Clojurians Log v2

I actually kind of miss the commute. The kind of focus when you can't go anywhere else and have no or only a crappy internet connection is hard to replicate.

Sidenote, that's when I can easily get there by public transport. And no way I'm going to spend 20 hours a week in public transport again.

Yeah, i can walk to the office in 30 mins or so, it's even quite a nice walk along the river. I ain't ever going back to the office.

I know an Apple employee who is quite keen to get back to the office. Depends on the person

When my children were young, I was very happy to go to the office for a chance to focus (and my wife mostly enjoyed the chance to raise them)

he has no kids. but likes the community. also, 5 billion spent on architecture makes a really cool building

@dpsutton not sure if it's your friend case, but many persons confuse "work from home" with "work in lockdown". Work locked in home is definitively bad. But "back to the office" is not the only alternative We can still "work from home" without been locked in there. And sure we can have an office and book a day with our team to meet everyone in the same room But I can't see a reason to obligatorily go to office many days

bikes all around the building, pond in the middle, cafeteria with huge 4 story doors that open

Back when I worked at Macromedia (2000-2005/6), I liked the building in San Francisco and the office environment (and the on-site cafe!). But the commute was miserable (about an hour each way, mostly on subway trains a.k.a “BART”). Crammed in with all those other people, often forced to stand, particularly coming home. For a year prior to that I had to commute by car to a place on the Peninsula and that was often 1 1/2 hours in the morning and 2 hours in the evening in dreadful traffic (where you can’t even read or do anything useful on your phone/laptop, unlike the subway) but, again, the office was nice and it was in a very nice “campus” area that was beautifully landscaped and pedestrian-friendly. After Adobe bought Macromedia, I was forced to commute to San Jose once a week (for meetings!), by car, which was a shorter drive but just as unpleasant — and their office environment was awful (I did not enjoy anything about Adobe taking over Macromedia and quit after a year). If you’re not fortunate enough to walk to work, commuting is just such an unpleasant waste of time and terrible for the environment too. Apple’s fancy campus is in a horrible location for commuting — that commute is why I’ve pretty much refused to interview with any of those companies on the Peninsula (in “Silicon Valley” proper). You are pretty much forced to drive or spend hours and hours on a combination of public transit and their corporate buses (which means you’re still stuck in all that dreadful Bay Area traffic!).

I miss my bike ride to work. Got lots of podcasts into my brain that way. We didn’t renew our lease and now have a WeWork space I could bike to, but it wouldn’t have my sweet multi-monitor set up.

Things take a while to die out. The switch to “business casual” when everyone had to wear a suit took a while. Every desk used to have a phone on it as well as an “inbox” and it was somebody’s job to walk around the office distributing paper memorandums. Now that the internet is “all grown up”, we only need to meet in person for special occasions or not at all. Commuting is just a waste of time, causes pollution and stress. Time can be wasted in the office just as easily as at home. Managers must step up and do the real work of evaluating performance by inspecting what has been completed.

A lot of good perspectives here. I enjoyed reading them all.

I prefer having a space that I can mentally separate from my living\relaxing space but I would prefer it was a choice for those that want it than requiring people to go there.

@jayzawrotny That's why, when we bought this house 20 years ago, we set up a distinct "office" (previously one of the three bedrooms), with proper office furniture (a nice big, curved double desk for myself and my wife, with decent chairs) and all the computers/printers/scanners/routers setup. And then I have a personal laptop (and she has a tablet) which we use in other parts of the house for non-work stuff. I "go to the office" at home. I "go out" of the office to get coffee or food -- and sometimes bring it back to my desk and drink/eat at my desk or sometimes "eat out" in a different room (in the summer, sometimes even out on the back patio).

That gives me a nice, clear separation of work and living/relaxing, even down to separate computers.

(That's harder in a small space and/or if you only have one computer but I think it's important to create a separation if you can -- at least on a computer you can always have multiple accounts: one for work, one for non-work)