At large companies with distributed teams, work from office makes no sense. Post pandemic, I started commuting in, only to sit outside or in a hallway on zoom calls, and then eat (excellent) cafeteria food that is bad for my health.
I traded that for a full remote job, and 4 hours for exercising a week. My watch says all my health trends have been markedly improving ever sense.
I wouldn’t mind an in-office job with a strong, 100% local team, but that’s rare these days, especially since I don’t want to move across Silicon Valley or deal with anything longer than a bike commute (and I am not the only one!).
My org became remote during covid, we are split across 4 cities, 3 of which in the same country even. Now we are told to go back to the office 3/5 days ... only to use the same tools to work remotely. In the office, there's none else from my team; and the only other person I know is my skip manager.
I have expressed multiple times here that I like the office, and I go 5/5 days with some exceptions, because the 45 minute commute on foot allows me to decompress and relax. I know that when I reach home, there's no more work.
Funnily enough, I prefer it like this because I have fewer interruptions.
I was thinking that way, then I realized I could take the 45 minutes (in my case, 48 minutes), and use it to jog, bike a beautiful hilly trail, or strength train, and get 5x the benefit for the same amount of time.
Yes that’s my exact problem - I’m sick of all the damn zooms. I watched as my team went from 15 minutes of standup where everyone was literally standing up face to face and the rest of the day was a mix of dedicated work and ad-hoc collaboration to literal hours of just sitting in online meetings, but exclusively those of the least productive sort. Ugh.
The product reflects it too - in the year since I’ve left no new significant features have come out.
I traded that for a full remote job, and 4 hours for exercising a week. My watch says all my health trends have been markedly improving ever sense.
I wouldn’t mind an in-office job with a strong, 100% local team, but that’s rare these days, especially since I don’t want to move across Silicon Valley or deal with anything longer than a bike commute (and I am not the only one!).