Comment by dmitrygr 3 days ago
> A thought experiment
> Have you thought of playing along and see if you would actually like going back to office full time
That is not a thought experiment. That is a "uproot your whole life" experiment.
Comparing working from the office to sticking your hand in a blender is such an absurd hyperbole that it completely discredits your argument.
Hand in the blender can be healed for a few tens of thousands of dollars and a year of rehab probably. Commute to office takes approximately one full month of human life every year, unpaid and uncompensated. So that's actually a very reasonable comparison. It's just most humans are terrible with estimating long term costs and benefits, so they tend to ignore the ridiculously insane cost of commute over whole career.
> absurd hyperbole
It's actually not, if you stop and consider the true cost of working and commuting to an office. It's just we're conditioned NOT to consider the true cost, so we externalize a bunch of the costs.
For example, you don't consider the CO2 from your car, or the time spent driving, or the risk of death. If you factor in just the time spent driving, suddenly smoking a pack a day is better for your lifespan than being in an office.
but subtlety is usually lost at the folks here and this comparison will at least be understood. then again - the thought of having to go back to the office is evoking a feeling not too different from anticipating something quite painful. too many colleagues are just unbearable and the waste of time having to commute unpaidly ... maybe i'd prefer a quick blender session for another year of home office even.
Thank you. Sure it was hyperbolic, but it was in response to the notion that maybe we’re all too shortsighted to see that we’d like full time RTO if only we’d try it. There are certain things I don’t need to try before knowing that I won’t enjoy them. I’ve worked in offices enough decades to have sufficient data: I strongly prefer WFH. “Maybe you’ll like it this time!” is weak sauce. I’m not a delicate flower who couldn’t RTO if situations demanded it. I would not help me do a better job for my company, though, and I don’t want to.
This is academic for me. I have an amazing job at a company all-in on WFH to the point we just downsized a physical office we were underusing. I hate seeing my colleagues get dragged back to legacy offices for no compelling reason though.
It is not "uprooting your whole life" to go back to working in the office, unless one was so foolish as to move away from the city their job was in. And yeah in that case it sucks balls, but I don't imagine most people did something that foolish.
> unless one was so foolish
Making decisions is not foolish, even if they disagree with your idea of how they should be made. I quit my previous job over RTO, leaving a great team at a cool company. It was a conscious decision with pros and cons carefully weighed.
seems more like very smart to do such a thing - but sometimes even smart decisions just don't work out.
“Hear me out, what if you might like sticking your hand in a blender?”
I genuinely miss seeing my pals at work and eating lunch with the gang. I genuinely do not miss the commute, the struggle to get things done with a million distractions around me, not having my dog sleeping in her basket underneath my desk in my home office, and seeing my kids before and after school.
There, thought experiment concluded. I didn’t like it.