When working from home is toxic
morgan.zoemp.be> My concern with such a chart is that not everyone has a home office that looks as good as a traditional workplace. In addition, interruptions happen at home too and chatting with coworkers is not a problem per se.
I wish every person arguing for or against home office would open their comment detailing what their home setup looks like. As someone living in an apartment with no backyard and a small desk placed in the intersection of my kitchen and living room (aka "the one room that is not the bedroom"), losing my office has more cons that pros.
At the same time, I am fully aware that the "my office" part of my previous sentence is doing a lot of heavy lifting. Those cursed with an open office plan are probably enjoying now those benefits I've been missing for a year now.
If only there was an accepted "working environment checklist" that we could all use...
I couldn't agree with you more.
In contrast to a lot of folks, I have a dedicated office with a door on the second floor of my (small) home whose purpose is to be a work space. The noise levels are decent. The ergonomics are better than what I have at the office. I have a window that lets in lots of natural light. In every way it's superior to my office work space.
And while I use it on the weekends for personal stuff, during the week it's work only.
When I'm working, the door is typically shut and folks in the house know not to interrupt, which eliminates distractions.
As a result, the separation between work and home life is easy: I shut everything down and leave the room.
When it comes to avoiding mental fatigue and overwork, for me that's just a matter of discipline: I have hard cutoffs for number of hours works, and there are no exceptions.
Ironically, for some of the complaints in this article, things are actually better for me.
I'm far less sedentary as, without the commute, I have far more time to go for walks, go touring on my bike, etc. In fact, I've never felt more connected to nature and my local community since I'm experiencing so much more of the outdoors and the amenities nearby. My wife and I have even started getting into casual birding together.
I'm also less likely to suffer from distractions since I don't have random people coming by to talk to me.
Really, the only thing I can empathize with is the lack of face time and socializing, but if I went back to the office part time (say, 1-2 days a week), I think that'd fill that need.
So, as always, it really depends. The problem with the pandemic, as so many have pointed out, is that it forced people to start working from home, often in far from ideal circumstances. So it's no great surprise that many people found the experience inferior to their corporate workplace.
The main thing I have always had is a mostly dedicated room I can close when I’m working. The room itself has varied between one with a nice big window, a basement room where I was basically staring at a wall, and variations in between. I have an IKEA office chair, an electric standing desk and a Bluetooth headset, the latter two allow me to vary positions and walk around when stuck in endless video calls.
Even if the room is functionally shared (these days the room in question also houses a tv so it doubles as our TV room after hours) we are disciplined and use the room for the proper purpose at the proper time, so the work-life distinction is well-kept and that helps a lot with the “it’s easy to drift back to work” thing.
I think one of the main things you need in a WFH setup is a choice about where you sit. Even just being able to sit at the other end of the same table can somehow change my mood. Perhaps it's something about the sunlight or just being in a different place that is refreshing. I can definitely see how people who are crammed into one particular place might find it miserable.
As it happens I have a whole load of choices about where to sit, and I often change it up.
I live in a modest ranch house with my wife and kids, and my “home work area” is the kitchen table. I was overjoyed to return to the office so I could get my job out of my house. The separation makes all of our lives significantly easier.
I can see a large split based on this. One of the things I don't want about going back to the office is going back to a crappy chair that does not fit me well (I am rather tall). I have gotten used to having a headrest. But if I were using a wooden kitchen chair all this time, that office chair might be quite nice.
Why not bring a chair you like into work?
I have a fantastic setup at home. Much better than the open plan office I'm used to but I still hate working from home. My home would never qualify as an accepted working environment. I don't even care about colleagues. I just want the separation between work and home.
Getting back to working from the office last week has done wonders for my mental health. I went from being locked up for a year WFH with my wife and kids in a small row home working out of my goddamn basement to actually being able to concentrate in a beautiful, still-mostly-dead office with a view. There's an exercise room on my floor that no one uses so it's basically my private gym. I can chat a bit with the few coworkers who are in the office regularly. It's been amazing. I feel like an actual adult human again instead of a parent/employee trying to hold on to various threads to keep everything from becoming undone.
I have had the exact opposite reaction. I work remotely and have for almost 30 years. I live deep in the forest with no neighbors for interaction. I love it.
This week was my first trip to town for errands where I was not mandated to wear a mask. In less than a week, social distancing has become a thing of the past. Life looks completely normal again, and I hate everything about it.
I still wear my mask and keep my distance, but I got the distinct impression that this will not be tolerated by the majority for much longer. When most people stop doing something that was “normal”, it is longer viewed as normal; our abrupt population-wide shift seems to emphasize this perceived deviance in the eyes of many. Consequently, I felt even more like an outsider than usual, even though there were a handful of others wearing masks.
Even before the pandemic, I needed the extra bubble of space. I actively avoided crowds. The pandemic created a world that I enjoyed greatly, and I feel a tragic loss that it is now past and may never be seen again.
You may feel liberated and whole again, but I feel like I am back to living in Hell. I face existential dread at the very prospect of going to town. One man’s pleasure is another man’s poison.
My experience with offices is literally the exact opposite. They're like high school full of corporate nonsense, cheerleading and other childish behaviours.
My work from home life, with my beautiful wife and child at arms reach, is a miracle.
Yeah, my office isn't really like that. It's quite quiet (more so than I would like if I'm being honest). The culture is engineering-biased and not bro-y. It's also a B Corp, so for profit but with a mission. I think that helps create a positive work environment since coworkers self-select as people who want to have a positive social/civic/environmental impact and generally are thoughtful and respectful people.
Honestly, for me I think I just need to move my body through space and talk to people to be happy. I'm probably more gregarious than your average developer, but definitely still an introvert and talking to people all day would be exhausting. Still, I need some social interaction. I feel like WFH was in some sense easier (could sleep in later, for example) but I just felt like I was withering away. I was craving some sort of variety, some stimulation, seeing different things and people. Being surprised by things! I missed all of that. Video calls are a poor facsimile of human interaction and the whole pandemic period felt dehumanizing.
Sounds nice.
Video calls are as pointless as the requirement for face time. If your team members require constant vigilance to be effective, you need to get a new team. If your manager requires face time, your manager needs to reconsider what their purpose is.
As someone with narcolepsy, the pandemic is the single most wonderful-terrible thing that could have happened. When the black plague struck Europe, the survivors found themselves inheriting immense wealth. I feel sort of similarly, because for the first time I can participate normally in a traditional office environment -- because the tradition is now to use Zoom and not to have your ass in a seat from 9 to 5. I wake up each day not quite believing my luck.
I really empathize from the other angle too, where people who are used to a normal environment don't want to WFH. But a lot of their hatred may be due to their awful environment they put up with. (A lot of it might not be, either! Different people like different things.)
As I said elsewhere, a lot of people seem to feel they can't change it, or they put up with distractions, or they don't worry about setting boundaries, or the equipment is subpar compared to the office.
One day my wife and I set a trap for my father in law. I nudged her to keep working, since she had unconsciously started fooling around online because of the inevitable story that FIL was going to walk in and tell, like clockwork. The moment he came in to tell his story without asking, I said "Heyo! So, I didn't understand until a few days ago, but it's best that, before you do this, mentally teleport yourself into her office and imagine you're standing next to her coworkers."
It made all the difference, and I haven't seen him do it since. He was super understanding too. I'd been guilty of the same thing; it's easy to forget that WFH means "you need office boundaries at home."
It is really hard to enforce office boundaries on two year olds. He doesn't seem to care no matter how many times I sit him down to tell him I need to work.
The moment I posted the comment, I was like, "Crap, forgot about kids."
Yeah.
Our solution was to install a lock. Are you in a situation where you can do the same thing?
The lock happened to be to our basement, which isn't exactly a nice place to work in. But it was effective. A lockable side room might make all the difference.
Our house doesn't have any extra rooms for an office. My office is the corner of the living room. There is nothing to lock.
If you're permitted to WFH indefinitely, you can move somewhere cheaper and buy a larger home for the same or lower price.
Many people like living where they are for reasons in addition to it's close to an office. And most of them will have an option to go into an office as was the pre-pandemic case although it may not be the same experience any longer for better or worse.
I should have written it as an option, not a solution. WFH will permit many people who dont like where they live, but have to be there for their job, to move away. This will reduce real estate costs and will permit people to buy larger homes near the cities they want to be in. Perhaps large enough to have their own home offices that they can then use to WFH if they choose.
WFH is win win I unless your income depends on being a landlord/real estate investor.
Yeah, but I bought my house close to the office already… if house prices go down like you say, I would be under water and unable to buy another house even if it is cheaper.
Yeup, and I suspect a part of why we are going back to the office in September is that exact reason.
Try a different facial expression and tone. You're dealing with a small mind that doesn't have the capability of reason, but from an early age, babies/kids know when other babies/kids are sad/angry because they put on a pout face - an obvious outward visual cue that things aren't right.
The sedentary thing is orthogonal. I have worked from home for years and remain far more active than I could be in an office without being weird. Having an Apple Watch -- or any similar fitness tracker for that matter -- can definitely help towards this.
I love working from home. However it is a constant battle to ensure that others understand that it really is working. That I don't have flex time to do anything at any time. I might have the agency to be able to, but I also have goals and inertia and focus that I want to feed and that are very important to me.
As to interruptions, that really is case by case. I completely shut out peers when I want to (to be frank, fuck your noisy, useless, attention sucking slack chat/discord/IRC and anything else where anyone has expectations of synchronous responses), and have been lucky to be in a position to do so. I also just shut my phone off when I don't want calls. If I couldn't do that, work interruptions would be a disaster. However it's a bit more tough on the family front where my wife, for instance, feels pretty slighted if I can't engage in a conversation whenever something comes to her. However many calm explanations have occurred, if you're in the same house it's tough for people to perceive you as unavailable.
These articles are so low quality. Some ppl WFH better, some ppl prefer an office. This isn't ground breaking philosophy and the endless articles repeating the same basic idea is just boring now. /rant
Moreover, some prefer both. I know because I am one of them.
Really enjoyed the opportunity to wfh before the pandemic and am really excited about the office now. I guess I just like the change of the scenery.
Haha. I feel you. But on the other hand, it's an endless article cycle either way, right? It's just philosophizing about WFH instead of Google now.
I imagine it'll dry up in a year or so. Till then, it's probably important to let people express what's on their mind. If people hate WFH, addressing the concerns is the only way forward.
It's also a monumental shift for the workforce. Many of the problems people have WFH are because we've WFO for so long! Social culture has incredible momentum - so much so that it took a pandemic to get the ball rolling in the direction promised by home PCs decades ago.
A transition like this takes time. That consideration seems to be absent from arguments one way or the other, but I'm happy to hear them so we can smooth out the transition to _whatever_.
And it’s not just about the people’s preference. An office could be the google campus or it could be a crappy cubicle farm. Similarly, wfh could be a studio flat where your workspace is a table shared with a homeschooled toddler, or it could be a fully kitted out home office with a forest view. So comparing wfh to an office could be comparing completely different things depending on the individuals circumstances.
It's getting to be the new tabs vs spaces argument
A recurring argument where one side is delusional and wrong, while the other is right?
To me the home office wins out by a lot:
Small cubicle with no window near by is a common office situation. Lack of exposure to sun disrupts the circadian rhythm. Vs Sitting next to a window at home.
Many Office AC systems don't filter the air from pollutants adequately. Cheap office carpets tend to have all kinds of chemicals that off gas. No way to open a window to get fresh air. Vs the typical home office with a window to the side you can open anytime.
I was in an office where the secretaries farts would rise and accumulate in a dead zone at the second story stair well. No more smelling other peoples farts or getting their flue.
Sitting prolonged times in a chair, and not being to take a bathroom break for long times. Not only uncomfortable, also unhealthy. Vs a chair I pick, and a standing desk, and short breaks anytime I want.
Listening to music on headphones vs a radio playing in the background at home. Headphones damage hearing.
My cubical has too much sun. The way it was set up when I came the monitor is in line with the arc the sun follows in the early spring.
Working from home I can just move my desk, I'm not sure what I'll do when I go back.
==Sitting prolonged times in a chair, and not being to take a bathroom break for long times.==
Your office doesn’t let you use the restroom?
One of the best things about working at home has been that I've never had to queue for the toilet.
Some people have really nice toilets at home, that will wash their behind. Not many offices have ones that do that. So you end up sitting in your own excrement for 8 hours. The life style bump up from that, is worth it.
I'm very baffled by this comment, but too afraid to ask if you are aware of the existence of toilet paper.
Have you tried a bidet toilet before? Toilet paper does not do as good of a job as water. Not even close.
Sounds like you live alone, most people don't.
The one office where I worked, it was always locked and logged with an access card. So I never tended to use it as often. Vs now I can take a shower at home any time I want to.
Every single problem listed with working from home also applies to at least some subset of office environments.
At least with a home office I can attempt to make my environment better instead of just accepting whatever my employer provides.
I agree. I have more autonomy and even though OP suggested all the wonderful things an employer provides, that's not always the case and people shouldn't take it for granted.
I think we've established now that WFH is either the best thing that ever happened to you or complete misery. It 100% depends on your home, your mental health, your social life, your own needs, etc.
Whatever your preference, it's ok and you don't have to justify that preference.
Well, no, quite a few people do have to justify their experience as they're likely being railroaded by their organization back into the office.
These articles and comments are people figuring out their true feelings. Justification of preference is currently vital.
I have been WFH since 2005 across 4 jobs. There has always been a little anxiety when the jobs ended that I would not be able to find a new one.
I am holding out hope that the ratio of WFH jobs will remain permanently increased after this, even if it isn’t a tectonic shift.
I would be interested in a poll on WFH attitudes that just looked at home office vs work office setups. How many people have a primary motivation of a crappy home office?
It's not just about setups, it's about social life. I would describe myself as introverted, but even for me, being in an apartment all by myself for 80-90% of my waking day eventually breaks me. The first year of pandemic-related WfH was okay, but especially last winter was really terrible, when the pandemic-related loneliness compounded with the mood effects of prolonged winter darkness.
Many of the things the article mentions are also an issue if working from an office (clearly author has never had the office next door undergoing noisy renovations).
Some others are due to an improper setup: no door/ private space can also be an issue in an open-plan office and at home, if faced with the prospect of long-term wfh, one can and should condition a proper, closeable space to work in. This mitigates most of the distraction-oriented complaints.
As to “i’m always working” - what’s needed here is the discipline of closing your computer at X time. Having a separate space really helps with that, otherwise just close the computer and chuck it in a drawer.
I fully understand wfh is not for everyone. However, one must realize when the main benefit of an office is imposing on you the discipline you’d need to have on your own if working at home.
If you work from home that means you are free to move anywhere you want, like a more affordable place that meets your needs.
Once you are living in a place with enough space, working from home is much healthier experience than going to an office, provided that you invest in your home office and keep your home clean.
If you take all the money that you spent yearly on transportation to the office and invest it in a home setup, you'll have a pretty neat home office in no time. There are many YouTube videos with ideas for home office decorations.
I just don't understand these articles. The office isn't going anywhere. Don't worry, if you want to work in an office that option is not going away.
Working in the same physical space as management will aways have an edge on remote workers. That's why it won't be going anywhere.
I can only speak for myself, but I feel that for many of us this is a once in a lifetime chance to establish working for home as a completely viable, respected choice. I don't want to move up, I just want to do my job in peace.
Some people may genuinely fear that is going away since there is a lot of talk about hot-desking at the very least. Not having to pay for offices also has its advantages.
Finally it adds to signal, without pro-office articles one would think that everybody hates working from the office.
That's really the main thing. To the degree that coming into offices half-time becomes normed, it's reasonable to expect that companies will shift towards more flexible desk arrangements as leases come up or space otherwise gets tight. I've even seen this pre-pandemic when people weren't using their cubes a lot.
I think the problem is most people think they work for a company rather than an industry. Some companies have gone fully remote, so if the office is your thing, you will need to leave that company.
To me that isn't a big deal, but a lot of people are reluctant to switch jobs.
>if you want to work in an office that option is not going away
Probably not universally, but in general.
Though they may have to deal with a lot of their co-workers not being present, the norm for meetings being Zoom rather than conference rooms, and hoteling.
I've generally found office environments to be about everything but the business mission at hand, which is the sole purview of a managerial class which, simply based on the fact that it cannot physically be the case that the majority of managers are competent, relies on information hiding to exert its competency and the rest of the labor force is basically standing around playing at high school until assignments come down the pipe as they are relieved from having to actually be invested in a common goal. Labor turnover is about every 2 - 3 years, since, again, no one is invested in anything, management about every 5 years.
Better to work from home then entertain a myriad of diversions and mirages of working in an office.
Tangentially, can we anticipate a spike next year in family home sales inventory as they get sold because post-lockdown couples are divorcing?
From a macro view, a lot of things that have been postponed for 18-24 months will likely happen all at once. Given the trajectory to normal, whatever that was, it will have been almost 2 years of artificially suppressed volatility in a lot of places, and a lot of stuff is going to roar back.
Soon my company will be switching to 3 days in the office being mandatory with 2 days being optional in office or at home. I suppose just having all 5 days being either one would be best, but it's an ok compromise.
It’s toxic for some.
An office space, desk, power, AC, coffee provided by your employer is nice if you can’t get a decent one yourself. It’s all trade offs between travel, free time, quiet space, social.
I've been seeing lots of candidates trying to get at job at my current employer because we allow remote work. People are willing to forego their faang compensations.
You know what we need? Something that is the equivalent of a blue check mark for remote workers.
The check mark would mean that this worker has a home office setup that meets or exceeds standards for remote work. The certification process can be handled by a neutral third party.
The standards would be stringent, a laptop on on some corner desk wouldn’t quality. You must have a room with a door that can be closed IMO. Maybe there can be tiers though.
Edit: I don’t get the downvotes, does this comment really lower the level of discourse, or do people just hate this idea so much?
You know what we need? Something that is the equivalent of a blue check mark for offices.
The standards would be stringent, an open office hoteling arrangement wouldn’t qualify. You must have an office with a door that can be closed IMO.
I can't tell if this is serious.
If you are serious, what's stopping me from renting a space for 1 hour, getting the check mark and going back home to my slum?
Or fixing up my place, getting rid of kids toys, getting the check mark, then letting things go back to before?
Seriously though, if you can't do your job, your manager should be able to figure it out.
I mean, I hate it, but it's not THAT far from certain requirements that you can run into. For instance....when doing games development as an indie dev, you can't have a Playstation devkit at home unless you have certified locks installed on all doors, the devkit is positioned out of view, the window isn't easily accessible from the outside(preferably with metal bars)....it's a pain to actually demonstrate that your place of work is safe enough to have a devkit present there.....otherwise they just won't send you one, end of story. So yes, in order to just do your job from home, there is a requirement for a level of security and setup involved.
As an aside - funny how in the pandemic these requirements were massively relaxed and as a remote worker I currently have a PS5 devkit on my desk like it's a not big thing.
It could be trivial to do an express “recertification” by recording a video of your workspace once in a while, after you’ve done the full certification.
I think we all need constant monitoring and certification that we're not shitting our pants. Because, you know, shitting one's pants is bad, so we totally need some patroling to save people from this. Can we count as a civilized society while we let pants-shitting happen to our citizens?
I can see how that can quite easily be viewed as gatekeeping.
Having a "spare" room or a rented coworking space to use as a remote office is a luxury of the middle/upper class.
I can see your logic, and I can see how it would be more profitable for companies when hiring remote, but at the end of the day, there are many profitable things a company can do that they are not (technically, see: "legally") allowed to do, for example not hiring disabled workers, firing pregnant female workers, and so on.
We choose to not maximise productivity to create a more accepting and equal society.
That is of course all in theory.
A company can still hire unverified workers though if they want.
But that doesn't address the issue that there would be a legal way for companies to discriminate based on your wealth, regardless if they do it or not.
"filter for applicants with a remote office" is virtually 1-to-1 with "filter for middle/upper class applicants", which of course is unacceptable according to our modern view on social mobility and egalitarianism.
But not illegal.
Of course, we need to gatekeep access to WFH opportunities. This is going to fix things.
I think some people object (aka downvote) because one of the good parts of wfh is "different strokes for different folks" without having to justify it or get permission. You are suggesting an approach that people will tend to find highly invasive and controlling.
If you want to control my work space and dictate what that looks like, then assign me an office and make what you want on your dime. Don't try to turn wfh into some perfect slave labor scenario where employers control it and employees pay for it and it's this highly invasive process.
For WFH, the organization that I work in had a form that I had to fill out prior to getting authorization. It essentially looked like something from OSHA.
* The working area is maintained between 68°-76°
* The working area is free of tripping obstructions
* The working area has a adjustable chair
* The working area has handholds on any staircase of more than two steps
Etc...
And yes, I am working on improving the area that I work in. It currently meets the requirements, I'm just looking to go another step for a more comfortable area now that I know that long term WFH is possible and reasonable.
Hah. I have a pretty nice home office but it probably doesn't consistently fall in to that temperature range. Often colder in the winter and I don't turn on the noisy window AC unless it gets really hot. (And I don't know what tripping hazards are.) But, sure, I'll check the boxes. Lying to employers is pretty traditional.
I actually agree with you. I don't think it needs to be strictly enforced. I think most people just don't realize how terrible their WFH setup is; they don't give it a moment's thought.
I've observed that they either feel they can't change it, or they put up with distractions, or they don't worry about setting boundaries, or the equipment is subpar compared to the office.
Having a checklist would at least get people to think for a moment.
It's not rocket science. In an ideal world, people probably have a dedicated room, a good adjustable chair that fits them, good lighting for video, temperature control, ergonomic keyboard setup, etc. Sure you can write all that down on a page. Maybe make a video. But a lot of people just don't have that space and there's nothing they can easily do about it.
Right, you must have room with a door to WFH otherwise back to the open plan office.
Why not just have employee cameras so that they can both verify the workstation set up as well as make sure they’re actually working for the full 8 hours a day?
Sounds like a great YC startup idea. They can use machine learning and AI to calculate the times that the employee is sitting at their workstation, have eye tracking to make sure that they are looking at the screen, and analyze the network traffic and keystrokes to make sure that people aren’t goofing off on HN or Reddit.
I think android overloads would improve the situation.
Eh? An employer should ensure all of this; money normally spent on that employee's workspace should be spent on their home setup. This should include enough money so that the employee can move houses to a place with a spare room, desk, chair, screens, electricity, internet connection, etc. Take what you pay per employee in desk space, and pay it to your employees directly.
And open up your wallet for relocation, since it's unlikely they'll find housing in SF.
I didn't downvote. But so long as I'm getting my work done--and barring any specific strict security requirements--I don't see how it's any of my employer's business whether I have an A+ office setup or if I'm working from my kitchen table (both of which I do).
People differ. I have a nice home office setup but for probably half the time I just use a laptop somewhere else in my house.
>You must have a room with a door that can be closed IMO.
I have a bathroom door. Does that count for the blue checkmark?
What’s the benefit of this?
It helps the professional remote workers with dedicated power user setups standout from the crowd.
I don't think the issue is that people are hiding the fact that their WFH situation is not ideal. The people who have crappy WFH setups are quick to tell everyone. They aren't trying to get away with working from home, they are asking to work from an office.
Even if you have this WFH certification like you talk about, that isn't going to tell your employer much. Some people will have great WFH setups and not be very productive, some people will have bad setups and do great work. The only way to see which is which is to observe their productivity. Certification won't help.
It doesn't really seem beneficial. In the end all that actually matters is that the employee is sufficiently productive. There's no reason to needlessly gatekeep working from home. Everyone works differently so whatever standard that gets set might work for a few people but be less beneficial for others and basically useless for another group.
Do we really want SWE interviews/applications to get more toxic than they already are? On top of quizzing for largely non-pertinent academic knowledge, wasting people's weekends with no-pay projects to "judge their work", and other arbitrary BS do we also want to tack on a qualification for getting hired being that your home is structured in an employer approved way?