In fact, I've added two days working outside of home instead of one because of the benefits. I think 3 days home/2 days office is the sweet spot.
I'm a software engineer in a Product Engineering team and it's about 75% hands-on engineering, 25% Slack/Teams interaction and alignments between people. I find being in the office helps to make connections with other staff in other teams (eg. bumping into people while making coffee in staff kitchen etc). I think thats important from a career perspective.
(no affiliation)
If it is a sweet spot for you fine, I am happy you found it. But DO NOT FORCE all of US who have different sweet spots to meet you at yours.
I put my comment out there to trigger just this kind of discussion.
I work from a library on the other day, thats a 30 minute drive. I tend to leave before 0700 when the roads are peaceful. My car is pretty fuel efficient, i try to hypermile it and get ~50mpg.
I encourage people who are remote but want human contact to rent a desk once a week at a co-working space.
For me personally, I want to do my work as efficiently as possible, in as little time as possible, and then have my social time, which has very little in common with my work and/or colleagues.
I might be an exception, but I get up very, very early and work almost right away, and I don't want to be on a roll and then have to pack up, get in the car at a terrible traffic time where (some) people are driving like animals, hunt for parking and then find a desk. That's a huge _tax_ on my productivity.
But I don't expect or demand that the rest of the world do this.
As a side comment, I would agree with you though, that 2 in the office is better than one. But I also had a very effective pattern around 10 years ago, where I spent 2 days in the office per month, and that worked really well for me (though those days were far, far less productive than my at home work days).
Now, if the world adopted a 32 hour, 4-day work week I would probably be ok with the office 1 day a week.
The entire system is designed around making the numbers go up, not down
People bought bigger houses or renovated. They upgraded their PCs and were more likely to subscribe to broadband and less likely to cancel. Empty office buildings are ever so slowly being converted to housing. Professional clothing purchases dipped and then rebounded.
But ya, probably best to just call it "traffic" then, and they might be more receptive.
However I do know people who really do not care. They may say they care but their actions and voting record show that in fact they don't care (or don't want to make it a real priority). But those same people get very upset when they're stuck in traffic
And this is a massive reversion too. In the mid 2000s republicans were openly advocating that we needed to do something about climate change and that it was a serious problem and then we opened the cash floodgates to American federal politics and would you look at that, oil companies have a lot of cash.
Keep in mind that the real cost of transitioning is very likely to be less than what we spent on the stupid oil wars of the 2000s. We can literally afford it now, let alone if we hadn't burned all that cash bombing the desert because of oil politics.
Oil companies themselves are fine to be "Energy" companies and invest in Solar and other renewables. They will be profitable just fine. Our country is tearing itself apart over a lie to ensure they remain more profitable.
And for many people WFH has other problems - if you're a dual-WFH couple in a small home, lack of home office space is a very real problem. (Although if WFH was a permanent thing, many people could choose less expensive places to live, and have more space)
Still, anything to eliminate a miserable and environmentally wasteful commute.
Sure I get meetings you need to go to separate rooms, but how is the rest is different from a regular open office? Oh no, my co-working space has the person I like to spend time with?
I'm not saying everyone must be WFH or that everyone must have a home office. I'm just having hard time imagining how two people cannot WFH in a 1-bedroom apartment. Unless both of them work in a call center.
Gotta travel 20 miles to downtown for anything resembling night life.
I am 100% more effective in person where I can dev and my desk and bounce ideas off if team mates around me verbally. This can be recreated in a remote environment by having things like a team Discord that folks sit on, but it can feel forced at times (just like communiting to the office I suppose).
My take might be heavily skewed though. I am in games and our environment is highly collaborative.
Can't you fucking do your homework beforehand, think your idea thoroughly, and then have at least a small written paragraphs about it before interrupting your colleagues.
Really, I am not a co-processor in a bus for you to dispatch a job to me and raise an interrupt line whenever the fuck you fancy doing it.
I work from home for the last 25 years (I am an independent vendor, design and develop business critical products for medium size businesses). I have no desire to socialize with employees of my clients and when I am in a mood I have real fiends to spend time with.
Can't imagine wasting my time in corporate cubicles or open concept offices
And half the staff was just WFH anyways, or remote, so the collaboration opportunities... diminished.
I even saw this happening at Google before I left there, which had formerly been a ... luxury office. Packing people in like sardines, forcing people to "reserve" desks. Bad parking and/or transit situations.
I get it when employers face financial or real estate crunches. But in the last 10-15 years (I've been working for 30) -- even pre-COVID -- I feel like some switch went off in tech industry leadership brains that is just outright disrespectful. Paying high salaries to engineers and then providing them with uncomfortable accommodations. Makes little sense to me.
I'm back to WFH and the isolation that comes with it. In part because the office environment was actually not what I was hoping for. Because the industry ruined it.
My kingdom for an office with a ceiling, lmao. The exposed ductwork cheap-ass offices are so awful.
I'd just like cubicles back.
>Oh no you don't understand I need a compress decompress cycle I TRIVE when I burn as much gas as possible
So? The only people who matter are shareholders and their proxies (management). To everyone else: you don't matter as much as you think you do, quit being selfish and be happy you get anything at all. The world doesn't revolve around you.
The world might not revolve around me, but thankfully, I do get a vote in who I chose to work for, and I chose an employer that lets me work remote.
This claim might be true but it’s simply not showing up in the data which suggests that even if true, the effect is probably minor.
But no, it won't ever be that level without major infrastructure change. Not all jobs can be wfh. We can get close by a major public transportation overhaul, but that will take decades (even without the inevitable pushback).
You don't speak for me :)
I hate it.
But these are stupid made up arguments. WFH or not both the homes with no one in them and the offices with no tenants are getting heated still to keep the pipes from bursting.
Note, some people even think that would take even more energy in total per day, but that's not correct because a cooler house doesn't emit as much energy as a warmer one.