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Working From Home: What if You Never Saw Your Colleagues in Person Again? (bbc.com)
Bryan Lufkin, writing for BBC: Throughout my career I've worked with people that I've never met in person. In theory, I could spend an entire day without meeting another human face-to-face. But could this kind of self-imposed isolation become standard working practice in the future?
Studies show that in the US, the number of telecommuters rose 115% between 2005 and 2017. And in early 2015, around 500,000 people used Slack, the real-time chat room programme, daily. By last September, that number soared to over 6 million. In 2017 a Gallup poll revealed that 43% of 15,000 Americans say they spend at least some of their time working remotely, a 4% rise from 2012. And a 2015 YouGov study found that 30% of UK office workers say they feel more productive when they work outside their workplace. How would we feel if we never had to work with another person face-to-face again? Would we care? Have things gone so far that we might not even notice?
Studies show that in the US, the number of telecommuters rose 115% between 2005 and 2017. And in early 2015, around 500,000 people used Slack, the real-time chat room programme, daily. By last September, that number soared to over 6 million. In 2017 a Gallup poll revealed that 43% of 15,000 Americans say they spend at least some of their time working remotely, a 4% rise from 2012. And a 2015 YouGov study found that 30% of UK office workers say they feel more productive when they work outside their workplace. How would we feel if we never had to work with another person face-to-face again? Would we care? Have things gone so far that we might not even notice?
I hope so!
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
The best summary
http://theoatmeal.com/comics/working_home
The one place I was at that allowed work from home saw me being much more productive. No cubicle drive-bys. No distractions. No ruckus from the surroundings.
A pox on those short-sighted employers who insist on chaining us to the stupid desks. Seriously. I hate it.
The "Civilized World" jumped the shark ca. 1973.
Well I think one of the causes for this is the insistence from upper management that open plan offices are a good idea and impose it on every one but themselves.
the result is that people need to find a quiet place from time to time to not be disturb so that they can concentrate on a specific task. And when putting headphones on, not answering email immediately and so on don't work any more because people just come by your desk and stand there until you give up and talk to them, the only solution is to simply not be there!
I think it really depends on the job. There are clearly some where being left the hell alone and not bothered allows a person get much more accomplished, never mind all the time saved from the commute to work.
However, I can't imagine having something like a writers' room that works anywhere near as effectively if everyone is video conferencing in from home. Also anything that requires a lot of specialized and expensive equipment doesn't seem workable in that manner either.
However, if you could have 20% of the current work force working from home it would likely make traffic far more bearable for the other 80%.
I have severe degenerative disk disease. My manager used to unofficially accommodate my disability by letting me work from home, but then another manager decided to make an issue of it...
...and I can't, even if I want to, because going in would provide evidence that I no longer need the accommodation.
Long story short, I had medical documentation, I could prove the previous accommodation, and I had a decent lawyer. I never need to set foot in the office again.
sounds like an article from 15-years ago from someone obsessed with Second Life. Makes one wonder how little qualifications are required to advise government officials.
I loved working from home, when I could, but occasional socializing in person is still a must. Neither e-mail, nor IM, nor audio can properly convey all the subtle details of smiling and other body-language. Smilies, emojis and memes are a crutch... Video is better, but it is still not as good as the real thing.
As a result, for example, your rejection of a genuinely bad idea can get easily misconstrued as meanness or vendetta against whoever proposed it. People slowly grow to resent each other — meeting in person, whether for work or just for a "happy hour", is crucial to maintain good relations.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
My nearest collegue is 100miles away, we all work remote, we get together once every 6 months for a 'company' meeting to recall who everyone is.
Beyond that there is NO reason to be in the same office as everything we work on is scattered globally and we couldn't even PHYSICALLY touch the systems if we want to (READ: CLOUD), if the systems fall offline we call one of the big 3 and they go look at down systems. Other than that we keep the systems running and go on about our day.
Wheel of Time: Book by Book and Sumview (summary review) Bigdady92 style: http://bigdady92.blogspot.com/
More likely, for the first time.
When I was Debian project leader - is that around 20 years ago now? Time flies - I had around 200 regular collaborators who were the package maintainers at that time. They were distributed worldwide and we never met. We made a great distribution that worked and got on the Space Shuttle for two flights. I ran into Ian Kluft at a ham radio function, and eventually was invited to Europe to speak and met some other developers. But I have still never met many of those 200.
Bruce Perens.
Sounds like a solution to every working man being accused of sexual harassment for looking at a woman. Then if your spouse sues, at least t's community property.
How about a moderation of -1 pedantic.
I've been working from home for about a year now, and honestly I love it. I am a software developer, so it makes sense for me to have quiet and minimize interruptions. As a result, I'm more productive (because I can just turn slack off when I don't want to be interrupted, harder to do in an office environment) and I get to spend more time with my family instead of an hour or more on the road on a daily basis. We use Zoom constantly and we try to make it a point to turn on our camera's so we can actually see each other and interact. That makes a huge difference to me, since it allows me to feel like I get that daily interaction with folks.
We also make twice yearly homages to HQ and I would be ok with it being quarterly honestly. We go to our HQ for a week and get some stuff worked out that's easier to do in person. The team building aspect of those times actually feel like they mean something as well. Previously, team building events didn't mean much because they were with folks I interacted with in person everyday.. Now I feel like they make a larger impact on myself and my colleagues because that time is so much more valuable.
Just my two cents
I feel less productive working from home. Way to many distractions including turning on a tv and to many temptations. Plus i think i would miss the humans.
thatcher was a fucking nazi bitch and I hope her soul is burning in hell
No thanks. I don't want to be a keyboard warrior. Human interaction usually improves your mental state too https://www.nytimes.com/2017/0...
I love working from home. I don't miss humans face-to-face. I still need contact via phone and IM and that happens daily. I am a programmer, and our people are mostly distributed, so an office generally doesn't make sense any more anyway. But I hate it when the big bosses come up from head office and I have to go to the office. Totally wasted dead unproductive time.
The other thing is, I never need to print anything at home - I can get by with stuff on the screen. When I worked in an office, I was always printing white papers and documents. The trees love me now.
Offices are redundant and counterproductive for information workers. Technology has made obsolete the burden of relocating ourselves geographically every day—at great expense in terms of time, money, and stress—to shuffle data around computers at (nearly) the speed of light. I'll readily concede that in-person collaboration is valuable, but hardly a constant necessity. Let's stop blocking roadways, wasting energy, and building surplus office space. Let's meet face-to-face only when needed, and otherwise work in comfortable, distraction-free environments that're a short walk from our breakfast tables. I've been working from home for almost five years. It's made me happier and more productive, and that should be a norm.
Hello fellow coder.
I have been where you are, poor, living out of my car, I saw winter approaching and knew it would potentially mean my death.
Working for free must end, work for money.
I found work by going around sites like kijiji and looking for key words like javascript etc. This would lead me to small or medium sized businesses who were looking to hire coders so that they could have a GUI for interacting and manipulating their database of clients, warranties, etc.
I hope you do not die.
IRC and Jabber are where the cool people play.
For jobs that are entirely theory based, I can see that happening (like writing software on the web, or accounting, or a number of other jobs). For jobs where you must physically interact with a product or customers, not so much. On the flip side, many employers have countless incompetent managers who only feel comfortable when they can look over your shoulder and see that you are in fact working, regardless of how productive you are, or if you just switched screens from solitaire.
The only way I can see a mass shift of theory based jobs to permanent offsite status is if states and/or the federal government eliminate the gas tax, and instead charge the equivalent amount of taxes to employers based on the number of employees they require to be onsite each day. For example:
100 employees onsite multiplied by the average commute for the state = X number of miles driven round trip = Y number of state and federal taxes incurred to maintain the roads.
The more employees allowed to work from home, the lower that tax liability. This moves the regressive gas tax burden for highways from employees to employers, and gives them an incentive to use the roads less. You may not think it is much, but for example, in California the average commute is 27 minutes one way, assuming an average speed of 60mph, thats a daily round trip of 54 miles. The California gas tax is currently $0.42/gallon, and assuming the average commuter gets 27mpg (because I'm lazy and that's probably close to average for the entire commuter fleet), that's $0.84/day. Factor a premium for using the roads during rush our for an additional 130%.
Multiply that by 260 working days per year and each employee and the business would be paying $568/employee per year to the state and $250 to the federal government. If you have 100 employees, you are looking at about $82,000 in taxes each year that a company could save by letting their employees work from home (to say nothing of other direct overhead like electricity, air conditioning and office space.) Obviously transportation companies (semi shipping, taxi services, etc.) would have to pay based on actual miles driven for the company, including commute and on the job.
This is one tax burden that is legitimately the responsibility of companies and should be paid for by companies, rather than employees.
As more companies let workers telecommute to save money, the added benefit of less congestion, fewer accidens and less road wear are also realized.
If you disagree, please post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like
I think the desire to is also dependent on the person. For myself, its pretty much a yes please. I could go for vast stretches without physical contact, in fact while I work in an office now, I'd said most of my interactions are already digital anyway. I have some overlap in what I work on with the physical people around me, but not a great deal either. Every now and again it is kind of interested to go to some large shared meeting or conference and put a face to a name. I've had working relationships with folks for like 10 years, and then meet them at some seminar which is kind of fun. So I don't think I would be really all that put out if working from home and rarely if ever met anyone. My partner however is more of a social type worker. When facing a prospect of taking a job where she would have little or no physical contact with many people she balked at it, and ultimately rejected the idea, looking elsewhere. For her she would need the constant social contact to stay interested with the job, where her job satisfaction is as much about who she works with than the actual nuts and bolts of what she is actually doing. For her that kind of isolation would be unbearable.
When you never see somebody, then the personalization goes down. I'm all for teleworking, but not 100% telework. If your boss never sees you, its probably a LOT easer to lay you off.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt01...
-- "This world is a comedy to those who think, a tragedy to those who feel."
...then I wouldn't be home sick like I am now because someone came to work sick.
but boy do i passionately hate working in openspaces! who the hell thought that putting a bunch of people with different job dynamics in one big room would be a good idea ?
people talk, answer phones, tell stupid personal stories, make jokes....while other ones are trying to think and do problem solving and conception.
Home office increases productivity, makes savings for everybody. i'v been involved in projects with people working from home and everything went smooth. so yeah, i would't bother not viewing my colleagues in person again (for working purpose in the workplace, i mean some of em are cool)
In theory I could be almost 100% remote, but I prefer to be in the office and interact more naturally with my colleagues. I do the odd day remotely, and I usually get some project that I've been putting off done then, but I wouldn't want to be remote more than one or two days a week tops.
It helps that I can walk to the office, of course.
If you're a sysadmin, your physical presence at the office is a comfort for all who work there. If any system goes down or has a problem, it's reassuring for them to know that you can look into it at a moment's notice. Employees often wonder if offsite admins are even available, or are working.
I'm in the same boat again now as I was about a decade ago. Both times I moved with my family to a place far and yon, but came to an arrangement with my employer to work remotely from a home office. Both times I travel back about 20-25% of the time (roughly once every 4-6 weeks), mostly to maintain social contacts. And that's the key if your larger project time is 25 or so people. After a certain size, and with the general workplace turnover, people in other groups with whom you interact are just cogs. I've worked on-premise at one software firm and never personally met the DBAs, even though they were a floor down. Wouldn't have mattered if I were next door or in Timbuktu.
But with the smaller companies / organizational units, where jobs are primarily "other duties as assigned", the importance of having person-to-person contact & socialization is immense. Especially if you're the odd duck who is primarily remote, and everyone else is in-office. It allows you to stay abreast of relevant business "gossip" that isn't always officially communicated, and to understand both the working style & unofficial responsibilities of your coworkers.
Johann
My goal ist zu slowly move into Tim Ferriss/4HWW territory. I usually like my colleagues, don't stay long with people I don't like that much. But I'd very much prefer a surfing beach right near my working spot. Or some nice powder snow to get into some snowboarding.
My goal is to go digital nomad in the foreseeable future without missing a beat income wise. Could work out.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
This is fascinating, but I don't believe any of it.
Been working from home for years. I get so much more work done than being around people. I could care less for human interaction, that's what the neighborhood bar is for.
Fuck Ajit Pai
As in going full-on gluttony working in my underpants which would be fun at first but eventually becoming one of those fat slob/shut-ins. What I like about work socialization is that it's totally casual and a secondary objective to getting a paycheck. If socialization is the primary objective then I feel the pressure to be interesting enough or they'll be moving on, not just dates but friendships too and I'm not great at smalltalk. I've hardly ever befriended a total stranger, it's like we've been classmates, studied together, worked together, played at the same sports team or had some other reason to hang out for a while which has warmed up into friendships.
That said, I don't think the socialization has much to do with work or feeling like a team. As in I could totally see myself working in some sort of shared office space where we'd have different jobs for different companies and still do lunches and water cooler talk and goofing around a bit together. A lot of the people I work with do other bits that I don't really know much about and they don't really know that much about what I do anyway. And when we're on a break we don't really want to talk about work anyway. The whole "pulling together" thing is a bit overrated for me, I work because I got pride in what I do. I'm not doing it to save my colleagues' ass or for company deliveries/profits.
An analogy I've used is that if we're a ship then I'm the one setting the sails. I'm not the captain or navigator, though I'd certainly advice or caution them if I think they're making a mistake. But if we're sailing off a cliff that wasn't my decision, my responsibility or my blame and while I'll certainly try to help I'm not putting that burden on my shoulders. We're certainly a team setting the sails and it's not competitive, but I'm not going to cover for the screw-up again and again. Honest mistakes and inexperience yes, but not incompetence, recklessness and slacking. If you're not weeding out the obvious problems but covering for them and collectively punishing us for their failures that's highly demotivating for me.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
With a recent plain-ordinary-development project, I was in the office four days of the week to try and keep an intuitive "handle" for what we were doing, and would save up concentration-dependant tasks for home on Wednesdays. That worked well, for me.
Another engineer worked strictly from home, and had dispropriately more trouble than I.
A third worked from a remote office, and quit our project to work with the people who sat at the next desks.
I suspect this fits one of a family of U-shaped curves, with "bad" at both end of the U and good in the middle, but with quite different shapes for projects with different co-ordoination needs.
davecb@spamcop.net
My wife and I both work from home (for different companies). No more sitting in traffic or getting stuck on a subway (all wasted time). I never cared much for hanging out with co-workers (one reason I decided to work on networking and servers is I rarely have to deal with people). Another upside is a reduced risk of getting sick. If you aren't jammed on a bus or subway train with 100's of other people (some of whom are sick), you stand a much better chance of avoiding catching whatever they're spreading (although my kids do keep me exposed to whatever they catch at school so..). The benefits of working from home outweigh the benefits of working in an office in my opinion and extensive experience.
Working from home does require an amount of discipline in terms of working without supervision.
The dirty secret of capitalism is that it is not meant to work as a stand-alone; it requires some kind of social order. Since the 1960s we have abolished that social order and in its place added regulations and doubled the number of people in the workforce. The result is that most jobs are bullshit and can be done in four hours a week most weeks, but we have to be there looking busy for 40-60.
As a result, people are taking their work home so that they can really jam on actual problems and ignore all the bullshit, meetings, paperwork, silliness, etc. It's just more efficient. And if they did not see their colleagues again? No one would care. Only the really sad and lonely find their jobs important. For the rest of us, it is just what is demanded of us to pay in order to live, and we secretly resent it and the people who try to cheer us up by talking about "having a case of the Mondays." We would never socialize with these people if we were not forced to, which is why such people love jobs.
In the future, everyone will be a contractor who gets a retainer to be on-call and is paid by the hour, will work from home, and probably pay a lot less for work clothes, commuting, insurance, etc. Plus you get to be around your family and possibly, work a small garden so you can get actual food, since the stuff in the stores is mostly overpriced toxic gunk.
Alternative Right.
I've been at it since 1996 and I've met only two of my clients -- and only one of them intentionally. My code works, their credit cards work, that's enough.
AFAIC, commuting unnecessarily is an irresponsible act.
Warning: This signature may offend some viewers.
If people prefer to work away from the office, the office needs to improve.
The news here is not that home working is wildly superior.
The news is that modern offices are terrible. Noisy, crowded, lacking in privacy, environmentally inadequate, poorly located for employees to travel to.
Meanwhile, some people can't handle working at home and develop severe mental problems from the lack of social interaction so it's hardly a panacea.
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled"
The guy next to me is a paleo / vegan / crossfit enthusiast. The guy over from me is an evangelical christian who's trying to save me and the guy behind me has a distinct love of curry / chili / who fucking knows...
I'M totally ready to work from home Mon-Fri. I'm even willing to sneak in on Sat. to rack servers.
Yes Francis, the world has gone crazy.
It's really not a panacea. I work from California but 95% of my coworkers are abroad, in India and Australia. 0% are in my local office.
Tools like IM, audio/video conference, email slack are no replacement for being in the same room with another person, and never will be. All those communications have to be scheduled. Communications are slowed down way too much. Things get misunderstood. There is nothing like dropping into somebody's office to discuss an issue and getting it resolved immediately.
-- Julien Pierre http://www.madbrain.com/blog
After I left my last full time job, I worked for 10 years at home
I loved having control of my schedule
I loved being able to work when I felt inspired, even if it was at odd hours
I loved being able to take a few hours to do other stuff that needed to be done
I loved avoiding traffic and parking
I loved avoiding silly meetings, especially the crap required by HR
Most of all.. I loved the absence of distraction. When I closed the door of my home office, I could focus
I got a lot of stuff done, and was paid well
But, I kinda missed the human interaction
I'm an introvert with no social skills, but I still missed being a part of the society of engineering
It can be nice at times. You don't have to deal with anyone on a bad day, nor do they.
The fact that this cuts down on your exposure to illness is a nice bonus too! I've been generally healthier (as in not getting the flu/colds, etc) since starting as a telecommuter.
Not dealing with some crappy, underpowered machine is a nice bonus.
And the amount of money I save on gasoline is PHENOMENAL. I literally put less than 3000 miles a year on my vehicle (and my insurance company has a discount for low-mileage owners).
On the downsides (however).
You have to put REAL effort into enforcing a work/life balance.
It's quite possible to work yourself into the ground in front of your computer.
You have to make an effort to get up and walk away for a couple minutes to simulate breaks at work.
It can be VERY difficult to take lunches as this kind of setup encourages "al desko" dining.
Additionally, the fact that you're primarily interfacing with co-workers via text (we use IM to communicate) can lead to some major aggro. Instant Message does NOT mean "Instant Reply". And some co-workers and bosses have a REALLY hard time grokking this, expecting you to simply drop EVERYTHING and fence with them in IM for an hour.
So, you have to work at establishing and maintaining boundaries. One of the ones I'm working on right now is a co-worker who likes to play "hot potato". If I'm simply not available, they call a client up, get them set up, then simply transfers them to me. Regardless of if I'm working on anything else or not...So *I* have to either drop what I'm doing or broom them, which makes us look like shit.
So, it can be a sweet gig.
But you have to remember it's still "work" and you have to treat it as such.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
An extreme either way seems unnecessary
Twinstiq, game news
I started working from home a few months ago because I moved. I must say, I prefer being in the office. I like the interaction and I like the physical separation of "working" and "not working". At my request my manager installed a big monitor and a camera in my team's work space, so I still get some office interaction. We just keep a constant video connection up during working hours. Others on my team also work remotely but prefer to limit contact to email and Slack. Whatever works for you and whoever you have to interact with.
Chelloveck
I give up on debugging. From now on, SIGSEGV is a feature.
Why working at home is both awesome and horrible - The Oatmeal
I know everyone will be impressed that I know how to make an HTML link. Such technical knowledge!
Hey! TARGET="_blank" works on Slashdot now. Didn't maybe 2 years ago.
This is my work life in a nutshell. I've never met my boss or any of my co-workers -- they are several thousand kilometres away. My employer has offices all around the world, but not in my city, so I have no office to go to even if I wanted to. Even my interview was over the phone (although I should note I was already an employee of the company at the time, and the position was tailor-made for me).
The work gets done, and so my employer is happy. I have time to take care of things at home as needed, such as picking up my daughter from school. I can work from wherever I want, so long as I have online access. I could move across the country, and wouldn't need to find new employment. I can work in my pyjamas and slippers. I have a fully stocked and equipped kitchen at my disposal.
Frankly, I've had to turn down some offers and interest from some pretty big, well known companies, because they simply can't match my current work environment. Every day I can't help but feel like one of the luckiest guys in the world (for a working stiff, at least).
Yaz
I'm there now.
And as a bonus, my daughter is growing up with me quite near and accessible, and is surprisingly good company when working. (she's 3 now, and I've been home for 2 of those years)
Every now and again I miss the social - but I could just start getting out to social gatherings again to handle that.
And yeah, my coworkers are everywhere on the planet. It's pretty awesome sharing weather stories, for instance. The only real downside though is sometimes I'll forget to stop working and work into timezones on the other side of the planet.
I probably put in more hours now than when I commuted, and have a higher quality of work output.
but my home life is happier, my social life's pretty ok and I'm all in all a lot happier.
So yeah, I'm there. No regrets.
Finally, no way to claim that your career problems are due to racism, sexism and homophobia. Everyone is the same online and nobody is grabbing anyone else's body parts. Rise up on your merit and if you don't, you only have yourself to blame.
I've been working from home for about 15 years, and in concert with US colleagues while living in Europe. As a result I was working night shifts constantly -- meaning I spent much of my time alone and in darkness.
Since that time I've grown increasingly isolated. Some time ago I had a nervous breakdown.
I'm not sure that working from home constantly is very good for your health...
I've worked from home now for 5 years and never want to go back to an office daily. The work I do, though, has been setup such that working from wherever actually "works". We have a central system to plan the work, open communication channels on Slack, Skype for Business, or even phone calls (haven't gotten one in about 4 years, though). There are a few things I've learned:
1. You have to be okay with people just dropping in on you via Slack or something similar. The only time you can't allow it is when you're in a meeting or really working heads down on something complex. When someone pings, you respond. It's the digital analog (oxymoron) to passing in the hallway...
2. You need to be flexible about your time. Getting a ping at 7pm has to be okay with you if you're working with people from other time zones.
3. You do need occasional team get togethers. These are great for everyone, including the folks who actually are in the office. I used to go to the office for a week per quarter, and now it's more like a week every 6 months. 3 days is probably enough, but there has to be some face time. The best for me would probably be 3 days per quarter, but I can live with my current setup.
4. I, personally, have to have people around me, so I work from Starbucks or the library quite a bit. I'm fortunate in that I don't have a lot of critical meetings, so the background noise hasn't hurt me yet. I think a co-work place would be even cooler, but I don't have one around me and I'm afraid they'd be more expensive than my $2.50 cup of coffee a day.
I totally get what you are saying. I work from home right now and have found modern open plan or even cubicle-based office spaces to be very distracting from concentrating on programming. People who do focused intellectual work need an office with a door that closes (one thing Microsoft got right in the early days). Ironically, managers who are always talking to others and are out and about tend to be the ones who get offices these days. And especially the offices with windows (putting workers in office space without windows is illegal in some other countries like Switzerland).
One place I worked an insurance company with cubicles mixes with uncubicled desks), the guy at the desk behind me (we were back-to-back), working in another group, had just had a house built -- and was on the phone constantly with contractors. Very distracting. Though I learned a bit about house building. Then I got moved to a different desk as the group I was in consolidated its office space usage. In that company, having one of your cubicle panels replaced by glass was a sign of promotion to management rank. My new desk was just on the other side of a corridor from the project lead's cubicle -- which had just had a glass panel installed so he was literally staring at my back all day (as well as the backs of a couple other developers). I would have preferred the previous desk over that situation even with the chatter. You try to do your best anyway, but it all takes its toll on concentration and being in the flow.
One lab I worked in, the third lab I was in at IBM Research, a very loud computer with a squealing hard drive got put right next to my work space for a while. I complained about it, but to not much good. That noise made it very hard to concentrate. I've had tinnitus ever since too -- though it is hard to blame tinnitus on one specific event. Possibly that was the last straw in a series of noise exposures from my youth inclduing early work in a Princeton robotics lab where we noisily cut styrofoam with an industrial robot (and should have been wearing ear protection but usually did not).
That said, a diet of whole foods, mostly plants, has lots of health benefits -- although Paleo leaves out healthy grains and has too much meat and fat to be that healthy (see the book "The Whole Foods Diet"). Exercise whether Crossfit or just less extreme going for good walks is also a great health booster. Spirituality and community also has proven health benefits. And lots of studies show that Turmeric in Curry also has great health benefits. So, your coworkers are all tapped into different aspects of health.
I also very much enjoyed having lunch with coworkers and learning from them. For example, that project lead was into gardening and even made his own delicious salsa. Another person sitting near my at the insurance company told me (when this was not common popular knowledge in the mid 1990s) about how real wages had been flat in the USA already for decades. And I learned a lot at lunch listening to stories about IBM Research history from my supervisor working in a different lab there.
I also later "worked from home" for a year for that previously mentioned insurance company. But that seemed only feasible within that organization where essentially no one worked from home because I had been a contractor onsite earlier for a year. And I would go in for meetings once a month or so. That was before cheap good laptops, and while the project went well, I can see how otherwise things might have been even better if I would have gone in once a week or so to work there and have lunch with people. In the meantime we had moved from where I could walk to work in ten minutes to where I had a 45 minute drive plus often-challenging parking to get there, so getting there was a bunch harder -- but not as hard a commute as other places I would work later even as it seemed daunting at the time.
So, while as a programmer, I'd make the same choice you would of working from home, I can see there is also a potential loss there of lea
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
"What if You Never Saw Your Colleagues in Person Again?"
I'd be okay with that.
I like going into the office once in a while, but I'd be fine working 100% from home. Right now it's about 50~60%, but not having to make the drive a those few days a week when I do go in would be great.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
More than you might think. A lot of Linux code comes from corporations these days - Intel are the major one but RH and IBM are up there.
I will add that it's one too many.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Great in theory (well, the work bit) but managers favour people they like (eg people like them). Drone #212 is going to have to do an awful lot to get noticed and in the meantime, there might be somebody in the same office, not as good, but happens to sit next to the right people and support the same football team.
What industry do you work in? Back when I was consulting, I had the displeasure of visiting a couple dozen software offices in several states. Aggregate number of appealing women in all those offices combined: zero. The software industry is a desert.
Using Slack, or similar messaging apps, hardly means the people are working from home. I've worked for quite a few companies where some form of messaging app was used to let developers, BAs, etc. stay in contact without having to look up from their desks.
Darryl L. Pierce "What do you care what people think, Mr. Feynman?"