I wonder if those personality differences get considered when they throw everyone into a single room with a few low cubicle walls.
I wonder if the market gives a shit about being fair to those who have personalities that thrive in said cubicles.
Thirdly, I wonder if those who thrive in remote give a shit about being fair after having dealt with cubicle farms for so many years.
I had an office for a short time. We were moving to a new building and got to pick our seating arrangements by seniority. I was toward the end of the list but nobody had picked the lone office in our area so I did. My manager immediately had the walls torn down.
Yes, exactly. When you sit right next to your business users and listen to their day-to-day activities or phone calls, it is priceless "ambient information". However, if you sit next to completely unrelated, but noisy team, it is hell! The trick is floor layout. The best companies in my experience obsess about floor layout to get relevant teams close!
In my experience as a software dev the "ambient information" that has tended to be most valuable was information about how the product was doing financially. I worked in an environment where we all had offices with doors and it was great but the "ambient information" I missed was that the sales of the product weren't going all that great and there were layoffs on the way. In a cube environment I think I would've heard a lot of chatter about layoffs coming weeks to months earlier. In this case I was pretty much blindsided.
That's entirely unfair. The ability to do most of these jobs remote wasn't even really possible until a decade ago, and interia of in office work kept it that way for most existing enterprises. Yet still, plenty of startups in 2019 chose to be remote, and plenty chose to be in person.
Also I would bet that the amount of people who prefer remote has gone up drastically since 2019, both due to exposure to it, and due to covid isolation shifting people's personalities.
It's not unfair when knowledge on the effects of these practices were public several decades ago and companies still insisted on optimizing for employee per square foot while giving their executives private offices.
All remote work did was showcase people can in fact rebel against the status quo when the inertia associated is entirely self-inflicted.
Nice post! At my company, one of their locations has insufficient space for all employees. As a result, they introduced "hot desking". It is widely hated by all non-executive-level employees. Literally, you cannot keep anything at your desk. (Put it in a locker everyday that feels like high school!) The message received by non-execs: "You are not human; this is the matix; you are interchangable." Of course, none of the execs are forced to hot-desk their nice corner offices. (FYI: I have a terribly combative personality.) When I saw one of the execs after the plan what annouced, I casually asked: "Oh, what days are you WFH? I'll take your office." They almost fainted with fear.
I think that's an overstatement. I've been more remote than not for close to 20 years and 90%+ remote for close to 10.
That said, there is some point in time before which companies would have had to largely shrug and tell people that they had to stay in the office pandemic or not. (Which of course many jobs and professions basically had to anyway.)
AS my grand father would tell you, who retired from AT&T in the early 90s. The "telephone company" had the ability for pretty much every employee to be remote except for field techs and sales people in the 80s. And he in fact had people he worked with who were 100% remote in the 80s. Field tech, because that is obvious. Sales because when he sold a large contract, he was expected to supervise the install, and he wanted to. Before he entered sales he was a field tech, or "telephone pole climber" in his words.
I think you make a reasonable point, but I'll also echo some replies that remote work has absolutely been a possibility for many industries for much longer than a decade. I've been working 100% remotely for 21 years, and some of the people I was learning from in the beginning had already been working remotely for years before me.
That said, I've been a professional programmer for all that time, which in my mind is practically made for working remotely. It's definitely taken longer for some other industries to be as amenable, which I believe has been due to the people in charge, not the profession.
I agree that general inertia has something to do with it, but that's a terrible reason to accept the way things are.
Perhaps only "anywhere in the world" remote has only become possible in the last decade but I have coworker programmers that have been fully remote or what we would now call "hybrid" since the 90s.
The GP to your comment is suggesting that it's intolerant to push for remote work, but you're suggesting that it's simply "inertia" to push for in-office work. This clear double standard frequently shows up in these discussions.
There are real benefits to having personal relationships with your colleagues at work.
I started a job a few years ago and spent the first 4 weeks in the office in SF, then moved back to Australia. The relationships I established in that first month were invaluable for the first 6 months or so of my work there - lots of things were easier for me as a result because I knew who to message or connect on slack to get things done.
After about 6 months those relationships faded to the point that I couldn't rely on those social connections any more. It was difficult knowing who to message when I needed something done outside my team; and they had no idea who I was any more.
I don't think you need to be in the office every day, but I miss going to an office at all. Those casual social connections are crazy valuable. Zoom and slack don't give you the experience of sitting at a table with people over lunch and chatting. We dismiss those relationships at our peril.
Maybe in 1950 when only half of the population was working out of home. Now everybody goes to work and evenings and weekends are spent doing house chores.
[And no, I don't want to go back to 1950 at all, don't get me wrong.]
Well said this is a refreshing take. All these please for going back to the office or being present in person seems aimed entirely to placate the people who for decades have exploited such environment to their favour. Chatting, small talk, being seen, all of which on top of the horrendeous open desk trend, only adds to the overhead for the rest of us who thrive in remote environments.
Market has already listened and are going to favor the latter group and the remote environment is going to be here with us indefinitely. If for whatever reason you feel like going against this new market trend/correction, you stand to lose out.
Companies who are demanding hybrid or return to office are unironically putting themselves in walls that will limit their competitiveness in the long run. Again this is what the market tells us, many companies are realizing they can save on expensive commercial rent/logistic overhead and hire more remote workers.
