> Christina Cage, a 38-year-old chartered accountant in Edinburgh, did not appreciate how important her commute was until she stopped doing it. “I came to realise that my commute was a time where I could transition from being a mum to becoming a colleague with a bit of space in between to myself,” says Cage, who has two young children. “Overnight it became a threshold of a door that didn’t close.”

While I can’t say I’d like to pay the price of 2x50 minutes each day, I too miss that piece of time that was truly mine and mine alone. I used it to read, do a mediation or just space out and let my mind wander.

I'm completely different, I despise my commute because it's time that doesn't truly belong to me and I'm not being paid for. It's getting up earlier and arriving home later for the exclusive purpose of mindless presenteeism, time that belongs to my boss rather than to me because I certainly wouldn't be doing it out of choice. I also have to cycle through often horrible weather around drivers who I can only presume have WW2 fighter style marks for how may cyclists they've managed to run off the road.

My next job will be exclusively remote, and I'll be much better off for it. I don't mind what other people choose to do, as long as I'm not forced to participate in the return to the office.

Oh, I have no doubt there are commutes that are horrible. The part that I miss from mine is a 26 minute train ride on a train that was always punctual and never more than 50% full.

> 26 minute train ride on a train that was always punctual and never more than 50% full.

I'm happy for you but it doesn't seem like a typical commute though.

Typical for whom exactly? Mine is the same, just 15 minute total. What's "typical" for you?

An internal London-to-London commute could well be like that. My Kennington to Goodge Street commute started with an empty train, while if you can flex your starting time to 10am you're going to have a pretty empty Tube on much of the network.

In a past life I used to commute to a small scenic village out of a city. It was exactly as you describe: scenic and relaxing 25 minute train ride with not another soul on the train and it was always on time.

Now I fly around a lot and it feels like half my life is draining away "waiting to get somewhere".

My job is fully remote, but it's not entirely greener grass. There's almost no emotional connection to the rest of the team, I used to have work friends and now there isn't really even a veneer of that. There's also a real loss of body language and other physical signs/cues you could pick up on. There's also way more meetings and "working sessions" for projects now that don't feel super productive but it's the only way to really collaborate. I also hate having my webcam on from 8am to 6pm with a brief pause for lunch. I am thoroughly glad to not have a commute, but remote work has in a lot of ways actually been worse.

> I also hate having my webcam on from 8am to 6pm

Is this a reference to a bunch of meetings or does your employer want to be able to watch you all day?

Some employers want their remote employees to keep their camera on for various reasons, from not trusting their employees to believing that leaving webcams running emulates in-person office environments.

I wouldn't agree to it, but I've heard about such requirements from others.

> believing that leaving webcams running emulates in-person office environments

Who seriously believes this?

Bunch of meetings and we have a culture of webcams on… it’s exhausting.

I sympathize with this, how do you think remote work could be made better?

Great question but I don’t have a good answer. All I know is it initially was great but 17 months into remote work and having no real connection to your colleagues and no water cooler discussion has really left a gap in the small things that made work okay. For instance, You don’t eat lunch with your coworkers, no one brings cupcakes in to celebrate birthdays, no one gets a beer after work. It’s all the minor pleasantries that have been stripped away and all that’s left are meetings and deliverables.

For the record, I don't really choose to cycle. Public transport is absolutely dreadful in much of the UK outside of London (I'm not exaggerating when I say it's an hour and a half to go six miles on a bus that often is 30-40 minutes late or doesn't turn up at all) and I don't have a driver's licence for medical reasons. These medical issues are now controlled, but the post-lockdown backlog for driving tests is insane so that's not an immediate option for me. At any rate it's wrong from a disability rights point of view to assume that driving is an option for everyone.

As I said there are other choices than just mode of transport. You could move closer to your office or find fully remote work or employer that has office in another city where you can move closer to the office or that has better public transport.

Yes, and for me that choice is to move away from companies that insist on commuting in favour of companies that are less Luddite in their approach to remote work which is what I'm actively doing.

I have zero desire to live in a city and zero desire to ever set foot in an office again, and I know that many other people in our sector feel them same. Provided enough people stick to their guns on this, commuting and office work can be a genuine choice rather than something people are coerced into which I think will be a hugely positive thing for society. I suspect it'll benefit people who actually enjoy the rat race too, because the offices will be empty of people like me who'd rather work in their own space and instead be populated exclusively by people who actually want to be there. I'm not saying people like you shouldn't get to go to the office if you want to, but I am saying that people like me shouldn't be forced to for no reason other than seagull managers fearing their authority might be eroded by remote work.

I literally only live near an urban area because I had to pre-COVID as remote jobs were few and far between. I'd far, far rather be in a cottage in the Welsh mountains or on a sailing boat slowly working around Britain. Urban life in general is something about as appealing to me as a sudden brain haemorrhage, which I think is an aspect in the motivations of many pro-WFH people that a lot of anti-WFH people fail to grasp. Lots of people live in urban areas because they had to, not because they wanted to and WFH provides an excellent route to finally escape the modern "dark Satanic mills" for good.

You fail to grasp that moving to a city or deeper within a city might be an unacceptable quality of life issue, either because of unaffordable rents and house prices or simply because city life is deeply unappealing to many. People take it personally because not everyone has the means or the desire for city life, and going around acting as though cities are the only place one might want to live comes across as deeply arrogant. It's a very "let them eat cake" kind of sentiment which grates harshly against the ears of people who aren't on high salaries or wages.

For huge numbers of people remote work finally let them cast off the shackles of city life while retaining their professional jobs, the point you're not grasping as someone who actually likes city life is what an incredible improvement that is to many people's quality of life, and how jealously people guard this new feature of their lives.

It is almost as if life was full of compromises. Yeah I too want to do nothing, but still live in a mansion and have infinite money, but that's not part of the reality.

If remote work is the most important aspect of a job for you then you should look for fully remote job. You might need to compromise on some other aspect like pay.

If you just want to eliminate commuting then remote work is one option, but you could also just move closer to your office or change jobs to a company that has office closer to you or to a company that has office in a location you wish to move to.

Again there is nothing I "fail to grasp" about this. There are other jobs than the highest paying one and there are other options than to work than commuting two hours to an office. What you don't seem to grasp is that I am not fighting you and you are fighting some fantasy version of me.

> I've purposely chosen both my employer and my living situation to suite me.

You're very fortunate to have had both the opportunity and ability to do this. Many people are not.

HN users with their top-of-market salaries and offices in downtown centers tend to forget this.

That's the thing. I do not have top of the market sallary and I do not live center of any city. If I was just after money then I would have to live with that choice and live in way more expensive city or commute for way longer time.

I didn't see them taking anything personally. Most people who are planning to go fully remote (or were already) have absolutely no issue with people who want to work in an office however many days a week. I know I don't.

However I think it's also true that at least some people who are anxious to get back to the office are visualizing a pre-pandemic office. And at many companies, it's going to be more along the lines of a fair number of people having gone full remote and others coming in 2 or 3 days a week.

I think for some people it's just their way of saying "not me."

And others probably read it as "I can't wait to get everyone I work with back in the office" whether intended in that spirit or not. I do think some will be disappointed by what "the office" looks and feels like at many places post-pandemic.

You cut the sentence just before it turned out it is primarily complaint about drivers:

> around drivers who I can only presume have WW2 fighter style marks for how may cyclists they've managed to run off the road

Aggressive or unsafe driving is bad even if the author has the option to use other transport. It is bad also because to prevent people from using bikes.

Yeah exactly, I know lots of people who think I'm mad for cycling through an urban environment and it's everything to do with dangerous drivers rather than the environment itself. The key I've found is to be assertive but not aggressive, cars will dangerously pull out in front of you or overtake in a dangerous manner if you show the slightest lack of confidence or hesitation. It's not an easy thing to do as any cyclist will be acutely aware that Newton's laws of motion are not on their side!

Having said that, I definitely think the pro-cyclist camp (which I do consider myself a part of) likes to ignore that there are a lot of utterly useless cyclists out there too. Riding on the pavement, jumping red lights, being obstructive in traffic just to prove a point for example. I wish all cyclists kept to the highway code religiously because the small minority of bad cyclists or overly militant evangelists seriously damage the reputation of all cyclists, most of whom are simply ordinary people who want to get around without the expense or ecological footprint of driving.

Cycling ought to simply be a means of getting around, as normal as walking or driving. I understand this is how it's seen in places like the Netherlands, which is a far better state of affairs than here where cyclists are basically seen as vegans on wheels with all the drama that entails. Cycling shouldn't be a political act; I don't want to tell anyone they can't use their car for example, I'm certainly not saying everyone has to take up cycling and replace every journey with it. I'm not interested in telling anyone what to do with their life choices, I just want to get to work without getting literally run off the road by a mental taxi driver or clipped by a pillock who thinks its important to save the 0.5 seconds it would have taken him to check his left mirror.

I cut the relevant part since rest is obvious hyperbole.

But since we are on the topic from my experience most of the crashes that involve bicyclists could have been easily prevented by the cyclist.

If you have multiple experiences of crashes with cyclists, the common variable is you. Most of us never crashed a car with cyclist.

I've never crashed my car. However I've seen multiple times footage of bicyclist crashing with cars from both cyclist's point of view and from dash cams and the times cyclist couldn't do anything to prevent the crash can be counted with fingers from one hand.

Cyclist couldn't do anything is not a standard. People go to jail for causing crashes other person could have prevented. Cars crash every and participats could have done something else, but that is not how these situations are evaluated.

The complaint was about aggressive or unnecessary dangerous driving.

>The complaint was about aggressive or unnecessary dangerous driving.

aggressive or unnecessary dangerous driving is done by both parties and seeing a cyclist dodge and weave around cars during rush hour doesn't really leave much to imagination why their insurance premiums are higher.

It is fine if you like your commute or your office, but don't take it personally when someone says that they don't like it.

I’ve now had 10 different commutes in my career (home>office combinations), and I think that the stress/comfort factor is an exponential modifier to how painful a commute is.

Anecdotally - a client who lived in Texas who and had an hour drive with lots of traffic to commute to work each way had gotten a Tesla, and had had it for about 6months (this is in 2019) and he said he loved it, but that his wife liked him having it even more! When I asked why, he told me that she had noticed a marked difference in his emotional state when he got home from work for the better - when he thought about it he realized that the car taking on the mental work of dealing with rush hour traffic allowed him to decompress on the way rather than be more stressed out…

This is the only aspect of their “self-driving” that I find compelling. I’m nervous about giving up control at 60mph and don’t mind holding the steering wheel with cruise control on road trips, but I find stop-and-go traffic unbearable. It is one of the few situations in which I fully believe an algorithm would be less likely to get into a fender bender than me.

Isn't that just "Adaptive Cruise Control?" That feature is available on lots of brands.

Genuine question: what stops you from going out for a walk to have time for yourself? I have been doing it, and I have to say I never thought I would like to just walk around the neighborhood just for the sake of walking.

When the work-from-home started last year suddenly and some people had trouble adjusting, people suggested to continue "going to work" as a ritual - essentially, you have your usual morning stuff/breakfast/whatever, then get dressed, walk around the block and arrive "in office" that just so happens to be very close to your bedroom. While seemingly useless, it helps to establish a boundary and a mental switchover from "home-mode" to "office-mode".

Not my comment, but I can answer for me. About 8 months into the pandemic I started renting a private office, and leaving my computer there, to avoid WFH. It was the best decision for my mental health I ever made, and I think the commute is an important part of this, because of the transition effect described.

So why not just go on a walk every morning, for that same transition effect? Because for me that would require sustained (or even increasing) effort over time to keep up, whereas the commute requires decreasing effort over time. Skipping the commute is a non-starter, because it has immediate consequences that my morning brain wants to avoid (having to email my boss/client to say I won't be working today). So over time it becomes a mindless, autopilot activity. Skipping the walk is too easy - if I'm in a rush or just not in the mood, I'll justify skipping it, just this once... The mental health consequences of skipping the walk are too long-term and nebulous to concern my morning brain.

I do also love going for walks by the way. But taking pleasure in an activity isn't a reliable motivator for long term habits, because it's so mood-dependent, and also because things get old when repeated daily.

> About 8 months into the pandemic I started renting a private office, and leaving my computer there, to avoid WFH.

Second this recommendation. Since the pandemic I rent (sublease) a small office room which is walking distance from home. Best commute ever. It's a quiet space and gives me a separation of work and home.

I have started to understand some of my own answers to that question.

Hour spent in city traffic is horrible. Nobody wants that.

But before pandemic I started taking a 5hr drive instead of flying (from Toronto to Ottawa FWIW) . It was the most zen experience of my life. And massive part of it was guilt free nature. I'm going to work, I would've been in a Taxi / security line / plane anyway, but I get to enjoy time away from to-do list and housework and project and obligations everything else.

Going for a walk, I always have million guilts in my mind - I could be vacuuming or cleaning basement or mowing the lawn or doing taxes or or or... Whereas a pleasant commute is seemingly externally forced, completely guilt-free me time.

Again only applies to pleasant commutes, which I feel are a rarity.

--- On aside, How you approach commute also makes a difference. When I had downtown commute I was grouchy mcgrouch upon returning home in my manual hard clutch wrx.

Then I switched to a cvt gas powered scooter. I still did all the same things - I did not lane split or share, I spent same time in traffic. But world has been opened up since I didn't have the hard clutch and roof and a pillar in my way. I enjoyed the stop and go traffic as it allowed me to soak up the beautiful downtown I never noticed before.

---

But most of the time commute sucks and ALL that being said I love my remote work. I am surprised that we are doing marginally better last year in communication and team cohesion and results than we have while in the office.

It’s just not the same. I’d love an answer too…

I used to get a lot of reading done on my commute. For whatever reason sitting down to read at home is difficult. I was recently on a plane, and probably read the most I’ve read in 18 months. But I’m not sure why being on transit vs. elsewhere makes it easier to read. Perhaps the lack of consistently fast internet?

Try reading during a 45 minute one-way subway ride (2x a day) with screeching brakes, people being loud, and the guarantee of at a minimum one "showtime". Headphones barely mask the noise...

My original post wasn’t clear, but my usual commute is by subway not by airplane. I was just nothing being in transit (whether train or plane) makes reading easier.

Yes. I am not "addicted" to my computers in that I feel withdrawal when they're gone, but my ADHD self is constantly tempted to use them. I think the computer screen is somehow a supernormal stimulus [0], especially the super-bright crisp Mac and iPhone "retina" screens that always gave me a slight headache.

0: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supernormal_stimulus

it’s not the transit, but the severe restriction of other options which allows your brain to settle down and accept reading as the best option. it’s the converse of the paradox of choice.

Laziness, mostly. Laziness, and guilt because I could do something “productive” instead.

> guilt because I could do something “productive” instead

Taking a break when needed makes you more productive in long term. It prevents burnout.

But sadly there are parts of life, such as school or employment, where looking busy is important. There we learn bad habits, which may take a lot of time to unlearn.

In short term, could you make yourself feel less guilty about taking a walk by deciding the exact route and exact starting time in advance? Then the walk might feel a bit more like "doing your duty"...

I expect a lot of people need the forcing function.

I just “commute” to my backyard office by way of a nice, quiet walk around my neighborhood.

The thing about working remote is that you can commute if you want to, and you can skip the commute if you want to. If you work on-prem, you have no choice. I prefer having a choice.

Absolutely nothing is stopping you or the OP from choosing to take the time out of your days to give yourself some space. You don't need a mandatory, expensive and time consuming commute for that.

And dangerous. Driving is the most dangerous activity we do all-day. There are people alive who would otherwise be dead, all because of WFH.

I used to have a 20 minute commute that was just perfect for exactly what quote mentions. I genuinely used to love it. I would cycle or take the subway, driving 20 minutes is a lot more taxing. I'd usually listen to my daily podcast and my entire demeanor would change.

What I loved even more was the ability to fully disconnect at 5pm. Having every evening properly all to yourself is something you don't appreciate until you've lost it.

Have you tried to reclaim that time without the commuting? Walk to a coffee shop and read there before work? I see a lot of "me time" posts about commuting but I think that this is something you can change without commuting.

I’ve worked remote for a dozen odd years now, and I’ll often jump on the mountain bike or take a walk around town as my “commute” to the home office.

The cool thing is that I can adjust the length of it myself, rather than relying on freeway traffic to do so for me.

I can sympathize with this. I don’t miss having to take the time, but I do miss having the time to myself. I often listened to a podcast, or just drove in silence letting my mind wander.

I do a daily walk, but it’s not quite the same for me.

I get it, but to me this is the equivalent of being nostalgic for swallowing rocks to help me digest my food. Surely there's a better way to manage the remote working lifestyle. Additionally, if you need time to do a reset or shift to prepare for work, then maybe this thunk is a solution for people with this type of remote situation. Just don't force it as excuse for company policy for those of us who don't have this problem.

My commute was 30-45 minutes of bumper to bumper traffic on a route that would take 15 minutes outside of rush hour. It always puts me in a bad frame of mind that takes hours to shake off and set the negative tone for the rest of the day at work and then the rest of the evening at home.

That's nice for you personally, but most commutes require people to drive, and they can't space out, meditate, or read. Instead, they're stressed out about being late while causing pollution, congestion, and vehicular accidents.

I've found even the walk to the bathroom, which went from two full hallways away down to a few steps out of my bed, to be a useful jaunt to think about a problem without looking at a screen.

She should get a backyard office/shed/ADU.

Legal everywhere in California. That will create a physical separation as well as mental.

> She should get a backyard office/shed/ADU.

> Legal everywhere in California.

Edinburgh is about 1/5th of the way around the planet from California, and even if it wasn't, not all housing units are resident-owned detached single-family homes (or resident-owned units in multiplexes with individual yards) with sufficient free backyard space for a habitable, functional office.

Edinburgh? that's a very compact City ie out in the sticks is a 20 min walk from princess street.

2x50 min seems super long

If you're not spending that time commuting, you can just take that same time and do it different way.

That’s a shitload of wasted money, energy, and carbon emissions that could be replaced by a babysitter, a spare room, and a walk.

Every day at the same time, with everyone else, jamming the roads and public transportation. It causes so many problems to clog the system that way, and also it's boring to repeat the same day, every day, every week. I never understood the need for having everyone in at 9am, and leave at 5pm like a flock of birds migrating for food. Office hours could be staggered, since some roles don't need that strict timeframe, and it would alleviate the strain on the system.

For me my breaking point was in mid 2019 before the pandemic even started. I was a contractor at an F500 and had to be in the office one morning at like 8:30AM so I could attend an "All Hands" meeting. Sat in traffic for close to an hour just so I could drink shitty coffee while watching the VP's of this company jerk off to each other's accomplishments for 2 hours.

I don't know why it hit me that day but I just felt sick of my time not being respected. Like yeah I get it if I have to be in early for a meeting that I have to take part in, but don't ask me to come in early so I can listen to things other divisions in the company did that have no bearing on my job (this place was a conglomerate so the other divisions were in totally different industries than mine). After that day I started to ask my team to work from home more and more. When I got sacked in March 2020 I took a remote job and have no plans to return to an office ever.

> so I could drink shitty coffee while watching the VP's of this company jerk off to each other's accomplishments for 2 hours.

I made an all-hands meeting simulator to cope when we moved to Zoom: https://rafsters.itch.io/all-hands

If it was an "all hands" meeting, then I assume we're talking dozens, maybe hundreds of employees attending, with the vast majority of them not contributing/speaking. How do they know you attended? Couldn't you just skip it and come in later? We're all grown-ups and should have a good handle on what is really necessary for getting our job done, and have the good judgment to skip the things that are not necessary. I pretty much skip meetings where I have nothing to contribute and the world has so far not come to an end.

> Sat in traffic for close to an hour just so I could drink shitty coffee while watching the VP's of this company jerk off to each other's accomplishments for 2 hours.

Ah, yes, the pep rallys. Didn't attend them in HS. Didn't attend them in college. Still don't attend them.

I'd say the same for weekends as well. On weekends where I live, hiking, skiing, etc. become unbearably busy. I'm lucky to have a flexible work situation so I do those things on weekdays and then work on a weekend day.

Agree with this 100%. When I was still working in the office they introduced very basic flexible working. Only an extra hour each way, but I switched to 8-4 instead of 9-5 and it made all the difference.

It reduced a ~50 minute commute to ~20, so even though I was starting an hour earlier I only needed to get up about 30 mins earlier. Plus, having that extra time in the evening felt really good.

That said, we transitioned to full remote working and I can’t imagine myself going back to be honest.

The coordination works wonders for the rest of your life though - when you work shifts/weird hours it makes it difficult to spend time with your loved ones who work regular hours. Jams are the price we pay for social convenience.

I don't think the point is to go to any extremes. Here in Paris, practically every one seems to start at around 9:30, give or take, and leave by 6:30-7. If you move things around a bit, even by an hour, it could help a lot. Bonus points for this not being fixed, so if you need to synchronize with friends working elsewhere, you could come in later or earlier that day.

I, for one, started doing this at work "on my own": I'd show up at the office at 8 AM, and leave by 5:30 at the latest. This way I could avoid rush hour, dividing my commute time by 3. This didn't prevent me from seeing friends, etc in the evening.

At my work, we've been told to go back to the office, however the messaging has been vague, contradictory, and ever-changing.

For example, a few months ago the Telecom area announced that they purchased hardware to move our phone system into Microsoft Teams. Phone numbers would be moved over department by department, your desk phone would stop working once your number moved over, and here's some recommended headsets if you'd like one.

Then, after the phone system switch was well underway, an email from the President announced that we'd all be back in the office in September and that WFH would no longer be a thing. On a positive note, the MS Teams telephone integration works really well, so regardless of where I work it's an improvement over the desk phones.

Then, after I'd told my team to prepare for coming back full time, the messaging changed to "We're going to transition back to the office and you only need to be in two days per week, but we'll be back full time by January."

Honestly, I'm not sure how I feel about returning to the office. I'm sure I'll get used to it much like I got used to working from home. And I'm sure my co-workers will get used to me leaving at exactly 4pm (thanks to the bus schedule) instead of staying a bit afterwards to finish whatever I'm working on.

From the rumours I hear though, not everyone is feeling the same way. I know of five people that have left who would have likely stayed if they could work from home.

On top of all of this, COVID cases in my province are skyrocketing (10% of Canada's population, but 35% of its cases) and our elected leaders have disappeared. Apparently the Premier is finishing up a two-week vacation next week, so maybe we'll see restrictions re-imposed at the last minute and returning to the office will be postponed.

Whether working in the office is preferable or even necessary is going to come down to individual teams, not whole companies. The employers who figure that out quickly will do well out of the current labour shortage. Any business insisting on 100% in office or 100% remote is limiting themselves to a subset of the eligible workforce, so it'll be interesting to see how quickly they get out-competed.

I think over a longer timescale (~a decade) I would tend to agree. In the short term, there are too many people addicted to face-to-face work environments; often I feel that this is more down to office politics than productivity, but it'll persist for as long as it is effective in giving a career advantage.

For a long time, it’s been true that the internet can help your career far more than whoever works in your office. Open source contributions, emailing people asking for advice, engaging people on social media… all the way up to raising money. The future was already here, it was just unevenly distributed. COVID forced some who were holding out to face reality of a global, distributed work force.

All fine for Big Tech workers, but let's not forget about the large array of others who work in more "pedestrian" parts of the IT industry, ie those working for enterprise shops who are still working through the early stages of cloud adoption.

If you want to progress your career, networking on the internet is far more effective than trying to grind the way up the chain in an old school IT company via in-office schmoozing. That is a dead end with or without WFH.

Again, depends heavily on the industry. Also, I'm not entirely sure this is a good thing; I see a lot of "Twitter famous" people fawning over each other at the moment in something resembling a white-collar version of the US tipping culture, but I don't think that kind of behaviour should be allowed to take root more than it already has. One of the other positives we should be taking from a remote-first culture is greater appreciation for the practices of other cultures (since they are now so much more accessible). I hope we're not sliding towards a world where American fake niceness dominates and more reserved modes of interaction are sidelined.

This is a very interesting take that I have not considered. I think you are right about this though. Thank you for sharing.

Documentation via dropping by someone's desk is much better than no documentation at all, which is what I have observed the effect of WFH to be (perhaps this isn't typical though).

Is it really so bad having small talk with coworkers? I don't know where one is supposed to find friends in this new society that prefers talking to strangers and aliases on the internet over talking to the person sitting right next to them.

Prior to the pandemic I was heavily biased, primarily due to my ADHD, to work in an office setting or at least in a co-working space of some kind. College was a persistent struggle, as I was basically unable to prevent myself from being distracted or sleeping if I was working from my apartment or my room.

When covid hit, I'd just started a new job in New York (ironic that my timing was really that bad) and I reached a point where I had to break bad habits. I went through about four "waves" of breaking these habits, as painful as that was it was still progress. There was hope for a new office in August, but that basically didn't happen. I also moved back home when my prior lease was up, because why on earth would I pay to live in New York when half the city is still closed along with insane rent.

Cut to now, I was looking forward to going back to new york for the end of my 20's, however at this time I don't really see the point anymore. Being social is a farce (either at work or in person), I'm used to having more space and frankly the financial side makes immense sense. Remote work used to be something I was very against and unexpectedly I now welcome it. I also have bad acne, so the lack of social anxiety with that in a work environment is another plus. I guess I see my time differently now, maybe I'll regret not being more social, but I feel like I got that out of my system in my early twenties living in big cities since I was 19?

Companies that required employees to work in the office, who otherwise can work from home should be heavily taxed. Taxed for generating necessary emissions.

*unnecessary

The times (of NY) is reporting that 50% of tube riders in London are going maskless, despite masks being ostensibly required.

That's a good reason as any to tell any boss pushing for in-person work to go to hell.

From TFA:

> “I really don’t want to be on the tube in rush hour, even with my mask on, because a lot of people aren’t wearing masks. I’ve been double jabbed, but the tube is an incubator for the virus.”

Maybe the expensive-ass government should do its fucking job and start fining or banning anyone taking public transit that is maskless or dicknosing.

If people were smoking in the tube they'd be fined or arrested. Five minutes of covid exposure is much more damaging to a person than five minutes of passive smoking.

The UK government has never cared about COVID exposure one iota more than it has been forced to. The 100 deaths/day stat is below the "forced to do something about it" threshold, which seems to be about 1000. Mere exposure, no matter how severe the consequences, doesn't move the needle.

My understanding is that surgical masks don't really work when you're jammed in a small space for a long period of time. There was a thread here recently with a lot of studies linked in it. It seems like masks can only extend your expected time-to-infection inside a building by several minutes.

Train cars have plenty of circulation it's not the heat locker youre describing.

Also it's 100% guaranteed that wearing masks is safer than not wearing them, and it's minimal effort. So just use common sense and wear the mask, it's working great for managing covid in Asia.

Your logic is basically this: "I heard of a study that suggest masks are less effective in an environment." --> "lets not wear masks and maximize our chances of spreading covid. Because there's a study that suggests masks are less effective in certain environments"

I didn't suggest that anyone should stop wearing a mask indoors. I wear them indoors all the time, and mostly refuse to go indoors without one. But I also still work remote and I rarely am indoors (other than at home) for a few minutes at a time.

From the research I skimmed, it seems like a cloth mask is mostly not doing anything for you if you're indoors for an extended period of time. Do not extrapolate that I am arguing against mask-wearing, because I am absolutely not. I am arguing that we cannot go "back to normal", because you can't just put on a mask and be safe to a meaningful extent. I worry a lot about my friends who are schoolteachers, and in the next few weeks will be stuck indoors for several hours with 30+ children.

Edit: also, it really depends on the train car. Have you been on the Lexington Ave line in NYC during rush hour? You are literally jammed face-to-back at times, and the air conditioners sometimes do fail. There's basically no way to avoid exchanging aerosols and large droplets with other people.

I summarized my impression of the research as "they extend your expected time-to-infection by only a few minutes".

If your definition of "works" is "provides nontrivial protection over the course of an 8-hour workday indoors", then yes, I would argue that does constitute a conclusion of "doesn't work".

This isn't a "disinformation tactic" any more than your argument of "it's not 0% therefore it works."

Note that I am also not arguing against mask-wearing. I am arguing against the notion that we can go back to normal in the near future, because masks don't seem to do all that much, and there isn't much else we can do.

That, or we have to accept a nonzero (but not that large) probability of getting sick with a new disease other than the usual flu, colds, etc., and hope that for the most part the vaccine-breakthrough infections aren't serious or life-threatening.

Maybe they should mandate n95/ffp2 then. They're not expensive now.

In Germany FFP2 masks have been required in most places which require masks for many months. They make a huge difference in tight spaces. I can't really imagine not using a FFP2 mask where I would wear a mask in the first place.

I'm in Berlin and even in the Starbucks in Potsdamer Platz some of the staff aren't wearing masks inside.

The other places I have seen where people need masks are mostly just the surgical (non-sealing) type, and half are dicknosing on top.

Hopefully the rest of Germany is being less stupid and actually enforcing the rules.

I am from Munich, things are a bit more strict here and all mandatory masks have to be FFP2. But indeed, I sometimes see people dicknosing which makes me especially angry.

The reason why smoking is banned in the Tube has nothing to do with passive smoking:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King%27s_Cross_fire

It’s not the commute that sucks, it’s the lack of sense of agency sitting in a public transport that starts and stops on a whim going to places you don’t care about.

So sitting in bumper to bumper traffic is better?

Tried both. Both suck. I can at least read when I am not driving, but random smelly individuals do not enter a private car.

I no longer own a car, but the fact that it was fairly clean was enjoyable.

Really depends on where you live. In where I reside being stuck in traffic driving to precisely where I want is faster than being stuck in traffic on a bus.

Traffic jams form a similar kind of agency loss.

I personally am not bothered by the agency loss. In fact I want the agency loss; it's my thinking and mind-wandering/clearing time.

But driving itself can be very tiring, at least if you are trying to drive safely. That's the main reason I don't ever want a driving commute longer than 30 minutes, but would be okay with a longer transit commute.

Interesting. I find it liberating because you can completely tune out the world. Don’t have to pay attention to anything.

> you can completely tune out the world

...not on the subway

Depends on the location.

I have fond memories of letting the world go on the Sydney trains on the way to/from uni

So... a few anecdotes packed together is the new journalism?

While I agree that getting the opinions of a few individuals is not particularly good journalism, this opinion seems to be the consensus among almost everyone I've spoken to about this. Colleagues, ex-colleagues, friends, family, everyone. The few who I have talked to that still want an office, have been in leadership positions, and usually this is from those who are higher up in the ranks.

Fact of the matter is, an office is an outdated method of working with today's technology. It just took a pandemic for the general public to realise this. You pay for a commute that's not necessary, you pay with your time (that you're not paid for) to get there (time that you could be spending on family, or something else), and depending on where you work, you're probably smelling 100s of people's sweat every day, and taking in, and contributing to, a whole lot pollution.

As someone who has been working from home for years now, I have wanted an office away from home at times.

But that is mainly because my family figured out I work from home and because I work from home they think they can just drop by anytime they like and demand my attention. I have asked a number of them "If I worked at an office would you drop my workplace unannounced because your son has broken his xbox controller (for the third time?)", the answer has been pretty much "ofcause not", so why do you think its acceptable.

I did ponder renting some office space near to home but it's cheaper to be a bit of an arsehole, tell the family "I've rented an office to prevent interruptions during my work day" and just ignore the door then it was to rent space :-P

However I don't have kids which would be more difficult to ignore while working from home. I just have to put up with the neighbourhood cats (including my own) interrupting me now and then, the cat from 2 doors up the street just jumped though the top window of my office to pinch some leftovers and is now raiding my cats toy box for a catnip toy.

But I have the benefit of a) having spare space in my home for a home office b) very little interrupts while at home c) great neighbours d) very good internet connectivity where I live (not excellent as I'm still waiting for 5G and FTTP, but I do have good 4G as a backup connection when needed). If any one of those were missing I would be seeking to either move or acquire office space to fullfill those needs.

>Colleagues, ex-colleagues, friends, family, everyone. The few who I have talked to that still want an office, have been in leadership positions, and usually this is from those who are higher up in the ranks.

That's the problem with looking at a limited number of opinions, I've seen a different consensus in people I've spoken to. Only 1 person (out of around 30) expressed a desire to remain completely remote and never go back to the office, while the rest favoured a hybrid approach. None of those I talked to (including a couple in the C-suite) expressed a desire to return to the office full-time.

The surveys I've seen have been pretty consistent (for people who can work from home most days): about 20% fully remote and about 20% five days per week in office with the balance coming in a few days per week. I see a pretty broad consensus that hybrid will be the main mode although mostly in office and fully remote will be significant too.

One challenge is that this means that in-office people that were used to everyone being physically present will largely have to adapt for many meetings (for example) to operate as if everyone were remote.

Our company is currently fully "home or office, whatever". It turns out to be basically full remote work. The amount of people coming in is miniscule.

I'm not sure what you can judge from right now. I'm familiar with companies that are allowing people back in offices if they want and some people are going in but it's not the default. Apparently it's pretty dead so you basically go in and work. But I don't really expect that to be the norm, say, next year.

It is dead, because nearly no one wants to come in given choice. We could agree on whole team coming in and we discussed it a bit. Initially half our team came for few days and then it gradually dropped. Convenience of being at home won.

There is no wish to come in.

Some people do want basically a co-working space that isn't their house/studio apartment. But, for a lot of people, even an "OK" commute that lands them at a desk near maybe one or two people they work with, possibly in a hoteling arrangement, isn't really that attractive. And, with underutilized offices, amenities--such as they are--are going to get pulled back as well.

What you're ending up with is that neither the people who want to be remote nor the people who were OK with going in specifically for pre-pandemic office are interested in going in. I'm not sure how well hybrid works and there will probably be some shifting around as a result.

I dare say it is the consencus but I don't think it's a surprise to learn that people hate commuting.

The problem is that managers want to see people working and an office environment is perfect for this purpose. I would be surprised if anything really changes in this regard long-term, other than in a few outlying cases.

Well in my experience as a developer 9 of 10 managers who said they prefer result / outcome and don't care about the process will be the first to complaint if see you're reading news / articles and oppose remote working

Do managers really care if you're in seats working? Most managers I know are fans of remote because they're usually older and have family. The push to return is coming from company executives at the very top.

Anecdotally, there are a lot of bad managers around who do care. I'm glad your actual experience contradicts this.

This hasn't been my experience so far, I've been looking at moving jobs recently and I've got plenty of options even after discarding anything with required office hours or "temporarily remote" jobs which will return to mandatory commuting.

I hope I am proved wrong and your experience becomes the norm.

>>“happenstance innovation in the hallway” is a myth perpetuated

hmm I experience it every day, where I over hear something in the hallway that another team it working on, that impacts my team.

This is especially true for IT depts who are often the last to know about something when they should be included from the Jump...

but sure just deny my 20+ years experience and insert yours as more valid that mine...

I am sure what you experience is true for you, and I am sure as I said in my original comment my experience my not be true for a company that has been WFH as primary for years, or from their formation.

However if you work for a 60+ year old company that until 2020 never had any WFH then just try to graft on WFH, that is going to be an issue

> hmm I experience it every day, where I over hear something in the hallway that another team it working on, that impacts my team.

If this is how you are finding out about things that impact your team, then your company’s communication and planning is broken and work from office is a bandaid enabling that. Wfh forces good process as it’s not sustainable without it.

Maybe it's Google's algorithm, as I have clicked on several of the articles from an Android, but it feels to me as I have seen more and more of these "pro commuter" and "how the office is a better place to work than home" articles come out now that we're coming to a point where lock downs are supposed to be ending. In the beginning, all of the opinion pieces seemed to be, "Work from home, is it the wave of the future?" style pieces. It's either journalism trying to ride a wave or being paid to push a narrative. Business as usual in the journalism world.

Yep. All ad money went to zuck, brin, and page.

Not sure about Craigslist. How is anyone expected not to struggle when they seem to have done little in terms of improvements in 25 years? I checked whether it's still alive and it had a few listings in Berlin, one of which may or may not be offering to sell a baby, so at least it's kind of a weird lawless place, but I'm not sure that's enough to run a business on (might be good enough for a few reddit threads exploring creepy stuff though).

I'm sure that ad spending has shifted online, but traditional media companies have been losing audience before Google launched News and Facebook started to dominate. There's plenty to blame, and the web as a whole probably played a part, but I'm not sure it's the primary driver. Before there were online alternatives, there was TV or just not getting "the news" at all. Relying on not having competition feels like a bad idea with regards to being a sustainable business.

The BBC news website was previously very high quality mostly impartial journalism. I am not sure why but the quality and impartiality has dropped noticeably over the last 10 years.

Always has been. The internet exacerbated things by publishing more anecdotes to cherry-pick from, but journalists were never scrupulous about taking a representative sample, and the Guardian in particular has always been practically innumerate.

Do you think the views expressed in the article are something that has been fairly covered through all this time...?

This is a breath of fresh air, finally some cost-benefit analysis is being done on what was a very hasty set of decisions.

A few days ago there was an online thing on the Guardian site for people to add stories like this of their own experience.

You're lucky it isn't just images of their tweets tied together with an 'emerging trend' narrative.

This was always the case!

I wish there was an HN guideline against nihilism.

It’s The Guardian, journalism isn’t what they’re known for.

Yeah, breaking stories on the phone hacking scandal, PRISM/Snowden and the Panama Papers isn't journalism.

Not completely true. They used to do better than that. This is minimum effort.

Only if they are carefully chosen to support a particular narrative.

There are two types of commute. The first is where you don't have to take an active interest in your surroundings, you are free to use a laptop, read a book, chat with your friends, or even sleep. This commute allows you to spend the time how you like, and can be quite rewarding.

The other type of commute is when you are required to pay continuous attention to your environment for your safety. I played "pay attention or die" (aka driving) on 2 of the top 10 most congested expressways in the country as part of my daily commute... being able to have a friend along for part of it helped, but that time is never truly your own. I imagine it's the same for using a form of public transit that is less than safe, especially as anyone other than a large old grumpy white guy.

Transition time in the first case can be quite rewarding, although both are a tax.

Even the first case isn’t often that nice, because it’s only a fraction of the time that you’re not busy.

For example I went to work by local train for a while, but in practice it was a 10 minutes walk, a 5 minutes wait, a 5 minutes ride, a 10 minutes wait, a 20 minutes ride, then a 10 minutes walk. So in 1 hour there was only 20 minutes “free”.

I had about a 90 minute commute for a bit over a year that required getting up at about 6am. Still wasn't great.

The company I work for can have me back at the office again if they drastically increase my salary. Otherwise, I’ll take the 20% raise I could get from switching jobs to a fully-remote company, skip the drive, and get closer to my actual market rate.

Anecdote, but I and friends at other workplaces keep being told that we need to the return to the office for "company culture" - which is something I am not sure exists, or anyone other than management seems to be concerned with.

Lots of psychology in the workplace. Some participants' self esteem is bound up with physical proximity to subordinates. Some lose their identity without physical location. Object constancy issues.

Replace culture with hierarchy and it may be easier to understand.

"Don't commute; communicate." -Arthur C. Clarke (1:50) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D1vQ_cB0f4w&t=7s

I’m looking forward to it, but I’ll be commuting by ebike more often now. Less bus and train, more exercise!

I will never do it again , unless i find myself in some dire circumstances