Weekly Column
Working From Home Isn't New. Commuting Is.
Just to get this out of the way first: working from home is not new. Humans have been working at home, or from home, for most of human existence. Your farmhouse sat on your land. Your butcher shop or blacksmith shop sat in front of, or underneath, your home.
Commuting is new, adopted slowly after World War II with the proliferation of personal automobile ownership. That's roughly 80 years, barely a rounding error against the whole of human history. And commuting to an office for something like a tech job is even stranger, because you're not a pipe-fitter or a crane operator who literally has to be where the work is happening. If you're in IT or programming, the work occurs online, wherever you are. That becomes especially clear once you've driven in just to spend the day on Teams meetings accommodating the people who aren't in the office, or done most of your job through RMM tools that work exactly as well from your home machine.
And still, I read tone-deaf, incompetent takes online promoting the supposed benefits of bookending your day with a one-to-two-hour car ride, just so you can sit in a fluorescent-lit beige-scape of silence, typing, ringing phones, and generic small talk.
"It's about the culture." No one cares. I don't care how much fun your mandatory fun is. I once won $100 in a pie-eating contest at an office job (which I'm surprisingly good at, who knew?), and guess what: if you'd asked me if I prefer that to staying home, I'd have gladly responded to emails from my home office all day.
I once worked a hybrid help-desk job, heavy on phone calls with concurrent incoming chats. Two days a week I took my laptop home. On those days, my average ticket handling went from 40 calls to 50, with a 20 percent increase in chats. Why? Maybe because I didn't have to get up and use the restroom to relieve the pain in my ass from an office chair I never picked out or had a say in. Maybe because my kitchen, five steps from my home desk, made food and drink something I could grab during a call instead of pausing for five minutes. Or maybe because I had zero coworkers talking too loud, snapping questions at me instead of putting them in chat, or otherwise creating a distraction.
See, I enjoy work. I enjoy having things to do and staying busy, especially when it's challenging. I don't want to socialize, and here comes the guy with the morning commute story: "You wouldn't believe my traffic this morning!"
Yeah, that's crazy. Stop. I'm very Rust Cohle about this, from True Detective, season 1: "This is none of my business. I don't want to hear it."
But don't you want to make friends at work? I'm ambivalent, at best. If I work with someone I genuinely like, then maybe, but I can find that out over a Teams meeting just as easily as being in an office.
If you're a manager or business owner deciding on a return-to-office policy, is it just that you like limiting your talent pool? Draw a 20-mile radius on your map. That's your talent pool. And if you're a very talented programmer or network admin working from home, and your company doesn't accommodate that, then you're working for the competition, who understands this. Maybe you just want to supervise employees more closely, in which case: there are dozens of tools that let you do exactly that, even if your employee is on the other side of the globe.
If you think remote work kills mentoring or spontaneous collaboration, allow me to introduce you to any and all video calling services, including but not limited to Teams, Zoom, Slack, Webex, and Dialpad. Everyone on your team is one call away, and most of these tools let you share your screen, grab theirs, or drive their mouse directly. You can practically guide their hand. Mentorship from sea to shining sea has never been easier.
And that's before you count the part nobody puts on the balance sheet: the commute itself. Nobody pays you for it, but it's real time and real money spent getting to a desk you could've sat at from home.
Do we get it yet? Stop trying to make commuting to an office look attractive. You know it isn't. You're just losing good people.
— Daniel