When I go into the office, it’s after taking a brisk 21 minute walk or a 6 minute train ride. I listen to music. I prepare myself mentally for the day. When I’m done, I leave my computer and my work phone sitting on my desk, and walk or take the train home.
I don’t devote a single square foot of my home to my employer. When I’m home, it has nothing to do with work.
I would never allow my employer to colonize my home.
To each their own. Personally, I like being able to work and live where I choose and not be tied to a specific location due to availability of jobs. And I'm still able to shut down my laptop at the end of the day and ignore work until the next workday. My employer has "colonized" maybe 25sq ft of my home and I'm ok with that.
I work remote and travel around going wherever I want. The idea that my mental health and lifestyle can be “improved” by taking away my freedom and making me go into the office a number of days a week is preposterous.
I do meet up with my coworkers in person at a regular and infrequent cadence, and that’s always nice and pleasant. But that’s not what qualifies “hybrid” by any reasonable definition.
I paid $983/sqft for my apartment in the city, so unless my company wants to give me a $25k tax free bonus, and pay for a desk, chair, monitor, keyboard, mouse, and my internet, it’s a bad deal for me. Glad it works for you though.
Average commute in the US is 45 minutes each way, so as long as $25k is ~15% of your income or less, it may not be so bad of a deal as you think.
(or total income of ~$167k; which isn't outlandish for even non-megacorp devs with some years under their belt.) And given you're mentioning paying that much for an apartment, I'm guessing you fall closer to that side of things vs. the general average.
> (or total income of ~$167k; which isn't outlandish for even non-megacorp devs with some years under their belt.)
Uh.. where might these unicorn jobs exist? All I've seen is salaries go down about $40k for like to like positions from my last senior role. They've all dropped out of the six figure park.
Looking anywhere I can at this point. Been unemployed with the rest of the industry for a while. Looking for intermediate to senior positions. Can do senior level work but tend not to go for them. I haven't seen salaries six figure plus in several months unless it's some ML guru rockstar ninja job posting.
LinkedIn has a bunch of 6 figure posts for full stack development so not exactly sure where you're looking. What's your field and YoE? And what's your physical location generally speaking?
Probably should just apply to those then. Or search for senior software engineer on LinkedIn and apply to those. I just did that right now and get lots of hits with salaries above 100k.
It has those posts, yes, those salaries are also going down but I was talking senior to senior development salaries. Those are all under $100k that I can see. I don't have the requisite experience for staff++ or team leads, nor do I really care to have those jobs.
LinkedIn. Sub 100k salaries are the norm. What magic are you doing to get more money? Do I just need to like humblebrag leetcode or something to get the algorithm to spike my worth?
I'm not in the Midwest nor do I put my desired location as there, I set it as remote only and use the 100k+ filter. I haven't done any Leetcode for any of my jobs, just full stack.
Very few of the situations under discussion are about companies that don't have offices at all. So commuting is usually an option. Of course, in many cases, the commute will be to a suburban office park so you may have a long commute if you're determined to live in the city.
I’m expecting them to give me $25k tax free to devote space in my home for the purpose of working during my work hours. I retain ownership of the property itself, but not the equipment; I would also reserve the right to use the space as I please outside of work hours, because it’s located in my home.
Those are my WFH terms. Companies can take those or provide me an office.
Fine, just say that figure; no one cares how you arrived at the figure (multiplying square feet times purchase price, nor what eggs cost at your local grocer).
Of course it's not. You're free to set whatever price you want, but if you set that price and then try to explain it as "this is what it cost me to buy it", that second part undermines your first part.
Your employer, to the extent they want to agree to this, is renting space from you and you're citing and setting the price to buy it forever as justification. That undermines. Just name your price and see if they take it or counter.
Because devoting a few gigs of my Home PC to work is easily worth avoiding 12 minutes per day on the train + however long it takes walking to the station and waiting for the train twice.
Really I used to live 1 subway stop from the office and WFH was still a significant time saver.
Every thread about WFH immediately devolves into people listing the pros and cons of WFH vs RTO. Guys, it's a matter of preference and dependent on individual circumstances.
+1 to this. I work with people who would love returning to office and others who are adamantly against it. Even though I overall prefer WFH there are still things I miss from being in the office. I used to commute an hour each way by bus and that was some of my favorite time; I could read, sleep, listen to podcasts, whatever. OTOH now that I WFH full time I can work out before work and help run kids around right after work.
The problem is that RTO companies refuse to recognize that, and are making "do it or get fired" demands of employees regardless of where they find it productive to work. Those more productive in an office have always had coworking spaces available. Those who work better from home can get stuffed under these mandates.
So whose preferences really matter here? Who holds the power in the equation? I'll give you a hint: it's not anyone who actually cares how productive work gets done.
In addition to what others have said, the biggest issue is that RTOers want to force their will upon WFHers because they don’t want to work in an empty office. I get it, social people want to be social, but forcing us WFHers into your paradigm because you don’t want to be lonely is not the answer, it creates resentment from both parties. WFHers sit there with headphones on, blocking out the world while RTOers wander the halls looking for interaction.
It is absolutely a difficult problem for modern companies to deal with. Hybrid seems like the best/worst solution so that no one is happy and both parties compromise.
Yes, that is the exclusive deficit of people who want to work from home and no other person, policy, or structural fact about your job. Your management hasn't already had the idea and, if they have, the only reason they haven't pulled the trigger is because they really like seeing your face.
Nope, it’s because even if you don’t believe it’s true, management has decided that people colocated together physically do a better job than those who are not.
And even if you believe that’s a complete fiction, it’s a fiction which has sustained itself for decades and after a brief loss of belief during the pandemic appears to be on the rise again.
And even if you believe that’s complete fiction, it’s fiction that companies and management believed in enough to pay the same individual 2-3x the amount of salary after paying to relocate them to SF from Idaho.
Whether true or not, management and leadership has believed the
benefits of employees being colocated physically for a long time and continue to believe that, and that’s what’s justified high tech salaries. Without that reality or fiction that they strongly believe in they have no reason to continue paying the high salaries you sre used to.
You're reducing WFH to just avoiding a commute. In my case, I found that WFH only was isolating, impacted focus, and cut me off from the information flow of the organization, something electronic means cannot really substitute. I have a sense of being more involved and informed about the business instead of being plugged into the Matrix and receiving a paltry trickle of information over narrow channels. The benefits of hybrid for me offset the burden of commuting enough to justify coming in.
> In my case, I found that WFH only was isolating, impacted focus, and cut me off from the information flow of the organization, something electronic means cannot really substitute.
I worried about feeling isolated but found I didn't feel that way. And I think generally WFH has improved my ability to focus. My company is fully remote so there are not many in-person channels for information to flow.
Before the pandemic I would not have taken a remote job, I would have not been sure it would work out for me, but having done it for 3 years now, I'm real happy with it.
I do still like seeing people and will go out to work occasionally or cowork with friends. Traffic where I live is horrible though and avoiding a 30 minute dance with death twice a day is an amazing reduction in stress levels.
I guess it's going to work out that this is just one other thing to consider about a workplace and there's no one right answer where all businesses should do the same thing, people need the options.
I always felt more connected to my coworkers when we are regularly working from home. The office is such a false environment people just act very differently.
The office is the real environment. When working from home, people are more isolated and heavily restricted by silos and tracking systems. That’s the false environment. Compare talking to a friend in person to texting them from miles away.
> I always felt more connected to my coworkers when we are regularly working from home. The office is such a false environment people just act very differently.
Jokes on you, I don't care if my coworkers get hit by a bus either way! I cannot stand anyone I work with. Every meeting that should be 15 is now an hour minimum why? People want to chat and I sit there with my soul leaving my body totally unable to do anything but smile fake and try not to look like I'm dead.
As hard as it may be to hear, to some extent that is likely a “you” problem. Start a culture of not having to have the camera on, figure out good reasons to have to exit such wasteful calls, etc. Continuing the same thing and whining about it melodramatically is unlikely to be fruitful
> As hard as it may be to hear, to some extent that is likely a “you” problem. Start a culture of not having to have the camera on, figure out good reasons to have to exit such wasteful calls, etc. Continuing the same thing and whining about it melodramatically is unlikely to be fruitful
I wasn't being melodramatic.
It is a me problem. Everyone else seems to love this random assortment of asinine "culture" and "team" concepts. I've worked at my share of places and it's always the same. "Standup is like 15 minutes." and it is. but then you have the 45 minutes leading up to it where they talk about what they did the night before or what their kids are doing or what life is like with their pet they've had for a decade. Everyone else seems to care and care deeply. I do not. At all. I just wastes my time.
One day hopefully I'll manage to find one of these magic unicorn positions that y'all seem to have around these parts. Until then I'll have to do with wanting to die rather than be at work.
In my experience, the office can be even more isolating and mentally taxing. I rather just type out my thought process if I need to talk to a coworker.
Like cool, I can spend an hour getting an overpriced lunch with my coworkers and push the "going home" aspect back another hour.
I haven't found RTO to make the information flow happen, at least not the way it used to, where I could just listen to all the background noise of people talking, and occasionally overhear something of interest.
Yup. I'd pay (and do! for 10 years now) my own dime to maintain a good PC solely for work. It's a stupidly easy investment for me compared to 1-3h of commute every day.
I also now require extra rooms for offices anytime i look at homes. The life balance is just so amazing for me i'm never giving it up, if i can. I feel respected in a way i never thought possible, before.
I have several and I would never install work software or store work materials on it. The privacy and security risk alone is just not worth it — and I work for a company that respects privacy.
I would also never pay any money to maintain a computer to do work for a company.
I value my commute tremendously. It’s one of my favorite parts of the day.
And if my grandmother had wheels she’d be a bicycle :) Indeed, if my situation were totally different I would feel differently about it. That’s why I made my situation the way it is.
> I would also never pay any money to maintain a computer to do work for a company.
But you would maintain a car to [do] work for a company. I'm going to have to take my three hours a day that I have working remote, more if you include prep time to even leave the house, and spend that on bumper to bumper traffic baby!
What's so bad about a short commute like that? It's good for you to physically get up and look around, and mentally to either clear your head or listen to a podcast/music.
We can count getting your things in order, gussying yourself up so no one sees you for the garbage that you are, and just kinda... not wanting to some of the time.
And framing it as 40 minutes saved is kind of missing part of the story, because it's every day. Forever! That in fact will amount to A LOT of time saved. Your employer would care about a 40 minute change in your hours one way or the other; why don't you?
Packed lunches or eating out. Shit coffee further tainted by the lingering smell of microwaved tuna. That feeling that you have to be seen looking busy even if you're not doing anything or just really need a break.
And there's Steve, who's always smacking on gum and humming while he works. You're awful, Steve.
This is why the conclusion of the study makes sense to me. I enjoy my short commute as a buffer between work and life, but sometimes I just don't want to, so I stay home occasionally.
Also, I think some WFH zealots on HN forget that other people may not have the mean, or the space, or the internet connection to have a nice office at home, and have pets or children that can be just as distracting as co-workers.
Going to the office is not that bad for me, _most_ of the time.
- But once or twice every month, I forget to bring something I need to the office (phone, earphone, water bottle, keys...etc) and that makes that day suck.
- Sometimes it rains and I get wet.
- Sometimes I eat something bad and have diarrhea and need to use the dirty public toilet.
- If my wife messages me saying she's sick, I need to sit in traffic for an hour before I can see her.
- Yesterday I got up 30 minutes late than usual and had to drive during rush hours, that's one more hour of my life.
- If I don't go to office, I only drive for up to an hour on weekend for fun. But now I spend 10x time in the car on weekdays and that's 10x more chance to have an accident.
None of these happens everyday, but when they do, they are just extra headache to deal with only because I need to go to office. If a few sqft in my home is all it takes to completely eliminate all of them, I would take that any day.
When you WFH you're not really an employee but a kind of consultant, who is paid by the company ALSO for yours home office...
Probably many companies hate WFH because of this: when people will realize the value of freedom at their home, their work can be seen as mere economical contract without tie, so people will be more precarious but so will be companies and that means we surpass the need of unionization by a kind of new market equilibrium.
I'm extraordinarily sensitive to my work environment so I rather just have full control over it at home rather than go into an office where I have to spend half the morning aligning monitors and searching for cables since I no longer have a permanent desk.
But I'm glad you have something that works for you.
FWIW, my experience with WFH (pre-covid times) was that I was way more prone to over-working and I think it eventually led to burn out. The line between work and home blurred considerably. It wasn't unusual for me to not ever get fully dressed somedays. Hygiene also somewhat suffered at times. I would find myself still working on problems well into the night. Part of it was feeling like I had to prove I was still working even though I was home. In short, it wasn't the utopia I predicted it would be after driving a long commute for a number of years.
personally when I come into the office, I can focus a thousand times better than at home. I go absolutely crazy at home. When things are wrong at the office, I often ask myself "why did I come in today" but I regret working from home every time.
For context, I have an amazingly comfortable at-home set up that is often better than the office. I also worked from home for the last few years very successfully. And I have to commute an hour each way. I have been less stressed working from a chaotic office than a quiet home.
My point here is: for some people WFH is the way, for others it is not. Having flexibility to stay home on a day and take my daughter to the doctor is amazing. Having to stay home every day is painful to me.
It doesn't matter if I work in the office full time or part time, if my management team is made up of control freaks with a micromanaging nature that is distrustful of people "wasting company time", then my mental health is going to take a bad hit.
If my management team has faith in me to get the job done, provides me with clear goals I can provably meet with metrics and trusts me to manage my time wisely, my mental health is going to be great, whether I'm in the office or not.
Asking which is better, WFH, hybrid or in office, seems to me too simplistic. A lot of depends on which type of work a person is doing and what type of management style they work under.
I can believe this. We're 100% remote company, and it's great. But, we recently had a 2 day all staff in person meeting, and even the introverts came to me afterwards and said how enjoyable it was. I think what's key is not trying to force things. And I know, this isn't hybrid, but it highlights the importance of seeing each other once in awhile.
There's also the big introverts (or w/e) like myself who loathe going in at all haha. My company used to do yearly retreats when we were smaller and i couldn't stand them.
But i'm glad if some people enjoy this stuff. I just don't want to force remote people in office, or force office people to be remote.
Part of what i value so much about WFH (going on 10 years now) is the work life balance. I love hearing peoples children in the background, or people stepping out to run an errand or deal with life. I love that we can value and respect the individuals life for them to be able to do these things. Yea, we have "work to do", but work should be there to live life, not the other way around. Feels like we've clawed a bit of that back with more WFH recognition.
Yet despite being purely WFH, i still respect that others desire going in, or hybrid, or etc. I just hope we can all learn to work with people, however they best live their life.
Agreed. I am happy fully remote but I am also happy when I meet my coworkers in person from time to time. I wouldn’t mind going to the office maybe once a week and I think it would be beneficial.
Actual title of the study: The Impact of Working from Home on Mental Health: A Cross-Sectional Study of Canadian Worker’s Mental Health during the Third Wave of the COVID-19 Pandemic
I wonder if there could be any possible confounding factors in this study?
I have made it a habit of disregarding any sociology or psychology studies done during the COVID pandemic as there were massive confounding factors across all of society for many people, and in my mind leads to it being anything but representative for many people. Science is about finding truth, we need to make sure we are putting sand in the corridor if we really want to have valid information.[1]
You're missing out if you're blanket disregarding research from one of the biggest natural experiments of all time. Take it with a grain of salt, sure.
I think it's important to remember that this may apply generally to a workforce, but not necessarily equally across all workers. Let's remain focused on flexibility vs prescribing things across the board.
It's certainly harder to have those conversations and to accommodate variation, but the result for employees and employers would be better with a little investment of time (and sometimes money) here.
I wonder what the responses would have looked like if they had asked about overall quality of live instead of just Mental Health. I personally like a hybrid environment. However, I think I've been more satisfied with life overall since being remote full time - even if I'm not as happy now with how I engage with my job.
I feel exactly the same way. I’d probably be happier wrt to work if I could be hybrid but being remote lets me live in a smaller town, in a place I love for everything else. I wouldn’t trade it for pretty much anything.
The study finds a statistically significant correlation but that’s hard to disentangle from all the factors that make it possible for people to work remote or hybrid. It also would be interesting to see how this result varies across number of days spent in the office. My guess would be that seeing coworkers 1-2x a month would get most of whatever social benefits hybrid has if any.
Working directly with people is disastrous for my mental health. My base heart rate dropped 20 points once I started working from home. I’m not introverted, I have a rich social life and I’m usually out of the house if I’m not working. I just don’t like working directly with people.
Quite similarly, I imagine that if there were a chart sort of like like Figure 1 with "mental health" on the y-axis but having "total work hours per week" on the x-axis, there'd be a peak somewhere above zero hours but far less than 40 hours. (Controlling for same type of work, sames ages, etc.) Anyone want to guess what the peak x-axis value would be?
I work most days in the office. By choice. That is the important part.
I have the flexibility to work wherever I want, no questions asked, no one keeping track. All asked, is that I get shit done and show up to our very infrequent in-person meetings.
Although I am quite introvert, I work in the office because I enjoy and need the social interaction.
Ultimately, what matters to me is not whether fully remote, hybrid or in-office is optimal. What matters is the freedom to choose what fits best with my personal life.
It all depends on what we mean by "hybrid." If it means going into the office to use Zoom, then no thank you. Remote is draining but convenient, in-person collaboration is energizing but inconvenient. Hybrid done wrong is the worst of both worlds.
I find it interesting that we always frame it as if we all perceive it in the same way.
I find in person to be draining, so the opposite of you.
I guess this is the core of the difficulty. Not everyone feels the same but very often we’re forced into someone else's ideal.
I agree with your main point - hybrid isn’t great when it is too prescriptive. Works well enough if each team is given the flexibility and latitude to decide what works best.
I agree with this. Driving into the office to be stuck on Zoom is not fun. My team is spread across three geographic regions plus people that are WFH that day. No matter what, we have to be on Zoom to collaborate. I’m not sure how this makes us more productive…
These RTO discussions always miss out on this consideration: what if improved the in-office experience? What if we got rid of open office layouts and instituted cubicles, offices for teams, pairs, even individuals? This doesn't improve commutes, but at least it beats the status quo.
I would absolutely kill for a job that’s 2 days per week in office with everyone on my team in one room. It’s really amazing but it’s hard to find anything but places that do “zoom from open office”, which is nonsense.
It looks very partial lock down period oriented though, which makes it a not very representative study. For example, the socializing hybrid provides may have been a lot better than almost no socializing with people outside the home, but far fewer WFH people today may be that isolated.
Unfortunately the only coworking place near me is $200/mo for a shared desk area, $300 for a dedicated desk. I've been wondering how hard it'd be to start my own coworking spot.
The HN title is editorialized and misleading. The study found an association, but no causation.
> We conclude that hybrid work arrangements were associated with positive self-rated mental health
For example, one explanation for the lower self rated mental health of fully remote workers could be because they already have poorer mental health and stay out of the office because that would be even worse.
The HN title should be reverted to the originally published title.
And even if hybrid is “better”, this study can only say that it’s better on average. Since no individual human is average, it will always be worse for some subset of the population. The whole problem is that CEOs are trying to cram every human into the same Procrustean box.
Anecdotally, I prefer hybrid work to fully remote or fully in-office. I do like getting in-person time with my team, but I don't find it effective for all types of work that I do.
Hybrid work doesn't provide any advantage compared to WFH except for avoiding commute 2-3 times a week.
1. You still have to live within a commutable distance of your office, which, if you have to pay rent, is expensive.
2. You still have to arrange for someone to accomplish the chores you're able to do at home when you WFH - like cooking, dropping and picking up your kids, etc.
> The levels “Very little of the time”, “Some of the time”, and “Most of the time” were collapsed into a single level—“Hybrid”. “Not at all” was recoded as “Do Not Work from Home” and “All of the time” was recoded as “Work from Home Only”.
Imagine you had a 5 increment rating system that was 1–5 stars. Then, to interpret the data, someone decided that 2-,3-, and 4-star ratings were all equivalent.
Bullshit. Mental Health is best when you can pick where to work, which is almost always remote. Commute is so detrimental to mental health, especially until we'll have the so-much-promised self-driving cars.
Boiling the frog. Y'all will return to offices before you know it, and say goodbye to affordable housing, raising a family, saving money and maintaining actual friendships. If possible, you'll be put into company towns - labor camps with nice decoration - so you can sleep, eat, and work onsite.
They are - google is one of them. The same company that wants you to work onsite, pay for the privilege all while you are away from your family and friends. The very same company takes makes money from remote customers.
When I work from home I can log off and immediately go for a run in the sun, especially important as the winter approaches.
I have a gym I can access at work, but then I'd be on a treadmill staring out the window at a parking lot and the concrete ass of a big box store.
Guess which one I'm picking every time. Its crazy how fast that sun starts falling when you're stuck in traffic.