat; can’t stand working from home, and wouldn’t take a remote job. I had eight days back in the office this year, after which the government advised offices to close again… (Ireland has been particularly aggressive about this). During the brief window we were allowed (though not required) to go in, lots of people do.

I do hope and expect to be back in the office properly in 2022, though.

My impression is that the average person would prefer part in office, part WFH. I’m an outlier, strongly preferring all in office. I think full WFH may also be outliers; most polls seem to have flexible as the preferred option.

It's not the same when the office is "open," but only 5% of people are coming in.

If you’re in San Francisco, we work down by the Salesforce tower. If you’d like to grab a coffee or say hi, e-mail me (address in profile).

Seriously, as an extrovert, have you actually talked to any of your fellow extroverts? All of them want to be in the office at least part time. You’re in good company.

However, many people want full remote. And we all want more flexibility than FAANG is currently willing to provide.

We have engineering offices in NYC, Miami, Boston, Malta, and Brazil (Porto Alegre and Florianópolis). Many open engineering roles (recently raised a $150 million Series C) https://www.yieldstreet.com/careers/

https://www.kiter.app/lists

Also, try to join the local library and start working from there. You will meet a lot of people and you will not feel alone or anything like that.

They will list a position as being local to your search, but when you view the listing, it will actually be for a remote job. There is no way to really search for on-site jobs in LinkedIn.

In the "All Filters" section, there's a new On-Site/Remote section where you can exclude remote listings now in the job search tool.

Offices are still closed, so many companies still do not know how they will truly operate once they will re-open.

Might make sense to look there, because you can't be forced to work remote ever.

I always get an astro-turfing vibe when reading such posts.

Service work in my country is a 0.25x or 0.1x reduction in income compared to software. Americans are much better off working in tech from a financial perspective.

I think companies are doing this to just show up in more searches.