Nearly 40% of software engineers will only work remotely (2023)

I feel crazy sometimes, because I'm the exact opposite. WFH has been a disaster for me. I just joined a team with a hybrid schedule (3 days in the office). I'm there every day, but it's pretty dead on the other 2 days. If they close the office and go remote-only I will quit on the spot.

Can you explain what has not gone well for you? How has it gone for the rest of the team?

Having the option is the point, people are different.

Hacker news is a pretty strong echo chamber for the work from home crowd. When covid hit there were many people at my company who really struggled with working from home. The reasons ranged from having kids or family interrupting them, being stuck in small condos, some of the new to the country employees relied on office time to get to know coworkers and make friends, others just really disliked working alone or wanted physical separation of work and home life.

Often the people here on HN try to make it out that anyone who appreciates or wants to work in an office is evil or stupid or the like, but honestly probably half of people actually want a few days in the office. Comments here are not actually representative of the whole industry.

+1 work - life separation is a must. And not everyone can afford a home office. Also isolation is a real threat.

I get that point of view, but for me, being alone in an empty office isn't much better than being alone at home. I'm not trying to force people to be in the office, I just want to find a team where people WANT to be there. It seems very hard to find, but it's also hard to believe I'm the only one in the world who wants to be part of something like that.

What has worked well is agreeing on a few days where people will focus their office time, no forcing involved. Make a thing out of it, buy lunch or whatever.

The only thing that changed is the power balance. It's still perfectly possible to get skilled workers into the office, they just have to want it.

oh yea because " I get to spend more time with my kids" and " I am too lonely to wfh" are equivalent .

If the team is mostly in-office, the out of office workers become second class members of the team.

I'm pretty sure few people are being forced to work remotely, it's an option.

Covid was different because school-age kids were home too, which made a larger portion of situations untenable.

To me personally, working remote makes me feel like I'm working completely alone. For me, it's hard to feel like anyone cares what I'm doing, which has made it hard to make myself put in effort. That's a recipe for a downward spiral, which is exactly what my work has been since the pandemic.

I'm not saying the office is some perfect, joyous or highly social place or anything. I just think for me, it makes a big difference to have a place (different from my house) where people come together to work on common goals, and occasionally interact face-to-face while doing it.

How about putting it on the table? As in: talk about it in the team and come up with ways to improve the situation together?

I have a mild preference for working in an office but I'm developing a very strong preference for getting out of the Bay Area/New York/Seattle complex. And unfortunately the in-office jobs at good companies are very concentrated.

They are. They're arbitrary wants/desires that have nothing to do with the job

There was a point in my life where I craved working in the office also and seeing people who also wanted to be there. And now I can't imagine going back to one.

I miss nice offices though. Before the whole let's stack people side by side on desks, rather than give them some nicer spaces with lots of room for deep thought. When I was working for HARC, we had a nice former industrial space near UCLA. I totally could go for that, but when the only way to get something semi-nice and private is to work at home, well, that is going to bias people.

except you can work on your loneliness and try to have social interactions outside work.

I guess you can say " you can try not to have kids so you can work from an office" . I have no answer to that.

If you are working remotely, you can move somewhere that you can afford a home office..

You’re being downvoted, but exactly.

The persons responses basically amount to: I can’t manage my time and need others to validate what I’m doing.

Take some personal responsibility.

I have this dream that the closed down/ghost shops blighting towns and cities across the UK will be converted into co-working spaces.

Your employer rents a desk for you, you probably get to walk to work or at least enjoy a very short commute. You have people from other employers around you for the social aspect. Etc

I guess WeWork was a similar idea that shows now is not yet the time for this.

I still think it’d be great - reduced commuting miles / time wasted. Cheaper offices that are nicer (don’t like this co working space? Just book into a different one) etc etc

This is a gross mischaracterization of the stance. I want everyone to have an office to go to anytime they want— always, sometimes, never. If you want to make me go to the office we'll have words.

We have forced-office and office-available, no one is arguing for forced-remote.

It's not crazy to have a personal in-office preference! I'm very much team WFH but I recognize some people have temperament or home environment that will make WFH difficult. And also that there are sometimes specific types of work and phases of projects that benefit from a lot of in-person collab.

It's probably even reasonable to organize teams around similar styles, preferences, and demands of the actual work output. But it's good to recognize that a LOT of IC roles benefit strongly from greater control over their work environment and time, which can often be achieved via remote (and even a lot of managerial work that's high contact light touch direction can benefit from the tooling and organization required to support remote work).

What's less good is to universalize. It rarely reflects detailed attention to organizational and individual needs and output. It's more like the fad that produced the categorically inexcusable open-plan-office. Where it happens, it's often a cover for something else, or a reflection of limited interest in good management.

I can manage my time just fine! The problem is that I find it very demotivating to be working completely alone, and enjoy working with others around. It's a personal preference, no more complex than that.

Finding a work environment that makes you most effective and productive IS taking some personal responsibility. Different people have different needs, and a big part of responsibility is understanding and managing your own needs relative to those of others.

None of those things change by physically being somewhere else.

Nobody cares what you’re doing because they’re sitting vaguely near you.

Those rose colored glasses are goddamn dark, my friend.

Then go to coworking space? Jesus. Stop trying to ruin everything because you’re lonely and want to shoot the shit by the water cooler like it’s 1952

Larger businesses tend to be more on-site focused.

That is uncharitable and dismissive.

I find it so hard to understand this type of militancy. In what other situation is it normal to respond to the statement "I have a preference for X" with "no you don't / you have issues / take responsibility for yourself"? I prefer working with others around and I'd like to work with others who feel the same way. That isn't a personal attack on you or anyone else :)

You aren't alone, although you're in the minority. In our data set, around 9% of candidates are looking for in-office work only (we find a similar value to the OP - 41% - looking for remote work only).

That's an advantage for you, though! Active desire to work in-office greatly reduces the amount of competition you're dealing with for jobs; all else equal, it should ~double your success rate.

Yes, many people are asking for offices to be completely abolished, turned into housing, or other things. Also, working is about compromises, we had some full remote, but we did ask most people to come in 1-2 days a week to work with their coworkers who wanted to have an in person meeting. We never had an issue with it, most people came in because their coworkers wanted them to, maybe 1-2 were hardcore at home forever types like you seem to be. But that was the extreme minority.

But no, I don't think I'm grossly mischaracterizing anything. Even replies to my post are literal personal attacks against the OP for not wanting to stay at home, or actually making fun of the reasons people want to go into an office. It's truly toxic behaviour.

Thanks for the explanation.

Can you imagine feeling fine with more frequent WFH yourself, if something about the culture changed?

For example, could you otherwise get the vibe that people were engaged and wanted to be working together, even when it was on intermittent chat and videoconf?

(And if there were occasional in-person meetups, if only for more personalizing or focusing?)

Are you wanting to be around other people, or specifically your team? You might try working from a co-working space if you want to be around other people.

I am very biased as I am from the Austin area, but this is a big reason why I still live here. Everywhere here seems to be very hybrid friendly and the suburbs are close and very cheap in comparison to those 3 cities.

I don't know if it's different in the UK, but at least in the states, tech companies only have offices in the most locally-expensive areas, so if their offices were converted into co-working spaces, I'd still have to commute to them.

If every neighborhood had at least one pub and if every pub had an upstairs co-working space, that would be amazing.

edit: ah, I realize now that I took the word "shops" to mean the colloquial "tech companies", but you probably meant brick-and-mortar retail stores that have been slow-killed by the internet

I've heard people say to turn empty offices into housing but not kick everyone out to do so. I think the disconnect is that if you think 1-2 days in office is the compromise you don't get why remote work is valuable. Half in office is still in-office. I don't own workwear clothes, we only have 1 car, I can stay a few weeks with friends in other cities with no issue, I get 2 hours more sleep every night with a consistent sleep schedule. All the good perks happen at actually remote.

Office available with social events and meetups is supposed to be the compromise. The part that I can't wrap my head around is what is gained by making someone who doesn't want to be in office show up? The folks at $dayjob in that position literally just sit at their desk with headphones for 8 hours.

Your dream can already be true, just use the turkish barbers and betting shops as coworking spaces. Cheaper too

WeWork was killed by a dishonest CEO, and problematic financials. As far as a product, it was pretty great to drop into a random town or city and be able to have a hot desk to work from.

He's ruining it for everyone because he prefers being the office?

This touches on the core of the problem.

The only thing that changed is you can no longer force people to the same degree.

One alternative would be to design offices that people like to work in.

I like busy cafés for focus work, with music in headphones.

The background hustle keeps my brain going but it doesn't bother me since it has nothing to do with me. Nice coffee helps.

That's awesome, I'm glad you have the option to work in a way that fits into your life.

Forcing others into the office just because you want their company is definitely a bad idea.

The way forward is finding ways to work together that the entire team is comfortable with. And employers thinking of employees more as humans and less as resources to be manipulated and squeezed. It will take compromises and growth, but it's far from impossible to achieve.

Sorry you feel the need to be babysat, the rest of us are here to get shit done.

Want me to work in the office? Offer me an office with a door.

Always so weird to see people threatened by something so trivial. I like offices! Sorry that frustrates you, pal.

Maybe I’m not stating it clearly: I want to work on a team that’s in the office full time, which I don’t currently have. I’d take a pay cut to get it! If you know of anyone doing this, please let me know. Not hybrid. 5 days in office, for everyone.

I want my work to be in-office full-time and I’m going to keep pushing for it. Consider that from my perspective you’re the one “ruining it” for me.

Yes, studies show people are more likely to want to come into the office if they have a nice office to come into. But what's the point of paying say half a million/year for an engineer if you also have to give them a nice space to be productive in?

Anyways, it isn't a mystery why people want to work at home these days, and they don't really need to be in the office anyways considering how hard it is to get conference rooms to VC all the time with your partners across the country or world.

Double of "no one is hiring" is "no one is hiring", sadly. My experience with hybrid/in-office hasn't been much better WFH. I wonder if Los Angeles is being hit even harder than most of the country for some reason.

I do worry about the junior talent in the future, yes. This attitude it part of why Juniors aren't sufficiently trained into future seniors. Then everyone wonders where the seniors went.

They don't grow on trees.

Depends on your pay.

try meetup.com or local facebook running groups ( if you are a runner) to beat loneliness.

Again if you are working remotely as a software developer, no matter whst your pay is, there is somewhere in the US you can afford an extra room for the same amount you are paying now unless you are already living in a rundown trailer in the middle of nowhere

And yet, you're threatened by an empty office, which is also trivial.

Introverts and extroverts will never understand each other. This entire thread is pointless.

you are not alone.

i love commuting and used to travel every week for work and work from customer offices. i intentionally chose this life and absolutely loved it.

covid completely upended this. work travel makes very little sense when most of your employees are hybrid.

for me, wfh has been awful.

it's difficult for me to attach to the mission without physically being with others striving for the same goals. very few people outside of this wild and wacky world of tech understand what i do. i don't really have avenues for vibing on work outside of 1x1 zooms, which are awful (for me).

i can see how it's nice if you spend all day in front of a terminal churning code, but, for me, anything involving other people is just so much worse while remote. body language, dynamism, and humanity are super hard to capture over zoom, even with the camera on. (talking to a camera is extremely unnatural in my opinion; not at all the same.)

it's also extremely easy for work to melt into your personal life, though i've found an old-school workflow that mostly solves for this (separate work phone that's off after hours, being very deliberate about where I work whilst home, etc). regardless, having to be in front of a computer in your own home when the weather's great and inviting outside feels like a mental prison of sorts. the same dynamic exists within the office, but it's _designed_ for that, which makes it different.

while i understand others wishes to be remote, i very much wish i could work in an office (and/or travel every week again).

## preemptions for common retorts!

- "Just make more friends!" can't hang out with friends during work hours. see also: ideate/kvetching about common work.

- "Pick up hobbies!" i have hobbies. i can't do them during work hours.

- "Commuting is awful!" i love commuting.

- "Work at a coffee shop if you need to be around people." i actually do do this, and it's quite nice. i don't work with those people though. i'm still working by myself.

- "Invest in a better home office!" my home office is super sweet. i'd downsize in a heartbeat for a proper office and intend on doing just that when the time comes.

I would definitely go in to the office 5 days a week if I had an office with a door and lock on it.

You might be, yes. Or living with parents or a partner who pays the bills.

But how come every solution to pay these days is a dismissive "just uproot your entire life and community and move to the middle of nowhere"? If you have no social life nor reliance on modern conviniences, sure. But I've been raised in that environment and can't recommend it to most

- it's about as walk-unfriendly as you can get. Because there's a lot of empty land and the only benefit is you buy large swaths of it for housing (at least, "large" compared to urban environments).

- you have very little business to rely on locally. I had a small grocery store, an unkempt library, some liquor stores, a church, and a single burger joint. These were all 3+ miles from my home. Doing anything else required a 40 minute drive to the nearest downtown. Especially emergencies (no local hospital).

-weather in such towns is likely worse. So expect biting cold and dry environments or arid deserts. Not really places you can just walk out and take a quick jog if you're into that.

If all that is worth never coming into an office just so you can have a dedicated office, then sure. Move your life.

I will compliment the lack of light pollution, though. Amazing place if you're an amateur stargazer. Or simply want to see the night sky in the ways Hollywood portrays it.

There are plenty of burbs in major cities where you can live without being in MiddleOfNowhere Nebraska. People move from their childhood homes all of the time.

Should I have stayed in my small town in south GA when I graduated from college in CS in the mid 90s to be close to my parents and friends?

The US is a big place with diverse weather.

I bet you I can find you a nice big house in the burbs of Atlanta, Charlotte, a hurricane mostly safe place in central Florida, rtc.

I in fact moved from Atlanta where I spent all of my adult life since 1996 two years ago with my wife because I wanted better weather and save money on taxes (no state tax) as a bonus.

You adapt, you make new friends. Honestly most of my friends in Atlanta are so busy with their own lives and family, even when I lived in the same metro area, we still had to make an effort to plan quarterly get togethers.

I still do that now - I just hop on a plane.

>People move from their childhood homes all of the time.

And some don't. It's a personal choice and comes down to a myriad of factors. Do you want to stay close to family or do you in fact want to be as far away as possible? Is your town a good place to network, if you care about networking? What are the laws/policies in your old and new town (something becoming more relevant by the month)? Is home ownership important to you, present or future? Dating scene, safety, venues. It's hard to distill all those experiences down to "what lets me have a home office for my job?" unless that is your biggest factor.

>You adapt, you make new friends.

Let me know when that happens for me. If I'm struggling in Los Angeles, I dont' want to imagine how it is for smaller scenes to make adult friends. That's a whole other topic.

>I still do that now - I just hop on a plane.

My family and I aren't meeting this holiday season precisely because "just hopping on a plane" isn't an easy expense this year. Planes don't get much cheaper with CoL.

I know of one company, Axis Communications, one of the reasons I'm not working there anymore.

But there's a fair amount of forcing involved.

Me thinks you're not going to find many companies filled with people who enjoy living in the office.