What Tech Workers Don't Understand They've Lost by WFH
I&#x27;m not at all sure at all I believe the bit about left&#x2F;right politics and WFH and that paragraph seemed odd&#x2F;out-of-place when I first started reading. After finishing the article it really makes no sense and makes me thing the author is just throwing any&#x2F;everything at the wall to see what sticks as I find their other arguments range from &quot;reaching&quot; to absurd.<p>&gt; Nobody likes to do video call hangouts&#x2F;drinks, but many of us enjoy it in person.<p>Disagree, I don&#x27;t mind in-person but I don&#x27;t mind virtual at all.<p>&gt; If we&#x27;re lucky, we&#x27;re confronted with the images (including our own) of several different people all on one screen. If we&#x27;re unlucky everyone has their camera off, and we speak into a void of muted mics and turned off cameras hoping that someone is actually listening to us.<p>And similarly wearing blindfolds at a bar isn&#x27;t fun. Come on, you can twist the settings to make in-person better and I&#x27;ll agree virtual is still a good bit away from 1-to-1 in-person but it&#x27;s not anywhere near as bad as this guy makes it out to be.<p>&gt; Video calls add friction to human interactions. The most jarring experience of this for instance is telling a joke while people have their microphones on mute. No matter how funny the joke is the response feels like an awkward silence.<p>I&#x27;ve spent hundreds of hours in video calls since 2020 and I think this has happened 1 time max and it was even funnier after people unmuted. I&#x27;m really finding it hard to take this guy seriously.<p>&gt; In a previous role, one Microsoft Teams update led to calls exceeding 10 minutes turning the fans on my 2 year old Macbook Pro to their highest setting. I&#x27;m still curious to know what Microsoft Teams would have been processing in the background of those meetings.<p>And the point is? No really? Do fans bother people that much? Are they not using headsets and&#x2F;or earbuds? I sit in a room with 3 desktops, a Synology, an my MBP (sometimes 2), fans have never bothered me once. Also Teams is hot garbage, news at 11.<p>&gt; Reasearch by Gartner has shown that remote new joiners have a diminished sense of beloging to their organisation. Remote working is making it too easy to stay in our bubbles rather than to engage with our colleagues.<p>I joined my company fully remote in late 2019. The pandemic actually improved a number of things about working remote and brought me closer to my coworkers on the whole. You have to make an effort, setup a &quot;catch up&quot; zoom call with people to see how they are doing, what&#x27;s new in their lives, the same way you would walk over in an office and talk to someone. Sure it might take an extra step but I&#x27;ve not found it taxing in the least, also your conversation is completely private and there is no chance of someone overhearing and butting in, something I experienced more than a few times when working in-person.<p>&gt; Knowing our colleagues on a more personal level makes it easier to communicate and solve problems, making work much more rewarding.<p>I agree with this but being remote doesn&#x27;t make this impossible to accomplish by a long shot. I&#x27;m able to form bonds just fine over zoom.<p>&gt; At my current company many colleagues have been poached by someone who used to work with them and is now managing a team at a different company. This poacher who has enticed a lot of the Data Science &amp; Data Engineering talent has been offering their former colleagues jobs without interviews. It&#x27;s because of the meaningful relationships that my colleagues have established with this poacher while working in person before the pandemic that they have been offered this opportunity.<p>Again, far from impossible even over zoom. I&#x27;ve helped get 2 ex-coworkers hired at my current company and if I ever went elsewhere I&#x27;d at least try poaching a few people I met at my current job because again, you can form bonds just fine over zoom&#x2F;chat.<p>&gt; The lines between work time and home time have become much more blurry with WFH. It is not just us either: a study of real-time data from millions of GitHub users found that work was often being re-allocated from the traditional 9-6pm weekday hours to evenings and even weekends. Life is losing the punctuation points between work and leisure that we have enjoyed in the past.<p>Gasp! People are picking when they work instead of being forced in an outdated mold? The horror! Spare me, this isn&#x27;t an issue on it&#x27;s own. It&#x27;s important that people have a good work&#x2F;life balance but that looks different for everyone and assuming we all do best in a one-size-fits-all 9-5 is absurd. I personally choose to end my day at 5pm but as long as the requests are infrequent and minor I have no issue jumping on for a quick zoom if I&#x27;m free or kicking off a deploy if it&#x27;s requested. My job is in CA, I live in KY, 3 hours different but they&#x27;ve been extremely respectful of my &quot;5pm&quot; and in turn I&#x27;m happy to occasionally help out past that time. In fact, I&#x27;m almost positive I worked past 5pm or in the evenings more at my last in-person job.<p>I&#x27;m not even going to touch on these &quot;focussing as a service&quot; things. If they work for you great, not everyone needs them and pretending it sees widespread usage needs some data to back it up.<p>All in all I find most of these examples to not have only a passing resemblance to reality. Some of the examples are more realistic than others but the outlandish examples make it hard to take them seriously (again, fans?). If you want to work from an office go work from an office, with so many companies wanting a return to the office you shouldn&#x27;t have a problem. I can&#x27;t help but feeling like this guy didn&#x27;t care at all about people who preferred WFH or were asking for it prior to 2020. I have no issue with people who want to go back to the office, just don&#x27;t try to force me back.