Is there where I post misc links?
My office is mandating that we go back in 3 days a week now, and unless the delta variant fucks up our city, they're probably gonna have us go back all 5 days after Labor Day. I'm currently interviewing for new jobs that are either a guaranteed hybrid model, or exclusively remote. FFS I just wanna be left alone with my pups while I grind away for a paycheck.
Strong agree with this. I'm lucky enough to be fully remote but if I have days where I need to be head down and get stuff done, going into the office is actually way more productive for me. Plus, I get to see some cool folks.
I've been working from home for about 5-6 years now. I'd absolutely LOVE to go work in a decent designed office (either offices, large cubes, or war room style) with good coworkers. It's nice to shoot the shit, know when it's good to ask questions (you can literally look at what they're doing), etc.
Unfortunately, the meetings do suck, and no good office floor plan will survive a new HR director who wants to make their mark on the office (always by turning it into pig trough style open plans).
There's also a powerfully fucked up psychological energy when you work from home and consequently just never truly leave work. You can mitigate this by setting up a separate work space, but my company isn't paying me a stipend to buy another desk and whatnot, so I'm not about to invest my own money into it. And I'm not even sure if I have the space to do it far enough away from my normal desk (many people absolutely won't).
And for most people, being by yourself all day (or even with family all day) every day is isolating. Not having any social stimulation until evenings does weird things to people. I noticed some people after covid seemed almost desperate in their interactions with me and others. Friend hangouts should be something you want to do, not something you're driven and compelled to do.
For me personally it goes both ways. I don't love having to go out to work but on the other hand I do appreciate the separation of work/home sometimes as well as being around people who know whats going on around me. That said it really should be a choice, and not a binding one but something you can change as needed.
I prefer to do a hybrid approach, like 2 days in and 3 days at home. That could be made 100% at home if there was a better system for planning work and managing test equipment (embedded software)
50% of my company opted for full remote, 25% opted for 1-2 days a week in the office, 25% opted for 3+ days a week in the office. If this is even close to representative for a reasonably sized SaaS company (I can’t see why it wouldn’t be), remote isn’t going away.
It’s going to be interesting to see the downward effect this has on pay for existing remote workers. My company plans to reduce salaries by anything up to 33% depending on where people have moved to (out of the HQ location). This seems short sighted at first (pushing salaries to compare with local, rather than remote markets) - but I’m sure they didn’t decide this without consulting/colluding with other companies first. They’ve gotta pay for all that empty real estate they now have, after all :cringe:
