Why would I commute (and in doing so lose 2 hours of my time per day)? Focusing in the office is next to impossible, the equipment is sub-par (I have a 3-monitor setup at home)? What is it about software engineering that requires physical presence? Currently we meet once a week in the office and I get almost no work done that day, and I’m not the only one.
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I never understood why anyone would spend hours traveling each day just so they can sit in front of a computer in another place for a while and go back home. Glad the world has caught up with this being complete nonsense!
In a previous work, we had salespeople on the same floor.
I'd look some of them sit in tiny booths to be on phone calls the entire day.
No idea why they wouldn't just work from home. But maybe the option wasn't available to them.
Because it doesn’t take me hours, I live a reasonable distance from the office. I find the office a much more pleasant space to work from.
It does add up. I went from a place where I had about 20-30 min commute to 2 mins. That is 1 hour per day extra. 5 hours extra per week. ~260 hours per year. That is nearly 32 days extra per year to do stuff.
I have gone back to the 30 min commute. I do not care for the commute part. The office bit is 'nice'/whatever as it is as I tell the people I work with 'toy distraction free'. As all of my cool things I like to mess with are at home.
But honestly they are paying me a decent salary and part of the deal is I do what they pay me for, for a few hours of the day. I am selling my time for money. If they want to pay for that I am fine with it. They want to pay me to 'work from home' I am fine with that too. It is is 'their dime'.
Some people don't have a home office, or even a basic desk + chair setup that's suitable for long hours of computer work.
A colleague of mine prefers going to the office because at home he's constantly distracted by kids.
Another has literally injured himself due working from his kitchen in a bad position for a year. It's worse than RSI. He had to rehabilitate for half a year just to get back to 95% health, and even now whenever he concentrates for too long the pain comes back.
One might say, "well they should arrange a suitable setup then". Not everyone has a home that's large enough. Besides, my experience is that most people don't have the discipline or will to do this properly, and as an employer you have to more or less force this upon employees (not even "recommend" is good enough).
In the Netherlands, if employees — even office employees — injure themselves, then the employer is obliged to take care of them for max 2 years, even if the injury was not directly caused by the employer.
> my experience is that most people don't have the discipline or will to do this
This widely believed anecdotally driven piece of opinion-data was what COVID invalidated. Studies demonstrated no significant loss in productivity and in many cases increased productivity during WFH during covid - putting aside contexts where it was clearly unsuitable / suboptimal (people trapped in their houses with small kids, no appropriate equipment etc).
Perhaps the real lesson is that most people at most companies were vastly unproductive at the office to begin with, so working from home didn't risk losing very much.
It is my personal experience at my own workplace. I literally saw with my own eyes that if I don't force employees to have a proper work environment, then they won't set one up by themselves, only to get back pain a few days later.
Your sample size of one doesn't prove or disprove anything.
Depending on circumstances, what you save on commuting could allow you to upgrade your living with an extra room.
Commuting costs are easily underestimated but a honest look might reveal that they are substantial:
https://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2011/10/06/the-true-cost-of-...
Where I live, the people with long commutes are more likely to live outside the city in a house with an extra room. It's the urban apartment dwellers that don't have the extra space.
An extra bedroom in most parts of metro Boston is like an extra $1000-1500, even in the close suburbs. An unlimited pass for public transit is $90/month. A blue bike annual membership is that much per year. It doesn't even come close.
The home office equipment can be bought from the higher salaries the companies are able to provide now that they don't need to waste as much money on office rent. Of course, getting a good chair is just as important as it used to be!
> Another has literally injured himself due working from his kitchen in a bad position for a year. It's worse than RSI. He had to rehabilitate for half a year just to get back to 95% health, and even now whenever he concentrates for too long the pain comes back.
I have literally injured myself due to working in offices: got back and chest pain because every piece of furniture from desk to chair was absolute garbage, each day hands, wrists, and forearms were in pain within minutes because of lousy keyboard and mouse, eyes crying so much I wanted to gouge them out because the screen was spectacularly bad (low contrast, low resolution, high minimum brightness, high latency) and lighting was the worst (single window giving into an artificially long room, overhead neon ceiling lighting flickering at mains frequency, no other lights). Of course it was open space, so to not be constantly distracted one isolates themselves with headphones and music for hours on end and whatnot.
Most employees had at least two items each they bought on their own dime or brought from home (whether it was lights, screens, chairs, headphones, laptops...) to make it bearable.
A coworker suffered from back pain and was put of commission for 6 months, came back feeling better, stayed two months... and was out again for 6. Another started to have ear ringing because of the constant music. At some point I felt terrible chest pain, like being hit by a truck, a piercing sensation from front to back, like being impaled by a javelin, couldn't raise arms, went out to try and catch my breath and legs gave in as I stepped outside. I thought I was having some heart attack of sorts but it was "merely" my chest and back muscles getting so tense over the years that they cramped and would not let go, even if it meant choking to death.
Took months to realise, years to undo the damage.
This experience was a tad extreme but the principles are generally consistent across many many workplaces: employers buy the cheapest hardware, rent the cheapest place, and throw the coding masses in there, where employees try to make the best with what they are given and what they can bring from home. The tech startup bubble where employees get the best hardware and working conditions is the exception, not the rule.
So to sum up: employees suffer commuting and terrible work conditions that they accomodate for with their own gear from home, only to end up isolating themselves once on site, for the benefit of having two times 10min face to face watercooler talk + 45min lunch per day. No wonder so many want to skip the nonsense, work from home, and do the occasional social thing outside of the office.
Ultimately I guess offices are part about control over employees and part status symbols for companies (as in, "we rented that big place", not as in "you'll have the best working conditions")
> A colleague of mine prefers going to the office because at home he's constantly distracted by kids.
Why aren't they at school?
School is until 14.30. And they have many holidays.
I mean I go out in the evenings more now as I go mad stuck in my house
I never understood why people think time spent travelling is "lost".
Commutes are often filled to the brink with people, there usually isn't enough space for everyone to move freely, and depending on one's location, you might have nothing but a black tunnel wall outside the windows. Public transport often requires one to switch trains or buses, and traffic jams are a constant worry for drivers.
Travelling, as in actually going somewhere, is often a nice and relaxing experience. Taking a delayed filled-to-the-brink bus to the train-station, switching to a delayed train without a single free seat, switching to a hermetically sealed metro car an hour later and finally arriving at the office 30 minutes late is _not_ a relaxing experience.
I'd love to see my coworkers now and then, but commuting really neutralises any benefits from going to the office.
Maybe travel at a different time, then.
That's the thing, though; when you're bound by working hours and need to commute (which most people are), you don't really have much choice and will need to commute during rush hours.
Personally, I'd rather find a non-tech sector job close to my home than commuting to a tech job. I am very happy to be fortunate enough to have the option to work from home all of the time -- most people don't
If you can walk to a train station in 5 minutes, then socialized with your train friends for half an hour to 45 minutes or read a book. Or if you commute by walking, cycling and running and it is considered your daily physical activity, it is fine.
If you spend your time running to a bus stop, not being able to do anything in the bus because it is crowded and bouncy, then have to catch a train, that is also full then another one, to run to another bouncy crowded bus and reach your office 1h30 to 2h00 without having been able to spend a decent amout of time reading, chatting or something else, this is totally lost. If you are driving chance is it is also lost for the most part.
Who the hell has train friends?
I made friends when I was commuting by train in Switzerland.
The first weeks you ignore people. Sometimes you start talking because of a special event, an unexpected halt, whatever. First friend I did was a cyclist like me so we were bumping into each other when hanging our bicycles to the hook when entering the train and one day he complimented me on my bicycle and then we started talking. Second one is a girl I was seeing most of the time because we were kind of looking for the less busy cars at the end of the lane every morning where most people are too lazy to walk to. She was sitting so straight and elegant one day I simply asked her if she was dancing ballet as most people who sit so well are dancers. It happened she wasn't but we started chatting and now we are friends. Another one I really started talking to because of another girl who was sitting at my side and who had intellectual developmental disability. That girl kept talking and talking, she was very funny, aware of her disability yet made fun of it saying it made her more entertaining and it was true and she was constantly making jokes about life, her and ourselves. I never met that person again but she made me and the woman sitting in front of me chatting about how good time we had talking to her afterwards that we ended up chatting for an hour and also became friends. These are the three I kept as friends and met outside of the commute context even years after we all stopped taking those trains and am still in touch with while living in another country. But I met other people I would bump into once in a while, whom I exchanged numbers and we would chat a bit every time we met.
It takes a bit of time usually and you don't get to be friend with a complete car but if you take the very same commute daily for months you eventually find out that you can bound with one or two people that share part of the journey.
Lots of people I know who live in the north of England and Scotland get to know the people they end up commuting with, but this seems much less common in the south of England. I think conversation with strangers on the train is also much more common up north.
I get it. When I lived in a metro area on a regular commute I would often see the same people at the same time every day for years.
Might be a new startup idea! Time to sell train friend subscriptions :p
> If you are driving chance is it is also lost for the most part.
I will never understand why people think time spent driving is "lost".
Because it is? It's time you can't spend on your hobbies. Of course, if repeatedly driving the same route every day is one of those, then go ahead.
To be fair the grandparent post did not elaborate,
but not everyone is locked into doing nothing during their commute.
People using public transport might be able to do all sorts of things like reading or creative work.
That’s of course hard if you need to drive yourself.
But if you are able to make good use of that time one could consider it not lost.
Maybe commute should be clocked in for jobs that don’t rely on physical presence?
When I was a younger human, riding my motorcycle into the office every day was an amazing hobby. I loved it and would absolutely go back to that daily habit if it works for me.
I generally travel at least 40 miles and sometimes a few hundred miles a day to get to work.
When else do I get to sit on my arse for a couple of hours and listen to the radio?
so what do you call 3 hours a day when you're forced to sit/stand in a carriage? sure, I can find activities to occupy myself, read a book, listen to podcast, etc, but this is not by choice. I'd rather go for a run. So if I cannot do what I want during the time, then the time for me is lost. And don't even get started on "learning new skills" while on a train. Studying requires concentration, at least for me, so no, I cannot learn new language while standing under someones armpit.
If you need to travel three hours by train every day and you don't like it, you need to get a job that's not three hours away.
Once a week is a lot, that’s hybrid and not remote. The thing is if someone “forces” you into an office once a week then it’s not for team collaboration but for control. They want to control that you are never going to travel too far from the office away. Organisations who care about collaboration and team bonding would say you should meet when the team decides it’s right for them. Throw in some budget so the teams can go for a nice lunch together when it happens, maybe have some for drinks after or let them plan an activity. But let the team decide when that time is, after all they will know best when a natural moment takes place where getting together will be good. It could be once a month, once every 6 weeks or sometimes once every two weeks.
"Why would I commute (and in doing so lose 2 hours of my time per day)?"
Working remotely has really made me think hard about the enormous part of my life that I've wasted commuting.
Never again!
When you hire a plumber to come and fix your sink, they charge a call out fee to cover the time to drive to you place and look at the job.
I think in future people will clock on as soon as they walk out the door at 9, and not clock off till they get home again at 5.
I'm working as a freelance developer in Denmark, this is my reality. I live about 30-40 minutes away from my current customer, and every time I go there I will charge the time spent. My company can also pay me a tax free "bonus" for every kilometre driven, because I use my own private car.
It's always been a part of the cost - maybe implicitly.
I like the work/home divide. I like the in person interactions. I like being able to walk and meet with other departments and dig into what really needs doing. Pairing is easier and the work I do feels more effective. I do appreciate flexibility in my role and being able to work wherever I want whenever I want. But for 70-80% of the time, I prefer the office and considering the full office, Im not alone.
I feel that software engineering isn’t a one size fits all and its up to you to chase the work environment you enjoy the most.
>the equipment is sub-par (I have a 3-monitor setup at home)?
This is a funny reality. Even the profligate employers of software developers are reluctant to spend money on a monitor setup as nice as what I had at home at the entry level.
...except, of course, I paid for it - plus sales tax - with the money they gave me - net of income tax.
I do mostly remote work, but there’s advantages to physical presence. First, offline is a more rich channel for communication. Blunt analogy is an audio vs video meeting. It’s easier to explain and understand people. If you have a lot of uncertainty and things changing fast, you want this.
Secondly, it brings people together. I myself found this argument BS, but I found out it really depends on the team. I am looking forward to the interactions I am having in the office now.
So, to each their own. Most importantly IMO is that teams can have freedom to decide what works best for them.
It depends not only on the own team but also the other teams you collaborate with or provide service for.
We're a small "DevOps" team that provides all kind of services but we figured out that people in our company (it's a small startup) just don't come to us virtually if they need something or want a second opinion.
So we said we'll come into office once a week on a specific day and that day they can approach us with everything. Of course it hasn't changed behavior of everyone but that day we have more interactions with all kind of colleagues than the rest of the remote days combined.
Doing a mental/empathy exercise to think about all the reasons why people would want to do that is an important practice for your career growth and building great software products for people that aren't like you.
I personally would prefer to working remotely (at least 4 days a week) unless my commute is less than 15-20 minutes but executives put significant value in seeing people working from the office. If they'll decide to save (offices are not cheap) and hire a remote developer what would stop from hiring around the world? Developer salaries in developed countries (and especially the US) are much higher than world average.
Working from office you compete with candidates in the same city or in the same country if willing to relocate. Working remotely one have to compete with the whole world.
Well maybe it can help the world be a better place by levelling income and costs of living accross all borders.
Same culture makes communication way easier, and the main problem in most teams is actually communication.
If my high salary depends on artificial barriers to workers in poorer countries, it's not sustainable anyway.