This is very interesting, because your office sounds like hell to me. Any time I work from home I'm absolutely desperate for meaningless social interaction, a walk and a chat while out for coffee, a beer with my team at lunch or after work and face to face discussion. I guess it's hard to find something that works for everyone.
Interesting. I work from home most often, and I find that not having to tack on a 2 1/2 hr daily car commute leaves me time for actually socializing IRL as opposed to trying to cram that need into the office.
If you only socialize with co-workers I'd say that is the bigger problem. All my interaction with people outside office hours are with people I don't work with.
Should I consider myself privileged in this respect?
I have a collection of friends from different contexts. Some from past jobs, the gym and other friends. So WFH is great. If your only social group is work, then you should expand your circle, because you never know when the employer might fire you or lay you off. Which will make you very sad because suddenly you lose all your friends.
I've only had one job in my whole career where I met people I wanted to hang out with outside work. One of two of the guys I work with now might meet that bar if they weren't so far away.
Where else do we find people? Well, we're all older, so we already had friends from other activities -- political involvement, volunteering for arts orgs, our cycling group, etc.
I think your schedule (“work from home most often”) is my ideal. Did you find it difficult to find a company that permits this? Did you have to negotiate for it, or is it pretty standard for everyone?
To be fair I grew into it. Company moved several times as we grew, each time moving further away from where I lived. I had to work from home for a while when I broke my leg. It just sorta stuck from there. I mainly work with International teams, so F2F are mostly just a quarterly meeting affair. I'm well aware not being 'in the office' each day hurts my internal visibility, but it's a trade-off. Not going to waste <50% of my non-work, non-sleep, non-chore time sitting behind the wheel of a car in a traffic jam.
When on linkedin, set it to looking for a job / open looking for new work to notify recruiters and add a message to the box saying you're looking for remote only. They will come in droves.
I've just shifted all my social interactions from the day to the night, which works very well for me. And I frequently grab coffee or run errands at lunch so that I'm not cooped up all day.
It's nice to have a private office with a couch and windows in it.
I think remote work definitely favours the introverted personality. I have started a remote gig as of four weeks ago, and I was surprised that I did actually miss the water-cooler/coffee machine conversations. Based on my own personality (and the reasons I chose to pursue a remote position), I didn't expect to. It's harder to talk about sports or make wisecracks over Slack.
On the whole, I am happier working from home for a variety of reasons, but it definitely hasn't been without it's trade-offs.
I think a hybrid approach works the best: purely remote company with small offices in some big cities, where people can go if they want to. What I've seen with that is some people go almost every day, while some only come in about once a week or so, but nobody has chosen not to come in at all. It's also common among purely remote companies to host an annual or even biannual meetup.
I feel this pain, but when I return to the office the next day the existential dread of experiencing the hellscape I am now a part of just to have a handful of meaningless unfulfilling conversations with pseudo acquaintances most of whom I'd never see again if I, or they quit, is soul crushing.
Personally either of those options would be better for me than working out of my home. But it's a curious alternative to working in an office. You're still surrounded by people and get the downsides of you're sensitive to them (I'm not) but you don't get the social benefits.
In a dev shop social benefits are synonymous to distractions. I don't care to talk to bizops people every time they walk by me. I don't want to hear females stomping on the floor with their heels like fucking mech warriors. I also tend to work in sprints that do not conform to 9-5 work days because DevOps/SRE people are typically coding/R&D during the day, and releasing/unfucking defects at night depending on intrusive maintenance windows. I can do it all from the comfort of wherever I choose and have working internet.
Some days I work from the park, or work from a bar until I'm buzzed and need to go home.
Also the monetary value of not having to spend money on daily transportation, don't need a huge clothing allowance so you have something decent to wear every day so you don't look like a slob, don't have to waste money on food if your employer doesn't feed you and don't have to waste time preparing meals if you don't want to eat out.
If you need that much socializing time you probably don't have enough work to do, or need a hug.
I tend to fill this with Telegram voice messages, or would sometimes just go over to a coworker's house and work with them for a while just for the fun of it. But that's not something you can do unless you have remote people who are still local to you.
I have a theory that co-working spaces will be filled with remote employees. You get the benefits of remote with the social benefits of an office but with less distraction.
I'm with you on this one. I ask colleagues for a quick tea trip if I haven't talked to anyone the whole day. It drives me insane to not to talk to someone.
To each his own. I have been self employed for well over a year and cannot see myself ever going back to and office environment. Don’t care if it pays 5x more even.
