I'm one of those weirdos who hates going in to the office. However, I'd like to provide a counter-point to that fact. My company has offices in Europe and I _love_ going to the office over there. Hate it in America. Love it in Europe. The question I ask myself is why? I don't feel isolated from my family. Its a couple blocks away. Safe and easy to get to. My son whose very young could safely walk there and back without being harmed (intentionally or accidentally). The city is so safe he could take the subway on his own if he wanted to. If I want to go home I can. If I want to go to lunch my family can meet me halfway.
The office in Europe _feels_ like an extension of home (in my experience - maybe not true for all). I feel a general sense of ease there. Taking the subway in New York or driving to work in Houston feels like a horrific burden that I'm just not willing to put up with anymore.
I work about 10 min away from the Chelsea Google office in NYC. It's just like you said. I usually start my day reading near my apartment and then going to the office. The subway is right under the building, so I can often get to where I'm going after work conveniently. The pharmacy and groceries are on the way home. When I'm not feeling well, I just go home to rest. Or if I'm need to go home and wait for a package. But lower Manhattan is one of the few pockets of "European-style" walkable areas in the country.
When I lived in Chelsea, Google contacted me and insisted I fly out to San Francisco for a curated tour of Mountain View
“Where leadership roles had to be”
I said I wanted to walk to work to the giant billion dollar office down the street, I love Chelsea, I love the Meatpacking District, I love the Highline and the things around that office, I love models
But “roles with direct reports had to be in mountain view” and they assured me I would be so impressed with the highly coveted Mountain View and highly coveted Google
the only thing seared in my brain from that trip was standing at an elevator that had a warning sign that I might get cancer if I use it, in the middle of a sprawling boring unwalkable suburb and a janitor being my best source at the time that its a boilerplate disclaimer. He was right. But that was my experience.
The Bay Area is a car sewer that could be teleported to the middle of Florida or North Dakota, and it would fit right in. It's a place you go for a couple years to make a bunch of money and have zero life, and you get out as soon as you possibly can. No culture. Just asphalt, office parks, pollution, run-down houses, and tent cities.
I live in a town of 80,000 now, that feels more urban than San Jose. It's crazy. San Jose is not a real place. It's a million people all dispersed in a couple hundred square miles, seemingly at random, all in their little boxes on the side of a highway. No landmarks, no tall buildings, no walkable areas. It's not the middle of nowhere, it is nowhere. I'd say you could not design a "city" more poorly if you tried, but the rest of Silicon Valley sure proves me wrong there! Mountain View is even worse somehow!
I'd say that they'd have better luck selling New Yorkers on their dystopian suburban hellscape if they weren't so obnoxiously positive about having paved paradise and put up a parking lot, but toxic positivity is kinda California's whole thing. They're not capable of putting themselves into our cynical headspace. You have to buy into all that woo-woo crap to survive out there. We're fundamentally incompatible with it. Won't find anywhere livable west of Chicago until you reach Tokyo...
It's fun to observe the difference in framing and word choice here. NY "cynicism" vs CA "toxic positivity".
As a Bay native, a younger version of me would've produced the mirror image to that rant along the lines of: "why are New Yorkers so angry and aggressive about everything? are they just miserable because they're all packed like sardines into that shabby concrete prison? why can't they just be chill like Californians?"
The first time you read an email that starts off with “hello friends” and continues on to talk about how “we made the tough decision to part with our valuable colleagues” you will understand what’s so grating about California nice. This kind of thing has unfortunately spread across the country, but California is the epicenter.
As somebody who’s lived half their life in each, both are exaggerations.
Most New Yorkers aren’t cynical. Most Bay Area folks aren’t toxically positive. But it’s silly to imagine that the urban infrastructure doesn’t influence peoples’ psyches - they totally do!
There’s nothing wrong with San Jose, it’s not amazing but it’s definitely not nowhere. Look at Japantown, a central neighborhood with nice well maintained apartments and condo developments well integrated in the street grid. Five minutes walk to dozens of shops and restaurants. Good network of bike routes including protected bike lanes on stroads. 12 minute bike ride to BART, 15 minute bike ride to CalTrain. 20 minute walk to downtown (adequate nightlife, San Pedro Square is walkable, etc). 20 minute bike ride to The Alameda and Willow Glen gives variety of walkable business districts. Plenty of parks with tall trees within a 20 bike ride (eg. Guadalupe River, Overfelt Gardens). Excellent Asian food, pretty good food in general. Fairly frequent city buses and a light rail (candidly, though, I have never used them).
That’s all^ for if you don’t have a car. Yea with a car you can access all the suburban stuff of which there is a lot (eg. shopping and restaurants at Westfield, The Pruneyard, eg. amazing hiking at New Almaden, Saratoga Quarry Park, eg. the vast amenities of nearby small cities). I recommend a car, it gives you access to more stuff, but is definitely not necessary, and even if you have one you don’t need to drive for everyday needs.
My one complaint about San Jose is not enough of a base of everyday cultural events, specifically live music and stand up comedy. The only small music venue I am familiar with that has regular bands is Mama Kin’s. There is no good regular stand up comedy to my knowledge. I guess SF and Oakland suck that energy out of SJ, but that’s a real deficiency.
No landmarks, no tall buildings, no walkable areas.
Absolutely not true - and shame on you if you've never explored the older neighborhoods downtown.
However I definitely agree that overall it's a huge did of a city for its size (and most especially for the housing costs). And that you're saying applies to at least 90 percent of it by surface area. "Not a real place" absolutely nails it.
Won't find anywhere livable west of Chicago until you reach Tokyo...
Not true at all. Sounds like you've almost never been out there, except for a random business trip or two. The west coast isn't my ideal either, but it has plenty of perfectly livable places (if you can only somehow afford to settle down there).
I visited San Fransisco in the late 90s, it was a fantastic place, one of the best cities I went to in th US. What happened? What caused it to get so bad?
San Francisco ia a sideshow. America is a suburban country and the Bay Area is a suburban place. There are ten times as many people in the metro area as in the city. Only Salesforce and Uber are in the city; the rest of Big Tech is in the suburbs. The social and physical infrastructure is built for someone who has a family and works in an office to live in the suburbs.
American postwar suburbia has a well-oiled machine for metabolizing growth, but it has to be fed with virgin land. The Bay Area long ago ran out. The growth kept on going, so it manifests in house prices and dysfunction instead.
The problem was the centralization of a certain brand of tech. If they had started making semiconductors in 1 or 2 other places in America this wouldn't have happened.
He's talking about "Silicon Valley" which is an hours drive south of San Francisco. As for San Francisco itself, I still love it here. Downtown has been dead since the pandemic but I don't really go there so it doesnt affect me much. And outsiders seem to have ramped up their anti-SF propaganda quite a bit but that doesnt affect me much either.
You can have fun on a weekend and it has unique look
I hate it though
People there act like or want to be categorized in the same tier as NY, London, Hong Kong and has nothing to cater to that tier except for the people that already wanted to check out to anytown USA with a high achieving leaning, but it doesnt have the self awareness to realize that
I'm writing from San Jose right now. I a few minutes away from downtown on my electric bike. It's a city like many others. I've lived in Orlando, San Diego, Seattle, Norfolk, Providence.
I'm guessing you worked long hours in an office park and shuttled between a generic apartment and your generic office park. That's dystopian, I agree, but it's not enough experience of a city to judge it and you could have that experience in many other cities.
I'm not really defending San Jose, I'm just saying it's no worse than most other cities. It lacks a waterfront. Cities with water fronts usually seem better.
As a San Jose resident, let me tell you, San Jose is just really big boring suburban town. It's not a city, no matter what the sign or the population is. There's no downtown. Like sure, there's a place called "downtown", but it's empty, even when SJSU is in session, and when it's not, it's even more of a ghost town. It's not even a good university district. Sure downtown Willow Glen is okay, but it's no different from Castro Street in Mountain View or University Ave in Palo Alto.
Most of San Jose is just tract homes, office parks, strip malls, and parking lots.
The worst part of San Jose is that there's absolutely zero culture here. Like none. Anything interesting in the Bay Area, it's in SF.
I totally agree, San Jose is not as interesting as San Francisco. That's why I take the train to SF. San Jose is a boring city, but my point is many other cities are the same. If I were a young person I wouldn't want to live here. I lived in Portland for awhile and that has a lot more character, but the weather is a huge drawback for me. I like the nice weather in San Jose, pretty much year round. Seattle is ok, but again the weather. I don't think San Jose is any worse than Salt Lake City. If I had the ability to live in any city, I'd move to Nashville.
Edit: I'm basing my opinion on a lot of time spent wandering around by car to have a look around North America. Over 100,000 miles. Some cities that have a good rep actually suck in my opinion, like Austin TX. Actually the most interesting city in N. America appeared to be Vancouver Canada, but I'm not a citizen so I couldn't live there.
I wouldn’t say it’s the same as any major city. Major cities typically have an entertainment district and a vibe. San Jose doesn’t have that. It’s lack of a real entertainment district and general lack of walkability is a recurring problem at city council meetings.
The summer weather in central Texas is not to my liking. When I was there it was very hot, very muggy and dusty. It's better than San Antonio, but if I lived in Texas it be down by Corpus Christi. Rockport was really nice. I once thought about retiring to the Gulf Coast. Fort Walton Beach Florida with it's white sand beaches was a real find for me because it was cheap to live too.
A big part of that “downtown” everyone tries to hype up is a tent city these days, so…
I’m not sure how that makes you feel better spending all that money to live in a place that makes Cleveland look downright exciting in comparison. At least SF and Oakland have some more excitement to go with the unbelievable cost of living and quality of life issues.
If it has more parking space than restaurant/bar terrasses and pedestrian only streets, this is not a city. This is just drawing streets in square and putting building and parking between them.
Providence and Seattle are far better examples of urbanism. I’d agree that it isn’t worse than Orlando. That’s not exactly high praise. Why spend NYC money to live somewhere that’s no better than Orlando?
Hey now, Howard St in San Fransisco is a pretty great camp ground. Everything you need, with REI right around the corner you can try every tent with their infinite return policy, or just take the tent out the front door and not bother with a receipt. No permits necessary. Cant really think of anything similar in competitiveness.
It’s great if you move there with $1M in your pocket for a down payment. I think a somewhat boring city, but the access to nature is unparalleled (well, at least comparable to Denver or SLC).
I have zero interest in putting where I’m at anymore on the map than it already is. Such places are vanishingly rare in the US, and incredibly common in Europe. It’s very frustrating.
However, in the interest of shaking everyone off my trail, I will mention that there’s many affordable, walkable towns and cities outside Philly and Chicago that were built up 100 years along the commuter railroads. In the absence of zoning-related tyranny, transit oriented development happens naturally. Look for towns and cities that were built before 1945, before we paved paradise and put up a parking lot.
The most likely explanation for this is that your recruiter (either individually, or recruiting in general) was tasked with filling roles for an org in MTV.
From the outside looking in, recruiting presents as a unified front, but in reality at many big corps recruiters will not be handling generic hiring. And they may either not be incentivized, or so new and unable to navigate the chaos, such that they can’t direct you to open roles outside their jurisdiction.
Yeah, i applied at the MV office a few years back and it was just hell on earth. Huge office park of nameless buildings and their big perk was a free lunch at a picnic table in a warehouse with 2000 computer programmers. I really don't get the appeal.
It's even worse now, they crammed down more desks and got rid of many things that made the office nice. With the return to office we got greeted with a "remodeled" campus, but cool spaces are just now cookie-cutter meeting rooms or really oddly placed new desks.
Yea uh, don't know what was going on there but there are roles with direct reports that aren't in mountain view (unless you mean, like in 2004). NYC has 1000s of googlers.
when recruiters unilaterally reach out to you it’s about a specific team and specific role, even if that’s just bait or a hook for other roles. very different than scouring a careers site for all positions. just writing that in case you weren’t familiar with that.
Also during my time there, yes there were roles with direct reports outside, but if you kept your eyes open you quickly saw that there was effectively a glass ceiling outside of MTV, NYC (and for some groups, LON or ZRH).
People would consistently get promoted more easily for less impactful projects, and getting headcount and approvals for projects in satellite offices was damn near impossible.
If you wanted to get ahead - To L7 or L8, even L6 on some projects - you had to relocate.
Ah prop 65 warnings. They are literally everywhere in California. I wish I could say it's the most stupid thing in California, but unfortunately there are many more. California's voters like it that way.
I'd presume they have already been at Google before, but Google wanted them to not be at the Chelsea office in NYC (the walkable one) but instead in Mountain View. So this is more an existing disagreement with the employer.
the first part made some sense, but the second part with the prop65 warning is pretty silly. it's everywhere, and kind of useless for the most part, but i've seen it on buildings, in parking garages at disney, on clothing, on equipment i've purchased. it's just a thing (tm).
and i'm moving to MV at the end of the month and am super excited about the walkability, green space, beautiful area, weather, and proximity to work.
sure, it's kind-of boring suburb, it isn't europe, but i thought it was quite nice.
. . . but the second part with the prop65 warning is pretty silly.
As someone from outside California, who lived there for a while, I have to say that it is pretty jarring the first time you see it. Now, it doesn't take long to get used to it and realise what a joke it is, but that first impression sticks.
Not that there's any excuse but I can imagine this was a recruiter who had to fill a bay area position. There are plenty of higher ups in the NYC Google office.
“Prop 65 warnings” are a California-ism where they got the people to vote on a good idea(tm) of having a carcinogen database, and then soon after that, a lawyer saw he could sue everyone and win and did, so to prevent that everyone puts unconfirmed carcinogen disclaimers on everything to the point that it is useless.
Fast forward to me being flown out to California and having to make a judgement call at the cancer elevator.
The "good idea" part was maybe the database. The "horrible idea" part was mandating notifications without defining any lower limits or exposure measures, and allowing anybody to sue for the absence of warnings. It was not just "discovered" by some lawyer, it's how the law was written. And Californians had ample time to fix it since, btw, but never bothered.
Steel Products
Steel products can expose you to nickel, known to the State of California to cause cancer, and lead, known to the State of California to cause both cancer and birth defects or other reproductive harm.
Power Tool Parts
WARNING: The metal parts of these products contain chemicals known to the State of California to cause cancer and birth defects or other reproductive harm. Wash hands after handling. None of these products are to come in contact with food and drinking water.
Electrical Cords
WARNING: The wires of these products contain chemicals known to the State of California to cause cancer and birth defects or other reproductive harm. Wash hands after handling.
Yes. Why wouldn’t I? When I first started working from home after Covid, I had a separate bedroom that was converted to an office and across the hall I had a home gym fully equipped with cardio equipment. I had no distractions from a loud open office and I could block time off for deep work and shut everything down - Slack, Outlook etc.
I said “had” because admittedly now I’m a corner case. My wife and I nomad around the US 7 months a year staying in mostly extended stay hotels and the other 5 months (October-March) we “snowbird” in our home in Florida that’s rented out when we aren’t there to cover the mortgage.
Before covid, my coworkers would get half the office sick, including me, about 4 or 5 times a year. Back then it was just taken for granted that getting sick was a part of life. Well I haven't been sick in 3 and a half years since working from home, and masking, hand sanitizing, etc. Covid changed me, and I don't regret any of it.
I've lived the excesses of over-funded startups - I don't need the catered breakfasts and lunches, I don't need the endless snacks and drinks, I don't need the fancy desk chairs or fancy desks - I need to not get deathly ill several times a year.
That's the absolute #1 top reason why I won't go back to an office. It's not just about covid - it's about all viruses and illnesses that coworkers spread around the office. Heck no I don't want any of that in my life anymore. No thank you.
This is a point employers often overlook: working with other people means exchanging bacteria, viruses etc.
The more people there are and the higher the turnaround, the higher the likelihood of disease. Covid has finally shed a light on this.
A friend of mine gives tours at a museum of modern art; he says what you say: it's almost a part of the job to get sick at least once per year, typically in flu season in winter.
Employers should be forces to either guarantee there only a very small and stable team of people you meet on a daily basis -- or pay employees premium for the risk they incur because of diseases.
The alternative is to live like people live in Japan where everyone wears a mask all the time during flu season. But people in the west are often too lazy and "individual" for that. I don't really like to be overly broad and generalize, but the COVID stats prove it clearly:
https://pandem-ic.com/japan-and-us-are-worlds-apart-on-pande...
This attitude is more dystopia than any micromanaging over the shoulder boss.
"Companies should pay an employees a stipend for the risk of..... human contact!"
I already lament the world where parents are fined and sometimes jailed for letting their kids exist independent of surveillance, and we do not need to take further steps into isolation and atomization
Indeed, besides the obvious social damage it does (you're basically chopping people up to be fodder to amoral adtech industries) there's something to be said for the hygiene hypothesis and its continuation throughout life.
Casual and constant exposure to infectious agents (natural ones, not those transmitted over TCP/IP) develops and maintains an immune response. It's not just the brain wired to have interactions with others, it's the whole gestalt.
Most people at my office seem to get sick from their kids who in turn get it from daycare. Should employees pay for that as well? I guess the alternative is to just never employ parents.
It almost always comes from either the employees that have to travel a lot for their jobs OR people with kids... because of course kids, younger more so, trade the illnesses around and also help them mutate and spread more.
> Before covid, my coworkers would get half the office sick, including me, about 4 or 5 times a year. Back then it was just taken for granted that getting sick was a part of life.
Any thoughts on how this happened? Did not have this experience in a diverse 40-year job history
Young workforce does not have these luxuries. Most of time they would be sharing home or would have tiny apartment, they may not even have people around them through the day (having people around is a good thing - isolation, loneliness is leading to depressions).
This even without accounting for career related advantages when physically being in the office - building professional network, serendipitous discovery of undocumented information.
In any large company, the workforce is so scattered anyway that you still end up having to do remote networking. I’ve been working remotely since 6/2020 at $BigTech and my network has grown much more now than it did in the 25 years I spent working in an office.
Nope. Love my home, we set our entire life to be remote. See my child every minute (except for school) and see my wife every minute.
I would need to be forced to the office, never going there.
Happy to go on an occasional trip though, love my colleagues, but family first
Hypothesis: so many adults have mental issues such as depression because they grew up with parents going to the office a lot of the time (for no good real reason other than "manager wants me to").
Most kids grow up without their parents really being there for them all the time. I feel this must be especially harmful the younger the kids are.
I personally find it completely inhumane and the whole going to the office thing makes 0 sense to me. I mean it makes sense that managers want to physically feel in charge of their herd, but that's obviously not a good reason from my perspective.
I think it's more likely to be the opposite: we're creating more mental issues by being more isolated from everyone outside our immediate family. "Stranger danger," watching screens or talking on the internet instead of hanging out in person with other kids/teens, etc. Generations that don't know how to meet people or talk to people outside of pre-arranged circumstance/activities or explicitly-circumscribed situations like "if you connect on Tinder, it's for dating or sex."
The mental issues you describe hit everyone, even that vast majority of people who go in to work every day. I would more readily ascribe them to the declining amount of healthy “third places” (i.e. neither work nor home) in modern US society, not remote jobs.
The comment I was replying to put the blame for mental health on "parents having jobs outside of the home during childhood." I think there are far more impactful socialization changes to the childhood experience in the last fifty years than just that; I'm not suggesting that a three year spike in remote work has caused immediate widespread harm.
I would even argue that working from home would increase the likelihood of going out and socializing after work. As you might want to get out of the house after for a bit and you have been spending time with family throughout the day. Where working at the office means you only have evenings to spend with family.
I don't want to go to an office, but I still am very social & go out all the time. This is the case for most people I know. In fact, if I didn't have to commute for 2 hours a day I'd have more time for social activities.
I'd also love to have some extra time to be able to go to the gym, but right now I'm getting home, cooking, eating, and suddenly it's past 9pm and I'm having to think about getting stuff ready for work the next day.
I disagree, it's way easier to meet people now that I don't loose 1.5h every day. I also eat better and have more energy, so I can go to the climbing gym/the sea every day, which I couldn't when I was in a office.
I talk to my neighbors every day. Working from home let's me feel connected to the community I actually live in, it's awesome. I actually find I really like socializing with people outside of our industry. It's a breath of fresh air.
I’m in agreement. Summers are challenging to have the kids (7 and 10) around, but it’s a challenge worth having. They are young once and I’d like to be there for them. even if the office is five miles away, I’m more productive as a programmer and a dad. Seems like a win/win.
This summer over the course of 9 weeks, my daughters will spend 5 weeks abroads. 3 weeks at my parents place in one country, 2 weeks at their other grandfather house in another country. The 2 remaining weeks we will have family visit and can spare taking a few days between me and their mother.
With a bit of organization it is not that challenging to have kids. Also there are a number of possible summer activities with school like schedules for those who have less family around + possibility to hire a student to take care of kids while you are working during summer.
We were thinking of shipping our kid off to grandmas when he gets older. The fact that grandma lives in small town China and my kid has mostly forgotten how to speak Chinese would make that an adventure at least.
I was surprised how quickly summer activities filled up this year. We got him in a Boys and Girl camp at least, but demand is super high for what's available in our region.
Totally agree. Working from the office is a dealbreaker for me yet I prefer working in an office compared to home. I just hate wasting a portion of my day to commuting or turning a 8 hour work day into a 10 hour workday for the same pay.
In my experience it seems like the people who make the decisions on returning to the office are those who can afford to live close to the office.
Facebook used to do basically that - they gave you a $1000/month stipend if you lived within 5 miles of the office. A lot of other companies do it in more informal ways too, eg. I've heard of companies turning down applicants because they lived an hour and a half commute away from the office.
It has some mixed results. It's very positive for traffic and for climate change - if everyone goes from a 30 mile commute to a 5 mile one, that's 6x fewer vehicle miles traveled, 6x less car CO2 emissions, and 6x less traffic. But it also drives up rents around the office to crazy-high levels. Facebook's policy basically just boosted rents in Palo Alto by $1000/month (when they were there), and then it and the office location was single-handedly responsible for the gentrification of East Palo Alto (after they moved).
If I were to commute to my companies nearest office it’s about 1h20 or 60 miles.
Let’s assume I moved to near that office and lived in a high density area away from nature and dark skies. What does my wife do, who now faces an 80 mile commute the other way?
That's just what it boils down to: Add kids to the mix and you'll have them change schools (and their entire social circle) every time you do a career change - to earn more, to do something more interesting, or because you're simply forced to.
For anyone but singles, co-located work seems anachronistic. Worked back in the day were only one person in the family had a job, and jobs were held for decades (not years) I suppose. Today it seems ludicrous to expect anyone to move for work.
Which naturally leads into either long commutes or remote work. Having built several remote-first companies, I'm gonna say it's not perfect, but it really works.
This makes sense multiple perspectives: it's good for the climate to not make people burn gasoline every day (though this point may be lost on some people) and it's also good for the local community - both the employer needs to step his game up to assist and train people more since talent pool is limited and locals also need to step their game up since there are only so many local employers around (assuming all prefer to hire locally).
Going this way, if this were a law, would also prevent employers from treating people as expendable.
Flying people in from across the globe because they are marginally cheaper than the local work force never made sense to me.
Is that so bad? The other way of looking at it is that employers would be more likely to allow WFH, since they don't have to pay for your commute costs anymore
TBH I'm on salary like many here and I do subtract the commute time (1.5 hr round trip) from work hours when I go in. I'm not paid by the hour so I'm not commuting then doing a full 8 hours in the office, sorry.
I’m on salary and wfh but often work 4 hours/day. Of course some times if it’s “crunch time” I work 12 hours. But on average it’s probably under 6. The whole point of salary is you don’t count hours though so you are encourage to be efficient instead of inefficient
Work want to move me off an hourly wage. Which is fine, but it means instead of being paid time and a half for every hour over 35, I take 1.5h in lieu off.
If I do a 90 hour week you’ll barely see me for the next three weeks.
Here in Japan, employers have to pay for the employee's public transit commuting costs (but not time). So people living very far away (i.e. outside the city's transit service area) are unlikely to get an offer.
It’s not just commute, I’d like an office but not my current employers office so I work from home. I would love to go into a decent office, except they cheaped out so much on the work equipment.
The beige and drab decor is okay, it’s the way the monitors are so cheap and outdated. And the way the mouse and keyboard are the cheapest possible. Giving people doing knowledge work on computers all day the cheapest possible interface just don’t make sense. It’s penny wise pound foolish.
And The office neighborhood is also very unfriendly for pedestrians and bikers. it’s clear planners believed there was zero chance of people actually walking anywhere.
I’d much prefer an office with decent equipment and a better setting. it’s a reason why I am considering switching jobs. To have a decent office to go to.
Agreed on this. It is partly the commute, but also the environment you end up in. I used to work for a FAANG in “cube-ville USA”. It was dark and demoralizing. There were great views out of the windows, but you couldn’t see them through your cubicle walls. A bunch of us took the top panels down so we could enjoy the sunlight and view, but quickly got in trouble with facilities. It was fairly miserable. Until they moved us to a team room with zero windows. That was worse. I left soon after.
I worked at Google for 10 years and I always tried to make myself a cubicle by getting a corner desk and then getting soundproof barriers. Cubicles got a bad rap but open plan offices are way worse.
I live in a relatively small city of Spain, working for a considerably big consulting company. It takes 30 minutes to walk to the office from my home, and I'm on remote 1-2 days a week.
This is a lovely balance. While the vast majority of my team is distributed across the country (and Europe, too), having the flexibility to stay at home or work alongside colleagues from other projects is great.
Need to focus on development one day? I'll stay at home, since it is more peaceful and my equipment is better (long live big screens with high refresh rates). Want to not worry about cooking and have lunch with other people? I'll go to the office.
I'm also quite active too. It can be a bit tedious, but walking at least 6km everyday does wonders for your health. Specially since I'm a type 1 diabetic.
Nevertheless, my contractor is far from perfect (I could rant for hours about how absolutely crap our company laptops are for developers). But it seems like these kinds of situations can only happen in small, compact cities; which is usually the case for Europeans and rarely for US cities.
I'd highly recommend hybrid to anyone who can afford it, but, as always, your mileage may vary
> if I could walk 5 min to my office, would I still want to work from home?
Absolutely, yes. Don’t know how it’s in Google, but offices in our company don’t supply nice equipment like Herman Miller chairs with high quality desk and constant distractions from other people make any kind of deep state of work impossible.
Add on top of that having a house with a nice garden (if you’re one of those lucky people!) and the clear winner is obvious.
Open office layouts can be hard to deal with for me, even if everything else (chair, desk, computer, etc) are good. It varies from day to day but there are days where it's practically impossible to think due to coworkers buzzing around like bees, popping in and out of peripheral vision. When that happens, putting on ANC headphones is like trying to patch a basketball-sized hole in a boat with a piece of chewing gum.
Working from home there are still days when focusing is difficult, but nothing as frustrating as that.
Offices don't even supply offices anymore and haven't for decades. They're clearly not fit for purpose.
There's a reason why 10x engineers inevitably work evenings and weekends, and, if they have any social acumen, manage to get themselves excused from most workday time wasting rituals, including showing up at the office.
> Add on top of that having a house with a nice garden
Do you mean "garden" in the American sense (an area for growing food and/or decorative plants), or in the British sense (what American's would call a "lawn" or "yard")?
The Irish I talk to all call their private patch of green adjacent their house a 'garden' even if it contains only grass with optional tree. I had assumed they got the word from you guys.
I think the confusion here is from you presenting a "yard" as an alternative, when a yard in UK/Ireland would be a space that's mostly or entirely paved or has some other artifical surface
When my company still had WeWork passes, I would go to the WeWork just across from my gym sometimes, which I go to (the gym) every day around lunch anyway. 10 minute walk there downhill, maybe a 15 minute walk back uphill. It was pretty nice. The main downsides were the hot-desking and not having dedicated hardware there.
My home office is kitted out with an ultrawide monitor, a nice webcam lighting setup, a great mic with a nice low-profile arm that slides under the monitor, a powerful desktop tower, etc.
The downside to working in an office, even when there is dedicated hardware that stays there, is that the hardware is usually not gonna be as good as what I have at home, and that I will not be able to have my own office room to work from without distractions.
Criticism of open office plans was almost a trope (there's a software book from the 90s that rips into them), but in the years before Covid, companies doubled-down, removing partitions and implementing full hot-desking.
I think those horrible, noisy environments would have led to a backlash sooner rather than later. Now any complaints about open plan offices will just be dismissed as people whining about not being able to WFH.
In an open-plan office, you have to listen to all your coworkers, including those on completely different teams, have extremely loud and simultaneous conversations that you can hear from far across the room.
In a coffee shop, people generally don't talk, or keep their voices low when they do, so you generally only hear people talking to the staff to make orders and such.
Roles aren't always that well-defined. Many of us aren't recruiters or in sales but can still spend hours a day on planning, etc. calls with distributed teams. It's not practical to seek out a phone booth or alcove for every one of those calls.
There was a group of people in a meeting room working on separate parts of some larger project. I had to call one of them. You think that guy would get off his ass to walk away and talk to me in private? I spend the time helping you out and you don't even offer me that?
No, I had to hear 3 other people having a conversation louder than his call with me.
Last time I was at the coffee shop someone was watching Netflix at full volume. So yeah that was pretty bad. And I don’t have any power to stop them (at a workplace I could complain perhaps)
> For some, probably. I'm happy to work in a cafeteria, coffee shop, etc.
Depends on the work you do and your age, I suppose. Also whether you touch type on a standard keyboard or not.
My work is made easier with large dual monitors and a nice standard keyboard. Squinting into a single small screen while mispressing all the laptop keys (because those characters commonly used for programming don't have a consistent spot in any laptop keyboard) is not my idea of fun.
We're a social species. So, many people actually enjoy meeting with and mingling with their colleagues.
During Covid, a local co working space here in Berlin was one of the few places I could still go to. It's a five minute walk from my door and I did go there quite often. So, yes, I would and I have. And I don't even have a family to escape from. I've been working remotely in various settings for close to a decade. But I've done so from various offices for most of that time.
I've also been to the US on business travel a few times and got to spend some time in a few offices. There's a real difference between the US and Europe and it isn't good. The average US office with it's cubicles, air conditioning, lack of a view, and typical dreary locale is just miserable.
Google is of course famous for making an effort to make their offices nice. But from what I've seen it's still a cubicle hell. So, I can imagine that enduring a lengthy commute for the privilege of being miserable there is a bit of a hard sell. On the other hand, they do pay a premium for their people. So asking them to show up is maybe not that unreasonable. And of course they have to justify maintaining offices in a places with epic real estate pricing. If people stop showing up, you might legitimately wonder what the point of being in such expensive areas is to begin with.
Some people do have very specific demands of company office environments because they don't like working in more open settings with ambient noise.
For me, if I could walk 5-10 minutes to an office (especially with people I actually worked with, which wouldn't be the case if I drove 30 minutes to the nearest office) I'd probably do so pretty regularly. For me, it's definitely mostly about the commute which would be 30+ minutes to the closest office and then I wouldn't know anyone there.
Cubicles are bad for collaboration: you can't easily hear all the conversations around you that have absolutely nothing to do with whatever you're working on. Corporate executives know that being constantly exposed to conversations on topics outside your expertise is great for collaboration and productivity.
Sadly cubicles aren't very soundproof or private (but they are still better than open plan for people who need to concentrate or focus.)
University libraries tend to be somewhat open plan, though sometimes with study carrels, and students manage to get work done there. However they also typically quiet environments as well, there are no supervisors walking around, and falling asleep may be socially acceptable. The density might be better in some cases as well.
Cubicles obviously aren't soundproof of course, but they're normally made with cloth-covered walls that do a pretty good job of absorbing sound, so offices filled with cubicles tend to be fairly quiet, and conversations don't travel far.
I think it's a reference to acceptable behaviour in different cultures. Tokyo station in rush hour is surprisingly quiet even though it's a sea of bodies.
Maybe, but my open-plan office here in Tokyo is much, much noisier than the cubicle farms I used to work in back in the US (back when cubicle farms were the norm).
It's not culture, it's physics. With a room full of a maze of cloth panels (which are specifically designed to absorb sound), sound is absorbed and can't bounce around the room, leading to much lower overall ambient noise levels.
Not really for most people. When I interviewed with Boeing in the 80s, it was a room full of desks and no partitions with managers around the outside in offices. I did, at the time, have a job with another company where I had an office (though I spent most of my time on job sites) but offices for IC engineers were never the norm at most companies.
We have separate offices for different teams (for the most part). Some are just glass walls and no doors (open in one end). Some are not really offices but partly divided by cubicle dividers. I feel that works pretty good. The most important thing is to divide the office up a bit so it's not just a huge open floor with desks.
And then there's "quiet offices" you can use if you need to take a sensitive call or have a quick meeting with 2-3 people.
Couldn't agree more: I used to cycle 15 mins to the train station, then take the train for 20 mins, then walk for another 10. Then I changed jobs and my commute turned to being 25 mins on the motorway. Which was shorter and more comfortable, yet I kind of hated it; I was so happy when I moved and changed jobs again.
There is something about walking / cycling that makes even the most miserable day at least tolerable. Now my commute is a combined cycle + train journey again, but now I'm cycling through lovely countryside on quiet country roads. I cannot possibly convey how much I appreciate it, I used to be a city boy!
I'm supposing in this thought experiment, being so close means you could be in the office for morning standup, work breaks, and meetings, and still do your deep work at home each day...
Even if you’re not so close you can shift evening commute home to lunchtime or early afternoon, and settle in for solo time at home. I do this quite a bit.
My work is about an easy 15 minute bike ride through a forest on paved paths. Very nice. I hate it. I hate having to get ready. I hate the time going there and back. I hate everything about commuting, even for an easy commute like mine.
I'm the exact opposite, I love having a 5k bike ride as my commute. It helps clear my head and it keeps me healthy. During COVID I even rented my own office away from my home just to have an excuse for a daily ride.
You could've just gone for a morning and evening cycle. When I started working from home I went for a walk before and after, it initially helped me maintain the mental work/life balance.
that's crazy, because biking 10 min to work was my favourite part of going to work.i loved biking thru my city, and having the flexibility to leave when i want, get home fast, and take public transit if i wanted to.
tho tbf i don't work well from home, i need social interaction and less distraction. the bike ride was great to wake up, jam, or think about problems for the day
It's 90% the commute (and the time lost in commuting, especially if you need to set up your gear), and only 10% actually being in an office. I have been fully remote 10+ years now while everyone else was at the office in a city I moved from, so that's the worst of both worlds: people don't need to be social on Teams/Slack, they are social by the coffee machine. But I'm not at the coffee machine.
The pandemic was a huge improvement. Suddenly everyone was remote. So it's definitely improved. In a perfect world I'd be very happy to go to an office one or two days per week and have meetings, be social. If the commute was 5 minutes rather than an hour, then I'd be happy to do it 3-4 days a week. But I don't think I'd want it to be 5 days even if I could walk there in two minutes.
Would you rather be 5 minutes from your office or your kids’ school? Or 5 minutes from your office or 5 minutes from your extended family? Or 5 minutes from the beach? Or 5 minutes from the ski slopes?
There are a lot of locations that really benefit me being close to them than being close to the office.
Also, 5 minutes from the office is not very far. If a lot of people work at the office, living spaces 5 minutes from the office will either end up really expensive or really small.
I'm 5 minutes from the beach (walking), 5 from my gym (biking), max 10 from my friends (both) and 15 from my family (biking). Also have a school nearby. Now I just have to find an office, or create my own.
Both Google and Facebook were in the process of building little company towns, mixed-ish residential/office zones, is my understanding. Both on pause indefinitely.
On the one hand, I makes sense to pause. On the other hand, making vibrant light urban spaces feels like something they could pull off & really build on. Become a destination company.
Yes, the US healthcare profiteer-capitalism is fucked. But it's not employers fault.
I have no idea what the housing model proposed is. But everywhere else in the US that is mildly popular is ragingly expensive. If I can live in a great place affordably while making a solid paycheck for the future, that doesn't feel like a trap, that feels like a development course. Even if it doesn't last. The meanest thing we can say here is that the rest of the country can't compete, which again isn't the fault of those entities trying to make better.
Will there be a company store? I dunno. Is this a worthwhile dig or a trope, a regurgitation of past historic circumstance? We just spent a while talking about how companies will be desperate to lock employees in, golden handcuff them into never leaving... But now suddenly it's dark Zuckville & he's also nickel & dime scrooging over the employees? This no longer sounds like a viable Destination Company...
Will it be both too utopian and too dystopian all at once? Or is there one side of too much you'd wager for?
I absolutely think this could be shit & terrible. But this is a vacuous shitty useless historically-based drag that, but to me, fails any real analysis of the current situation, ignores the possibilities at hand, and just seeks to disabuse.
In those wonderful towns, residents not only get fired for wrongthink, they also get evicted by the corporate police. The omnipresent cctv cameras help residents stay in line with the community standards of inclusive speech and behavior.
Pripyat, in Soviet-Ukraine, a “nuclear town” was established and subsequently evacuated when the infamous meltdown occurred: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pripyat
In the US, specifically, a lot of company towns issued scrip instead of cash or allowed workers to charge to an account expenses they could not afford. This may be outlawed but I think this model can be sufficiently masked with technology that it can be implemented and even incentivized for workers to use company money. Further, the company town’s isolation will suggest workers stay inside. Now your whole social circle and standard of life is dictated by someone else’s bottom line.
>I'm just not aware of any examples if this actually happening
That's the point. Google by and large treats its employees really well. There's no reason to think it would push this dystopian version of employee housing, instead of something a lot more tame. The only explanation I can think of is that some people just like thinking of themselves as the little guy against the world.
It’s the consolation of power that is concerning. The idea that one single institution that is accountable to nobody but it’s shareholders can dictate where you live, eat, who your friends are, and where your family is.
Many very-bad, dictatorship-type regimes have come into power with immense public support - a public that thought they would continue to be treated well.
I don't know why you're going to such lengths to defend someone who claimed they would be arrested by the corporate cops for thought crime. Over Google building some employee housing close to their office.
On the other hand, the rest of the world being exploiting wolves of capitalism fucking over everyone, obstructing most everyone trying to get started & make their way seems to be the actual evil here.
I agree there's potentials for the company to grow mean & sour, to exploit the position of granter of a reasonably good life. Ideally a good life should also be available by other means. What really is damned in this condemnation is the rest of the world, which lacks in offerances & alternatives.
The idea is that this is a destination company. Your whole premise is that people get exploited. Maybe over time that's true, but you will never create a destination company by being a shitty fuck.
This is not a persecution complex. As long as you are employed by a company, you are engaging in a business transaction. Once they determine you are no longer worth the expense, they will cut the expense, then your are no longer welcome in Googleville.
I personally never mentioned thought crimes, rather my argument is based on the rather fleeting nature of even full time employment in todays age.
The corporation had no loyalty and has no obligation to you beyond what was agreed upon when you got hired. A termination for any reason means your entire life is uprooted. In addition to finding a new employer, you are now looking for housing. That idea of vulnerability is terrifying to a lot of people and will cause further asymmetry in the employee-employer relationship.
I would go every day if it was 5 min. Even if it was 15 min. But right now my commute is 1 hour+ unless I go off peak but that makes the scheduling awkward. Still I do that pretty often because I find the collaboration far superior in person. One day in person produces more good ideas than two months remote
I am a 5 min bicycle ride from my office yet I still WFH 3-4 days per week. And if a daily office presence would be required at some point I'd just switch job.
> if I could walk 5 min to my office, would I still want to work from home?
I'd still want the office to be nice. If it's some concrete monstrosity where I can't get them to buy a decent chair and I have to sit in an open plan… home still wins.
Probably not, or at least not much. At home I have my own office, a window that looks out on trees and provides ample natural light, and my family. And I don't have to wear pants or shoes.
At the office I share an office with someone. It has no windows, so it's stuffy and lit only by harsh florescent lights. We have to take turns using the office because we just sit on video calls all day. I basically just sit in this torture box on video calls all day.
If it were five minutes walk, I would consider walking over there after dropping the kids off at school and walking back before they got home so I could greet them.
> if I could walk 5 min to my office, would I still want to work from home?
I have my own kitchen, my own bathroom, I can do housework things like putting the laundry in while I'm on a break, I can be in for deliveries, etc.
I'd be most happy with a fully remote job, that has an option to go in to the office whenever I like. Some face time is valuable, but absolutely not 5 days of face time a week.
I go into the office once a fortnight and the commute takes 2 hours out of my day. If it was 5 mins away I'd maybe have a preference to up that to once a week, maybe a bit more of it wasnt open plan.
I think there is certainly benefit in being in the same physical space as the rest of the team on occasion. I don't think it has to be often though, even the kind of once every 6 months to a year thing some fully remote companies do might be enough to make a difference with team building.
> As a thought experiment, people should ask themselves: if I could walk 5 min to my office, would I still want to work from home?
Not enough information to answer that.
Is it an open office layout or a real office? If it is an open office, I will still need to work from home even if it's a 1 minute walk because it is impossible to get any work done in an open office.
But give me a real office with a closing door and I'll happily commute 30 minutes every day to use it.
Yes. My office is about a 10 minute walk away. I work from home when I need to get stuff done. There are simply fewer distractions. I go to the office when I do feel live having some idle chit chat or to be social. If I were 100% remote, I would not miss the office.
I do not have a separate office room at home, I work from my bedroom.
I had a short (5-10 minutes) commute through a small park/forest and it was perfect. Just enough time to wake up or decompress, but short enough that I could run if late and merely be out of breath.
That or an elevator ride to a different floor in a hybrid office/condo tower would be nice.
>There's a growing consensus that most people like having an office to go to (more social, separated from kids/partners, etc.) but hate to commute.
This is what they get for adopting a car-centric lifestyle.
>As a thought experiment, people should ask themselves: if I could walk 5 min to my office, would I still want to work from home?
I live in Tokyo, and it's about 10 minutes to walk to my office, and it's extremely safe. No, I don't want to work from home much, except maybe the days when there's a typhoon or I'm just not feeling well.
I live in Europe. And love working from home. It's not that I hate going to the office, but it's so convenient to have the possibility work from home, since some days I need to focus. I often get much more done from home, since the workplace has a lot of distractions. I also have a family, and I get much more time with them. I think Google would benefit from giving a little slack there.
I go to an office where they have the AC running on full blast. It's insane, I'm freezing inside, and then outside it's like 90 F. Why do office people do this? Is it like that in EU or is it just a NA thing?
Imagining your scenario is like utopia to me. I hate going on the bus, always some crazy homeless person there, but I don't want to pay for parking either.
I wouldn't mind the office if it was like that. Safe and easy to get to. What a dream.
Temperature is such a personal thing; it's almost impossible to satisfy an entire group: some like it hotter, some colder, some in-between. On average women get cold quicker then men. I always have the problem that it's either too hot or that there's not enough fresh air (one office didn't even have windows or AC, it was horrible and I had a headache by 2pm every day, mostly due to lack of fresh air).
Personal offices is the best solution; I had a job that did that. It was brilliant. it's also fairly rare unfortunately.
Older people also get colder than younger people. So a 20 year old male and a 60 year old female are not going to be even close in terms of preferred temperature.
Especially because I can communicate with my door if I'm in no distraction mode or not. I don't understand why doors are considered toxic, they're a god send. (see larger rant)
This is one of those things that really depends on the etiquette and expectations. We had a simple "if door closed == thinking deep thoughts == don't disturb unless urgent" etiquette, and it worked well, but this does need to be widely understood and communicated, otherwise it can indeed come off as "harsh" (especially if you're the only one doing it!)
Yeah I had a shared office once where we'd never close the door and it just felt useless. I think part of what causes this though is management. If they are very concerned about seeing you work then it never works. But that generally means there's other issues since they are micromanaging instead of leading.
My last in person employer was exactly described. I wore a sweatshirt in the summer, but my hands were always cold, and I looked forward to walking to lunch to warm up a bit.
I love it when the office is extremely cold. Makes me active and focused. I can always wear a jacket if I want to be warmer. On the other hand, if you set the temperature too high, some people will be unable to make themselves comfortable no matter what.
Big offices in the EU often do have AC, and sometimes have it set too cold. Smaller companies in older buildings often don't have AC and a much more pleasant atmosphere as a result. I'm not a fan of AC, but apparently some people like it. Also a reason to work from home: you work in an environment that you control, and aren't at the mercy of Facilities.
It's mainly a North American thing I think, because Americans are so fat. Fat people feel hot in temperatures that normal people find perfectly comfortable.
It's usually a ventilation duct aimed at your head and blowing cold air at you the whole day. Temperature could be around 70 degrees but it gets chilly when it is blowing at you all the time.
That seems like poor design, proper ventilation shouldn’t be directly aimed at any humans. But 70 degrees seems like a very standard temperature for indoors, I wouldn’t consider that cold.
"very standard" is debatable - in my country there's a law limiting AC in public spaces to 27°C (with a 2 degree tolerance, so really 25°C). 70 °F would be regarded by nearly everybody as too cold
I live in Europe (well, Eastern Europe) and couldn't afford to live in an apartment close to the office, so my commute from / to the suburb is 1.5 hours each way, I'd literally get mental health problems at 3 hours a day in the traffic.
So no way I'm returning to the office. Almost all employers here state at least hybrid work (3 office + 2 home) on paper but in reality with tacit acceptance from management it's nearly 100% remote only, with occasional meetup in the office. Like once per sprint or even less.
I agree. I used to occasionally take my daughter into the office in Copenhagen when she was 5. The first time I thought I'd have to sacrifice some of my work time to make sure she was Ok and stop her getting underfoot / disrupting anyone else. Instead she got taken away by the design department to help make company videos.
When I worked for the same company in America - no way. I wouldn't have even tried.
To me as someone without children, if I worked in that design department and was forced to work from the office, they’d have my resignation the morning of the second time this happened.
Get a babysitter or work from home.
I didn’t chose for people to have children that they miss all day. I shouldn’t be burdened at work by their choice. At least not twice.
Nobody was obligated to do anything. We had a lot of space in the office and she could have happily watched TV on her laptop and done some coloring in the corner with me. I would have left if she was disruptive, but she was very calm. The design department came and took her because they wanted to. I didn't ask them to look after her, I was actually reluctant to let her get involved. I would never have asked someone else to look after my kid, they actively wanted to involve her and asked me about bringing her in again.
I think in the circumstances your resignation would have made you look a total prat.
If I’m obligated to work at a place where I can’t avoid children, then I’ll find a different workplace.
Obviously I couldn’t say my reason for resigning out loud in polite company. Children are a joy and a treasure.
But I’m not the only one of your colleagues who secretly doesn’t want to hear anything about your children and resents you (the hypothetical “you”) for bringing them to work.
I’m just not allowed to admit it, even during an exit interview.
I don't really like being around kids either but they are part of life and I think your attitude shows how disconnected we've become from home and family at work in a quite negative way. When I was a kid I used to go into my father's office all the time in the 80s. Home and work and office and friends all seemed a little more intermingled.
working social systems instead of neoliberal theocrats with weapons/police/prison-complex.
Cities are walkable by design (most built before there were cars at all) and you can clearly correlate quality/quantity of public transport with quality of live.
More money ends up in regional projects/maintenance of public goods instead of either going into private billionaires pockets (trickle down!!…) and/or military industrial complex.
Specifically China: high coverage of CCTV and effective police forces. Like it or not, but even young women feel save going alone through a big city at night.
Specifically Japan: society is very collectivistic and people go out of their way to not even disturb others. People even carry their trash in their pocket instead of throwing it on the streets.
Specifically Europe: the richer you are, the higher the chances you live close to a city centre, villages/suburbs are for poor people/families/weirdos.
No, it’s not guns. They probably don’t help, but I think that’s way too simplistic. I’m not worried at all about having a gun pulled on me in San Francisco, but it can feel quite unsafe at times due to rampant drug use and untreated mental illness, burglary and theft, and general unsanitary conditions. I think it’s far more deep rooted in an American culture of hyper-individualism and anti-social behavior, said untreated mental illness and drug addiction, and poverty. Take guns away and I think 90% of the problem remains.
European engineer here. All you said is totally valid, but still, what people complain here is "forcing" to go back to the office. What advantage does forcing people to work out of their homes bring? It can only be justified with "companies don't trust their employees"
I’ve heard a lot of people saying ‘Why should I return to the office, I’m just as productive at home.’ at my work. And many people are, for the parts of their job which require little collaboration. But the company (via the leadership) sees this type of low collaboration work as being only a component of their jobs and so mandates hybrid working.
Individual employees may disagree, but they’re not the ones responsible for running the company, and they can’t pick and choose which components of their job they want to engage in.
Probably a case of management not understanding the job at hand. Certain jobs basically don't require true collaboration, actions are limited by process and rules. It's basically just a conversation they're getting, one that could be had via phone, video call or even email/teams/slack.
I'm sure that's true for certain jobs at certain levels, but in my industry most people need to closely collaborate with people from different disciplines on an almost daily basis.
> I'm one of those weirdos who hates going in to the office.
I feel like a weird one for the opposite of that. It is nice having the option of working from home, or from my parents in the next county and I need to bob off to look after them, and the cats certainly appreciate me being around more when I WFH, but I don't get on with it long term. I like home being home and work being work, and I generally prefer work to stay out of my home.
I also prefer working in the same room as the people I'm working with¹ and consider hybrid to be a lie. We are officially hybrid, but really I'm remote most of the time because even though I go to the office many of the people I'm working with usually do not. Not that I begrudge other people doing what works best for them, and we get the job done so I don't see a productivity problem, but my level of comfort or lack thereof might mean I go for a bigger career change if I decide to move on from here (because every tech company I know locally seems to be the same in those respects).
Having said that I have the advantage of being near the office, a 15 minute walk² through a relatively nice city (York, the real one in the UK), so I don't have to factor a long commute into my likes/dislikes.
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[1] I think I'm sometimes seen as difficult for avoiding phone and video calls as I really don't find them comfortable: unless it is a group thing or a situation that benefits from screen sharing either come talk to be _really_ in person or send IMs/emails.
[2] Or a 10 minute jog when running late, or much longer if I take a more scenic route
It's really telling how those of us in Europe have much different opinions than those of us in America. The office was horrible back there, here I enjoy going in tuesday-thursday.
For me it is less about distance from home/commute, but isolation/distractions.
It is easy to get distracted and unless I have an office where I can __close a door__, I want to work from home (I live alone). I'd prefer the office. I don't need isolation all the time. But when I do, it is critical or I'm not getting any work done. It is already difficult enough with Slack and everything pinging me all the time, despite trying to minimize notifications I can receive (I'm religious about this). People @channel instead of @here, so even muted channels ping me. Every app has poor notifications that are "get a billion pings", "in theory this work, in practice you get the same", and "no notifications." (seriously, how is this not solved?) I can't do the latter or my boss gets mad, and the other two just ping me all day. It's false positive overload.
At least in the office I can turn off all my notifications, turn my computer on focus mode, turn my music up, and rely on the fact that if someone really needs me, they'll __knock on my door__ (or have someone do it for them). But many places have open floor plans or cubicles, and these are worse than slack. Don't get me wrong, I love the collaboration and I think being localized does help people work as a team. Whiteboard collaborations are an essential tool when working as a team. But at the same time, there are times where I need to just be left alone to get my work done. The door lets me clearly visually communicate this to my coworkers. So give me an office with a door (don't cheat with a glass room) or send me home. You're paying me to work, right?
Imagine this not being the case. And I don't mean a different district, but some neighbouring town. Not many people like to live in a city, and it's also not scaleable for a company to have most of its employees living around a specific office. Especially true for EU cities that all have huge satellite regions with cozy villages and small towns.
Zürich Switzerland or any other city/town in Switzerland. You will see very young kids going to school alone taking public transport. They are taught at an early age how to deal with crosswalks etc. (In Switzerland all traffic is required to stop at a cross walk for pedestrians, there is only an exception for trams and buses however those will stop for children), waiting until the car has completely stopped and only then crossing. School kids also all wear a high visibility type sash on their commute.
do you live in europe or are you an american on a working vacation? if the later, it might just be the novelty of it making it interesting or the location of the hotel and office being close
> My company has offices in Europe and I _love_ going to the office over there. Hate it in America. Love it in Europe
I was in US only once for business travel, in large city. Seeing the sea of people during rush hours on the sidewalk and in trains, moving towards dense "downtown" looked like every hollywood movie, in negative way. I like commuting by bicycle in European cities.
Lots of people commuting to the city centre isn't a US thing. Paris and London are the same - and I'm sure other cities I haven't experienced. It's a big city thing.
I live about 2 miles from my work. The campus is beautiful. The building are gorgeous. The work environment is top notch. Between my house and campus is a nice 15 minute bike ride on paths through forests. It’s quite a nice and easy ride. Or I could drive there in about the same amount of time.
I hate it. I completely refuse to go in. I am working from home until they fire me.
I hate the time it takes to get ready. I hate the time commuting there and back. I hate not being in my own home. I hate having to pack a lunch. I hate not seeing my family as frequently.
My commute is around half an hour in one direction, and it’s mostly enjoyable (7-8 minutes walking, 22 minutes in metro). What I hate is getting ready. My first meeting is at 10am, and I have to wake up at least at 8 if I’m going to the office (have a bite, take my dog out, shower and stuff). If I’m working from home, I can get up at 9:45.
While having colleagues around is sometimes beneficial, everything else is worse. My chair at home is more comfortable, I can keep the light dimmed, I can fart freely, I don’t have to wear shoes all day, etc.
I've worked in a lot of open offices in Europe, but they're not the hellish places that American open offices seem to be from what I keep hearing about them.
Well, one was: at Adyen, way too many people in a single room, on tiny desks, with nothing to separate different teams. That looked like a terrible place to work.
I went to Europe on a work retreat with all my coworkers last month, ~1/2 of whom are based there, and came to the same conclusion. “Oh, it’s actually just America that is so wildly inhospitable, not being back in the office.”
When I visit Europe for business, etc. I tend to stay in core downtown. A lot of my co-workers in Europe don't actually do that and drive to an office outside the city.
For me, it’s more about the habitability of the European cities themselves than anything related to the relative commutes. It’s quite nice to be able to step outside the office for lunch or a coffee, sit in the park, and see others (of all ages) enjoying well-designed public spaces. Thats mostly impossible outside a handful of major metropolitan areas in the US, and then there, largely only in specific, wealthy neighborhoods. You have to get in a car, drive to Panera or whatever other miserable chain, quickly eat your microwaved meal, and then drive back before your break is over.
Yes, although where I work, most of our main European offices are not in the city. (This is true in North America as well.) We have some smaller satellite offices in cities proper but they're mostly for customer and other visits.
It sure does feel like most anti-office people do complain about multi hour commutes and being stuck in traffic or whatever. That is very much American issue.
I haven’t found my European colleagues to be any nicer than the American ones. In fact, they’re often more straightforward in ways that would seem inappropriate or cruel in America.
What they are not, however, is so deeply motivated by fear that if they lose their job, they’ll lose their house/health insurance/families, be labeled a worthless outcast by society etc. That seems to be the primary difference in determining how toxic people’s behavior is in the workplace.
I think Americans are nicer in general than Europeans (which is weird the first time you work with them), but not disturbingly nice like Koreans and Indians (sorry for the cliché but it's true).
Europeans are rude in comparison.
But those are general culture traits. Corporate working culture traits in America are the worst. Even the northeast Asian usual 'this seems dumb, but my manager/chief want it, so I will execute rather than asking for explanations' isn't as insupportable as American office politics (well, in my case it was a partnership Corp+research institute I worked with, so I guess it might have skewed my judgment)
Most of the engineers I know aren’t worried about getting another job. Everyone I know laid off from Big Tech the past year found another job instantly. Probably it’s more true for other roles
The office in Europe _feels_ like an extension of home (in my experience - maybe not true for all). I feel a general sense of ease there. Taking the subway in New York or driving to work in Houston feels like a horrific burden that I'm just not willing to put up with anymore.