To the best of my knowledge, San Francisco (SF) was the first major city in North America to shut everything down in their reaction to the Covid pandemic. I remember having dinner with friends at a restaurant in the Mission District of SF on Friday, March 13th. One of them, who did some part-time work for a virologist, kept telling us that everything was about to change. I thought she was being hyperbolic and dramatic but . . . she was absolutely correct! Three days later, on Monday, March 16th the stay-at-home order was issued and everything instantly changed.
I was part of a small software engineering team in SF and, on a dime, we all started working from home. I arguably had a better tech setup at home than at the office and had worked on my own from my home in Vancouver for many years so it wasn’t a problem for me. For some of my colleagues, it was probably a bit weird at first but soon they grew to like it, and then love it. Most of them lived far outside of the city and now no longer had to engage in a 90 – 120 minute commute each way to get to work.
Given that I personally know several hundred tech professionals in the SF Bay Area, I’m very aware that none of them want to return to the office now, 2 years later. Oh sure, we all miss the camaraderie of working in person with others but those long commutes can be soul destroying and are absolutely pointless. Given that most tech teams are now national, and often international, what’s the point of working in an office. As an example, I have a colleague who lives in Fremont, CA. She has a 90+ minute commute on a very dirty, unsafe metro called BART. When she gets to the downtown SF office she would open her laptop to . . . communicate with software engineers in Ohio and Peru. Once again, the purpose of commuting all that way is . . . what exactly???
I eventually put most of my belongings in storage and left SF. Anyone paying attention to the news knows why. With a laptop, 2 external monitors, and other tech accessories, I found it very easy to make it work and have been traveling around the U.S. ever since, successfully working remotely from the AirBnbs and hotels and friends’ homes I’ve stayed in. Perhaps this lifestyle isn’t for everyone but it works exceptionally well pour moi.
As the [reaction to the] pandemic dragged on, most every tech professional I know got more & more satisfied with working remotely – be it a few hours away from the office, across the country, or even across the world. “Have laptop & WiFi” has become the common refrain of the Digital Nomad.
The views on all of this from tech management is mixed. Some companies have capitalized on the phenomenon with job ads like this: Forced back to the office? Come join Signal instead.. Have lemons, make lemonade. Others, like Elon Musk, have famously stated that “[Remote workers] can pretend to work somewhere else”. I actually fully respect his viewpoint. It seems clear that if an employer is paying someone to do something, then they can lay out the terms of employment. Then people can agree or disagree to said terms and choose accordingly.
What drives many nuts is when some employers take a passive-aggressive stance, trying to guilt people into returning to the office but not really coming out and saying it. My own employer tried this. They lost 3 senior people as a result. They almost lost the entire team. I got a big raise out of it because they didn’t want to lose me. The fact is that a 0-minute commute vs. a 2 to 4 hour daily commute is a no-brainer for most. In point of fact, it’s the employer that loses those hours of productive work, albeit from conscientious employees. My time-zone preference, when working for a Pacific Coast company is to be in the Central or Eastern Time Zones. I tend to get up at 7am local time and am usually working by 8am local time, which means 3 to 4 hours before the 9am PT official start time. At the end of the day, I will always work until at least 4pm PT. Indeed, this makes for a long day but I love my work so it’s not an issue at all.
A new phenomenon emerged during the pandemic whereby some people started working 2+ full-time jobs. To be clear, most of these folks are not working 8 hours in the morning/afternoon and then working another 8 hours in the evening. Oh no, they’re “working” all jobs simultaneously!
There was one fellow on my team, a QA engineer contractor out of Boston who was absolutely useless on our team. He took hours to answer simple Slack messages when the general expectation is < 30 seconds, if only to say, “Can’t answer right now. Will later.” I found out that he said in a meeting that he didn’t want to work with me because I asked too many questions. How dare I expect him to do his f’ing job! Later I found out that he sloughed off most of his testing work on our full-time QA colleagues. Through it all, our manager never caught on that he wasn’t pulling his weight … at all. Which perfectly segues into this joke:
- Q: Why do middle-level managers want everyone to return to the office?
- A: So they can justify their existence.
While intended to be humorous, there’s actually a whole lot more truth to this than people wish to admit.
If a company has responsible people working for them, who truly live up to the “professional” moniker, then work gets done properly and on-time. But when irresponsible people are thrown into the mix, problems quickly arise. Forcing them into the office where they can “appear” to be working, is not actually a solution to fixing productivity issues.
In summary, the past 2.5 years may have changed things forever, at least for those of us fortunate enough to be able to work remotely. Articles like this one talk about reduced costs for employees. While true, I’m absolutely convinced it’s the elimination of the insane commute times that incentivizes most people to stay working remotely.
The one thing I ask of my fellow techies is to have more than a little compassion for those who have jobs which are not conducive to working remotely. You are privileged yet so many have exhibited exceptionally selfish views about how they would prefer things to stay locked down forever. Easy for you to say but if that principle were applied to everyone in society then you would starve, have no heat or electricity or Internet within just a few days. News flash: Naive selfishness is not an attractive trait.
Finally, and this is primarily being added for the SDA audience, while I’m comfortable with my current job, the fact is that every software engineer with even a little experience, is contacted by multiple tech recruiters every week. Why? Because there are tens of thousands of unfilled tech jobs in America right now, even during this recession. For a tech recruiter to place a software engineer in a role typically means a cheque for them of 30%+ of the engineer’s first year salary. That’s a whole lot of money for not much of an investment of time.
When tech recruiters contact me nowadays, I have a basic template response I copy & paste and then customize a little. It states that I’m quite happy with my current job but am open to very specific other opportunities as long as they match what I’m looking for in terms of: Tech Stack, Mission, Remuneration, and Geographic location. My strong preference to the last one is Remote-only but I add that Hybrid (a few days a week/month at the office) as long as it’s not in any of these communities: Seattle, Portland, SF Bay Area, Metro Los Angeles, Phoenix, Las Vegas, Little Rock, St. Louis, Chicago, Minneapolis, Detroit, Philadelphia, NYC, Washington DC, Baltimore, or Atlanta. Some are on this list because they’re just too darn hot but most are on the list for a different reason. Do you think they can figure out the commonality?!
Great post. Pre-pandemic only about 6% of people worked from home. Today, who knows, but it’s a lot and growing. There is no going back.
Personally, I work for a New York-based firm while living in a small town on Vancouver Island. My clients are all over North America and Europe, and I’d say between a third and a half of them are also working from home.
If they doubled my salary in return for working from the office I’d say no in a second. There is no going back. And if you cast an eye over cities today with their soaring costs and crime, it’s a no brainer. I think a lot of cities are set for permanent decline from here.
Downtown cores are going to wind up being vacant, if nobody is going to commute anymore.
Which means businesses in the cores will suffer. No more foot traffic, and all those empty office buildings.
I’m just wondering what that’s going to do to the local economy.
Things change
Exhibit A: downtown Ottawa. Nobody is riding the shiny new LRT into downtown, downtown businesses only had trade when the truckers were there, civil servants are happy to log in from the burbs, cottage, farm.
Smart/wise city governments and smart real estate folks will start enabling the “loft conversion” thing ASAP for much of those office buildings. It will take the city/county/state governments though to look forward, because there’s a whole lotta zoning and probably building codes that are going to have to be changed. The other thing the wise gubmints will do is crack down on crime and all the progressive stupidity that is rendering their cities unattractive. One thing that would go a LONG way would be to pass a law that imposes the death penalty for “random murders”. You know, like when some scum pushes an unsuspecting commuter in front of the subway train. And no, there is NO “insanity defense” for that.
Dumb cities will just keep on doing the dumb that they’re doing.
Calgary’s new LRT line – The Green Line – is currently under construction. At least the first half is, at an estimated cost of $5.5 Billion! And expected to go much higher. So, what, $12 Billion or so for an LRT to an empty downtown? Well done, you clowns!
Edmonton just built a new $1.2-Billion LRT line to downtown that was supposed to open last year.
Construction flaws have rendered it a useless empty white elephant until further notice.
AND they have begun construction on its extension to the other end of the city.
Because climate change, blah, blah, blah.
As you mention, the key to remote work for the employer is: “If a company has responsible people working for them”. That, unfortunately, is not the case for governments where many employees do the least amount of work possible. The possibility for these employees to do even less work now that they are “working” remotely has increased exponentially, which is why the public sector unions are fighting so aggressively to prevent a complete return to the office.
There has been a huge decline in the productivity of Canadian government employees since government lockdowns and remote work began in March 2020. In total, governments have added 400,000 employees in the last 30 months while the quality, reliability and timeliness of all government services to Canadians have declined dramatically.
Ottawa
I used to have my own little business and had to deal with the government once in a while, and didn’t believe they could get any worst than they were. Guess I was wrong:-))))
Experienced ICs love it. Terrible for anyone getting into the industry and terrible for businesses in the long run. Agree that it’s a non-starter to push for back to office in the short term, but I don’t see it lasting through thile upcoming depression.
The catch is and will forever be:
How do you do light or heavy engineering “from home”?
Or any work that entails close human interaction with material objects.
In show-biz, the term, “phoning it in” is a derogatory reference to a performance where the the dialogue is just recited without any real “interaction” / “feeling”.
How many electricians, plumbers and gas-fitters can “work from home”? Nurses and doctors? Commercial fishermen?
OK, most primary industries involve people “working from home”, but that is a far cry from digital “paper-shuffling”.
I’m a builder, I work from other people’s homes. When I work from my own I don’t make any money… I agree with everyone that it’s way better though.
I work in an engineering office.
There was a big push to get employees to Work From Home once the thing that totally didn’t come from a Chinese Lab kicked off and some people openly embraced it.
I pushed back for reasons and returned to the office quite earlier, but we still get a lot of people Working From Home even now. Frankly due to our type of work I find it very frustrating. If you are not at your desk I cannot ask you direct questions and I am not prepared to work out if you are WFH, on leave, on sick leave or off on TOIL.
Hate to say this, but I am with Musk on this one.
Remote work will sort itself out… those who can be productive will thrive, and those who use it to shirk their employment obligations will eventually reap the consequences.
Myself, I’ve never been a fan of remote work, simply because I’ve seen so many instances where productivity suffered terribly in the final analysis. However, with modern standards of personal connectivity, I guess it’s possible for remote work to actually be productive. Still, it takes the right people to do it, and the right people to manage it… it will never be easy.
A good portion of mechanical engineers already know little to nothing about manufacturing. Isolating them from the people and machinery that perform the work can only accelerate the trend toward designing things that simply can’t be made. 3D printing helps somewhat, but it can’t address all the deficiencies.
Building upscale homes( like 8 car garages ).
Framing subs, or others come to me , drag me to somewhere and basically say they can’t do the plan. I look at the plan. They point. It’s obvious. I call the architect….they say yeah I know I thought you could figure it out.
Happens all the time.
So me, the subs wing it. Owner can’t read plans. Architect doesn’t know building, materials.
We’re are a society run by inheritors. Not the builders of society. The elites plop themselves down in the Grandfathers big chair and think they built the country.
I think you can safely remove the word ‘mechanical’ from your first sentence.
This is not a dig as such, more a pragmatic observation. Engineering is a big place and there are a lot of specialised skill sets.
The problem is that the people who put the engineering teams together often have little idea of how overall workflow should work and rarely structure balanced teams, or, have the ability to use balanced teams and full workflow and choose not to in order to meet the semi random KPI set from above.
We could get into discussions about responsibility and authority as well. In my Day Job for example I am responsible for a lot of things, but have little actual authority to enforce. So if I start to lay down lists of requirements for a problem I can often get the response that the method I am describing sounds like too much extra work and they just wander off and do… something away from me.
Engineering is a big place. Occasionally it is also a very well oiled and effective big place, but mostly just big with massive amounts of silos and re-inventing of wheels.
Still, get paid on the 15th. Remember the 15th.
@ Mudcrab:
“Engineering is a big place and there are a lot of specialised skill sets.
A succinct summary:
“Mechanical engineers build weapons.
Electrical engineers build guidance systems.
Civil engineers build targets.”
I think my company would like us to work more in the office but they have not done anything to make it a pleasant experience. It is all hotel space, the coffee sucks, the booking system is useless. At home I have my espresso machine, my big monitor hooked to the TV when I need it and my gym is close by so I can walk over whenever I want. As many have said I work with people all over the world; why would I spend time going somewhere miserable when I can stay at home. If any of you have watched Severance you get the picture.
Great post, Robert.
OttawaMJ, I heard the government employee situation was bad, but didn’t realize that it had become so deep and pervasive in just 2 years.
Another pandemic impact has been on education. A lot of students are not keen on returning to regular classes. There are also a considerable number of students whose health has been adversely affected by the jab. Then there are the kids, including preschool, who have learning disabilities and psychological issues because of masks and lockdowns.
I spent probably the last 25 years working almost all remotely. Most of the work was Professional Services, and a few years ago that really translated to road warrior. Besides the technical ability (and people skills…) all you really needed was a good internet connection, dedicated phone and access to a reasonably well connected airport.
There were some drawbacks. One was that your manager, whoever he/she was needed to remember that you existed as a person, even though they didn’t get to chat with you over coffee every morning. For example, I worked for a company that ended up being acquired by another (Sun Microsystems). After a while, they did one of their never-ending re-orgs, and the group that I worked with ended up reporting to a manager in Denver. He and his existing group were Java developers, and really knew nothing about the products we were supporting. In addition, we were scattered over the country in different timezones. Most of the work came from other managers, nothing really changed. One day, he called me to ask “do we sell a product xxxx?” assured that we did he then asked if I would know how to handle a problem some customer was having. Yes.
Didn’t hear from him again for ages, then review time came around. My Phone rang.
“Hi, this is ”
“Hi, how are you?”
“Fine, so how are things with you, Paul?”
“Fine, but my name is Philip”
“Oh, yes … and how is the Weather in Seattle?”
“Well, I don’t really know, I am about 400 miles south of Seattle, but here it’s quite nice”.
….
I didn’t get a warm and fuzzy feeling from that.
A few months later, Sun was having problems, and needed to lose a few people. Our manager was given a target number of people to lay off. Guess who got tagged for layoff – all of my tram, and not a single one of his.
Fortunately, someone realized that if they did that they would have no-one that could do PS work on the products that they spent a fortune to acquire. We ended up with a better manager.
It used to be the case that if someone was paying for your time, they wanted to see your face.
Then the bean-counters counted their beans and worked out just how much it was costing them to see these faces, and it became more and more frequent for them to ask if the work could be done remotely. Of course it could. What is the difference if I sit in one of their cubes working on a computer in a data center a thousand miles away or sitting in my home working on that same computer?
Turn office suits into “housing” with maintence rents for the workers, grocery stores on the lower floors, not street level so the zoo animals can’t get in. Would solve some issues for everyone.
Been done, they are called company towns.
“There has been a huge decline in the productivity of Canadian government employees since government lockdowns and remote work began in March 2020. In total, governments have added 400,000 employees in the last 30 months while the quality, reliability and timeliness of all government services to Canadians have declined dramatically.”
OH, you mean like he Pasport Office
Fewer people with passports means less airline travel. It’s by design.
Arrive Canada? Fewer people will travel. By design.
Long line ups in airports? Fewer people travel. By design.
When has “government” ever been “productive”?
I’ve worked from home for thirty years. My commute is reaching for my laptop – and for those making notes, yes, yes I did have a 286 laptop. I will happily travel to see clients but rarely need to. The money I don’t spend on gas or downtown coffee or lunch adds up. I joke with people that I actually retired 15 years ago but simply have not bothered telling anyone.
Now, I work entirely for myself. Which means I have to set deadlines and meet them. I have a partner who does about half my sales but I also have private clients.
To do this you need to have two things: an office space your wife and kids don’t come into and a really great relationship with your wife who, ideally, has a space of her own as her office/sewing room/ tech centre.
It works for me.
Great post Robert, many thanks.
I’ve owned my own business (incidentally in the downtown core) for 40 years, mostly for two reasons: 1) I wanted to be my own boss, and 2) I couldn’t imagine suffering through a long daily commute.
For all those years I had a 15-20 minute easy door-to-door commute, which I timed to avoid rush hour, congested routes etc., except for the years when I had to drop the kids off at school. Occasionally I would get caught up in “rush hour” traffic, or caught a glimpse of it on the freeway. I always thought to myself “Those poor stupid bastards, why would they subject themselves to that every day, twice, maybe wasting 10 or 15 hours each week..”
Congratulations on all those people who have been able to leverage the pandemic into changing the rules of the game, and are now working from home. Makes way more sense than a long daily commute.
I hope it works out for you all.
Just don’t forget to drop by downtown every now and then to see what you’ve been missing!!
What a load of horse shit.
People on laptops don’t do anything to build society.
GFY.
Working from home is synonymous with leeching.
Who built a school, a bridge, a road, a sewer, a fridge, a furnace working from home?
Who built a pipeline or mined iron ore working from home?
Cram it in your cramholes.
You make me sick.
Every single one of you.
I’ve spoken to small commercial outlet owners in central Calgary often of their challenges of running a business, and am aware of how the tax structure here has changed in the past decade.
Some business owners have told me they’ve moved to locales of 1/2 – 1/3 the size of former locations while their business taxes have still gone through the roof.
Home owners in the suburbs are going to take it on the chin hard when city councils look around and can’t find any companies to tax further. They’re not going to reduce tax, we all know that’ll never happen. As for property values in central cores where vastly fewer people are willing to work, there’ll be some “adjustments” coming…
If the towers are only 1/3 filled, why would they extend leases for 20 years?
Those office towers aren’t easily converted to condo suites, typically they may have 2/4 washroom facilities per level, and they never have kitchens. I’d expect a $20 million cost to just add washroom and kitchen facilities (16 washrooms, 8 kitchens per level) and individual HVAC to each suite in a building of 30 levels, 8 suites per floor, + whatever it costs to “make it look good”. It may seem a lot less than a new building, but this is also in a building that’s 1/2 though its service life.
They may not be worth the retrofit.
I have no idea what the people will do who dwell in Democrat controlled cities that Robert W has mentioned above.
Or their local governments which are already overextended in the bond market.
Get out now!?!?!
I’m a plumber/gasfitter, I did enjoy building the towers in downtown Calgary, and am content now to work in houses or small businesses away from there.
The pay being offered now is looking good for those who know how to make your house warm, how to run electricity in your house… I think adding 20% to the bills of those who work for gov’t sounds just fine to me.
No, I don’t care what anyone thinks of that.
“I think adding 20% to the bills of those who work for gov’t sounds just fine to me.”
It’s a drone service fee.
Work from my smartphone is more like it.. I am unlucky enough to be a on site worker who has to work with people who work from home.. Let just say my mornings and early afternoons are quiet.. Things pickup around 2pm after they have slept in, walked the dog, eaten lunch and grocery shopped..
One day a couple of them graced us with their presence and I overheard them complaining about the long hours put in working from home.. These were clients so I didn’t ask them where they were from 8am to 2pm every day of the week.. What they have done is put themselves on the afternoon shift.. That’s fine if everything is already lined up.. A disaster if they are supposed to be running the details..
I didn’t ask for a raise because I would have to pretend I’m happy for another year.. My boss gave me a big one anyway.. He knows..
Robert … I have been working from home since setting up my own sole proprietorship in 1990. That’s a shitload of years with a ZERO commute. And in all honesty, I believe that fact alone has contributed to my good mental and physical health. While I have watched friends burnout and some even die chasing the corporate cheese … I’ve been able to calmly yet enthusiastically perfect my craft and create countless beautiful projects.
It’s amusing that my business … practiced out of my home … was mocked and derided by many. It wasn’t quite “professional” regardless of the inspired, professional work I created. Working out of my front bedroom was … well … just silly. Nonsense. My home office is like a business cocoon … insulated from the distractions of a typical corporate “open office” plan. Yeah … a “open” plan for human distraction. Like you … I am more responsive and totally equipped in my little solo office space. So now that all those people who mocked my home office now embrace their own home offices … I just smirk my derision at their arrogance
And I live in a verrrrrry nice suburban community in the East Bay. A community that is very desirable because of great public schools (thank you quality parents) and a semi rural environment. However, as Bay Area land/home values go … we have always lagged far behind Silicon Valley prices. Well … since C-19 that’s starting to change. Now that the Silicon Valley salaries aren’t just tied to Silicon Valley properties … our local property values have started rising dramatically. The Silicon Valley elites are moving to the East Bay … where a couple commutes per week are manageable … but property values are still within reason. But prices are getting bid up … at least before Bidinh’s 6uild 6ack 6etter to 1799.
Kenji
yea…but you’re still living in a Left Coast Political Dump as they all are…no.?
LA to Prince Rupert BC. 100% Climatard – Save the Jungle tree frog – Free Injection site – Tent city – Feces in the street – HI Crime Leftist shit-holes…None of which I would ever want to be Near let alone live in. Cities that are rotting from the downtown core on out. Zoom & TEAMS being a big part of said exodus
Sorry dude seems to me you’re surrounded by the above enlarging cesspools…?
For all of 2020 and 2021 I worked in the office, in one of very few teams that did. The building was mostly empty, except for the maintenance shop downstairs. At the end of 2021 they mandated jabs and I had to leave that company. I started working in a similar company that is majority Inuit owned and did not have a jab mandate. I’ve been able to work from home most days since I started there and, I must admit, I LOVE it. I tend to be a bit of a hermit so it suits me perfectly, plus, this company has job sites in more provinces so the variety is interesting. The bonus has been that, while gas prices were really high, my gas tank stayed full for a very long time. I only had to fill up once this summer.
For people that have skills that are profitably exercised via a keyboard – briefwriters, authors, tech writers, coders, etc – you could always hang out your subcontract shingle and work from home, so long as you could sign clients. Plus, there were always those who never really spent time in the office – outside sales, etc.
Covid extended that ability – that benefit – to those whose skills were NOT naturally conducive to the WFH model. But too many people realized how much better it made life, so it’s going to be tough to go back.
But I think we will go back. It’s tough to actually manage people without seeing them, especially when their skill set wasn’t one of those first batch that naturally worked in WFH, where their quality and effort are made apparent in their output.
Did you see my joke about the purpose of middle-level managers? My #1 complaint about Silicon Valley tech companies is that 90%+ of the managers are incredibly incompetent. They’re really good about ensuring they don’t get fired but most are nothing more than big company bureaucrats who LOVE having an endless string of meetings and then undoubtedly pat themselves on the back at week’s end, remarking how hard they worked. Really? IMO if most of these managers went on a sabbatical for 6 months, no one would notice.
I don’t manage anyone directly but I can usually gauge within a few minutes of interacting with a new person, whether they’re a producer, lazy, or even a fraud. Why can’t most managers recognize the same?
Bringing people back to the office might provide the illusion of a well functioning team but nothing more. Accountability, dedication, coordination, and responsibility are what’s necessary for high-functioning teams.
“Bringing people back to the office might provide the illusion of a well functioning team but nothing more”
I’m not going to disagree with this at all, for the same reasons as the ones you gave.
But that illusion – sought by people who can at best produce an illusion of managing competence, and for whom meaningless made-up metrics end up defining “success” in their minds – is probably enough to keep that managerial class happy (or happier) than they are right now with no daily face time with their reportees.
I’m not saying that we’ll return to Work From Work because it will be so much more effective, but because it will make managerial beancounters feel secure and needed. People who are bringing in-demand skills to the table will still, like before, be able to name their price, which will probably include WFH.
So I’m pretty sure I’m agreeing with you.
I just read through every single comment. Thank you all for your excellent insight!
I hope & trust I was VERY clear in my very essay:
1. I feel very blessed that I’ve been allowed to work remotely. I don’t take the privilege for granted.
2. I deeply appreciate everyone who has to work away from home, away from the meta-universe that are the 3 computer screens in front of me right now.
3. I support Musk and any other business person who demands that everyone work from his workplaces. If people want to do that, then good for them. I’m not interested in working daily inside any 4 walls than my own. Does that make me less worthy?
4. I concur with one comment that managers tend to forget about remote workers. In my mind, who cares?! Fact: The average tenure of a software engineer in Silicon Valley is 14 months. The notion that I’m going to care about what a given manager thinks is the best career path for me at the company we’re currently both employed by is beyond laughable. It’s 2022, not 1952.
Writing software code, like I do, is somewhat akin to writing a book. I don’t have the skills of Mark Steyn or Douglas Murray and deeply admire what they do. But, on the other hand, they probably can’t build a software app from scratch either; one that can dramatically improve the productivity of workers in the real world.
Not sure if you’re all aware, but companies around the world are scrambling to find qualified software engineers. In America, where I’ve called home for several years, they simply aren’t cranking out enough Computer Science and Software Engineering students, which is what provides boundless opportunities for Canadians, Europeans, Indians, Chinese, etc. And when Silicon Valley companies can’t find enough tech personnel locally, they seek it elsewhere: in Canada, in Asia, in South America, in Europe, wherever. So when I open my laptop and am having a video & screen sharing discussion with one engineer in Ohio, another in Memphis, and two in Peru, what exactly is the purpose of me being at an office in San Francisco?!?
Kenji and others mentioned that they’ve worked for themselves for many years. Kudos! I did too – in Vancouver, Victoria, & Montreal. No boss to answer to. No endless meetings. I haven’t been able to legally do that in America … up until now, when something dramatically & positively changed.
In my mind, everyone should do the best they can with the cards they’re dealt. Some are born to multi-millionaire parents. Some win the lottery. I’ve never felt any jealousy to these folks. For the rest of us, we have to engage in these things called “jobs” in order to put food on the table and a roof over our heads. To that end, I hope that everyone utilizes their abilities to the maximum extent possible. “Where” & “how” one earns money is up to them. Not for me to judge.
What is being lost in this thread is that most of the people talking here are experienced. Yes, us experienced people can work from anywhere…. For the following poorly and quickly written rant, please realize that a) I hate going to the office, and the hours spent commuting and getting ready/unwinding, and b) I spend a lot of my time in the virtual world.
As a chemical/process engineer with nearly three decades under my belt in major engineering companies, major energy companies, and OEMs, I can work from home whenever I want – almost regardless of the corporate position. At this level, I don’t need a director or VP to tell me what to do – since most of them have no idea what I do anyways*. Tell me the priorities (assuming they actually understand the term) and get out of my team’s way. (*Most “engineers” these days seem to want to be Project Managers on a supposed career path to VP or the C-suite, but don’t actually understand how projects evolve over the entire lifecycle, much less what is required by whom and when.)
I used to be capable of orders of magnitude more work at home when I was a “do-er” due to drive and a deliberate lack of distractions. Now that I am more of a guide and approver as opposed to a “do-er”, it is much easier to be distracted at home than in the office – the work is no longer new and/or exciting.
This is why I see a huge issue coming, and it is going to hurt us very fast. Just like after the late 80’s/90’s where engineering effectively died in Western Canada, a new lost decade looks like it is about to happen. The next couple of generations are being left without the interaction and on-the-fly inter-discipline training required to make functional engineers (i.e., not just barely competent textbook readers). The only thing that really brings me joy anymore is teaching. The interactions between senior engineers and leads of different disciplines are now invisible to the junior staff. The discussions, negotiations, and compromises made along the way are invisible. Wanting to understand how all the disciplines affected each other is what made it exciting for me when I was younger. There is nothing exciting about sitting at home along doing the basic stuff everyone starts on, especially if you don’t understand how what you are doing ties into everything else. Without seeing how everything ties together, they all want to be managers, but no one is putting in the ground floor work.
Sorry, but much of the world is too complex for remote work until you are at the point where you master your portion of the complexity. Email is a horrible method of communicating complex issues. Virtual meetings are a horrible method of learning. Most people in Western Canada do not know that we lost so much experience and learning in the late 80’s and 90’s that engineering in Western Canada almost did not recover. The entire engineering world was almost outsourced to the US or offshore. Even now, all major projects have mandatory minimums for cheap offshore hours for most disciplines. Add on top of this the idiots who are trying to destroy the base industries in the West (both Canadian and the cultural West), the talent and knowledge is leaving and is not coming back.
Those who built the infrastructure, tools, and systems, that most of the people on this thread use every day to work remote, are disappearing. Go build productivity apps. Go build accounting programs or games. The bedrock of our society is being destroyed, but most of you who work in the virtual world won’t see it until the last pillars collapse.
The electronic world only exists because of the “hidden work” done in the physical world. Without that hidden world, both physical and related the fab shops, distributors, field craft, and engineering, your apps are not going to be worth anything. There will be no one left to use or buy them.
Many great posts on this thread, but yours was the most poignant and far sighted. Thank you.
Well…as a Senior Welding Inspector…REMOTE work on a Pipeline.? say Whaaaaaa…??
And drones wont be taking my place for a long long while just yet. Inspection has to be done in true 3D…LIVE by a human.
Besides, I’d get bored beyond all get out without being outside and in the wild. Meh, where else will ya get to see a real live Lynx, Bobcat…or…a Wolf..?
MacBk Pro in the Truck, iPad with Sim crd/Wifi in hand…Fluke meter/temp gun and other handheld Measuring tools, Gallon jug of water n cooler full of food – good to go fer 12hrs – (Loaded Shotgun in the truck – 8″ blade at the hip)….jic
lovin it…
The main thing you forgot to mention Robert, is that by working from home, you are saving Mother Gia!
All Blessings of all beings shower your life!
🙂
All fun aside, I have spent the last 5 years working for a municipal government. I have come to the conclusion that meetings are a specific function of CYA. By having multiple meetings prior to a decision, pretty well protects the whole management team from responsibility.
And yes, if the employee only knows government employment, most of the time they literally slow walk everything. Very frustrating to work with when you come from the private sector.
Ah well, it was my retirement job and now I am retired!
Back to the garden!
Good point! The massive insistence by Facebook, Google, etc. to have everyone return to the office shows their TRUE INTEREST in saving us from “climate change”. Namely, none at all.
Nice rant Robert. I’m just helping Buddy with his pills but in the meantime…
Q: Why do middle-level managers want everyone to return to the office?
A: So they can justify their existence.
I believe that managers naively think that if a person is inside the company building, they are working for the company.
As for the people who can’t work from home, like miners etc, pay them more. The downfall for people who can work remotely is that you are now competing with a worldwide audience for your job.
I started working from home in 2014, after my daughter was born. I like to say I was WFH before it was cool. There was a fairly effective woman pretty high up in HR who was a big advocate of remote work. They were advertising it regularly in our company newsletter. After the third time seeing it, I talked to my boss. He sort of hinted that upward mobility would be limited working from home and I politely told him getting a promotion to manager and having 18 – 20 direct reports wasn’t worth the $10k per year pay raise. So I was a full time work-from-homer from that point on. Telework for me was like coming home. I remember the first few days I’d openly joke, ‘well, time to commute to work,’ and I’d walk downstairs to my office. Work life balance is amazing. I’d spend my mornings playing with my new daughter instead of driving into the city. These days I help my kids get ready for school and wave to them as they get on the bus, then walk into my sun room and start my day. And I’m home when they get off the bus.
This is how family life should be and how it was for a large part of our history. We’ve adopted a very toxic way of living. Leave for work at 7am after dropping your kids off at daycare so you can get to the office at 8am. It’s about as anachronistic as the “in/out” folders people used to have on their desks… heh, or a desk phone. And our kids would spend 10-12 hours of the day with strangers, and return home to spend two waking hours with their parents. Sleep for a few hours and rinse and repeat. A few hours of this time is lost to the family due to nothing more than the commute! I think remote work can cure this degraded lifestyle. And if that happens it’s going to lead to wider political changes. Broken families is great for the large, interventionist government types who sell the idea that government is there to “take care of you.” Strong families are an inoculation against that type of weak thought.
Anyway, for years after that the WFH waxed and waned and then finally in 2019 I was told that I was “one of the last remaining employees” still working from home. I was lucky that that my manager liked me and I found it easy to tell him that if I lost my work from home, I’d be gone. Lots of negative talk amongst exec about telework. Certain members of the exec openly badmouthing it and saying they don’t support it. To me these people can politely be called “old school,” but a better description is “fossils” or “dead wood.” They’re the type who hate their wives and families and driving an hour into work and not coming home until 7pm makes them feel important and it becomes how they define their value as a person. But the scamdemic hit and the rest is history. Boom! Entire company needs to get on remote work ASAP. Large contracts get made for the licenses required for our VPN software… immediately scale up the VPN gateways. In 2022, there was an initial effort to “bring everyone back into the office,” but people had tasted telework and they were hooked. I remember having a conversation with my manager where I told him about my young nephew who just graduated from university and was working remotely, full time for an American company. I told him the job market is irreversibly changed now and that we had better get a clue. Massive pressure forced exec to implement an official telework program. Now, working from the office is an anachronism too.
My employer told us in June that we all had to return to the office in September or else “ face the consequences”.
I immediately tendered my resignation within 2 hours offering up to 4 weeks notice if they needed time for me to train a replacement.
Within a week I had a written agreement stating I could continue to work from home along with a nice salary increase to incentivize me to stay. I made sure this stupidity cost them.