The post-covid "remote work" will be very different from the present day and past WFH.
Right now, WFH is a struggle not because of the "FH" part, but because of "cabin fever" effect of being around everyone all the time, the complexities of avoiding the disease - things which were done by professionals is back to self-run, everything from cleaning to child care.
In the past, I've WFH'd only when I have had a good reason to justify that. This was in the pre-Marissa era @ Yahoo and I was probably one of those people, if you counted VPN time. However, the good reasons which required to be remote are often the opposite of productive - my reason was that my dad was on suicide watch for 4 months.
But with EVERYONE being WFH without choice has changed several people who have held similar opinions in the past about remote work - the managers might still consider the "from home" to be bad, but they might have realized that they can maintain an effective organization, without constantly talking to people in person.
The next wave of this "remote work" revolution will probably not be people working from home, but people choosing to work in an area close enough to home, but far away enough to avoid the internal pressures of pending chores.
Before Covid, my favourite "remote work" location was the SF public library in Potrero & the Burlingame one which even has private offices. Wasn't exactly WFH, but it was remote & great.
Adding to that: a lot of people had to start WFH with little or no preparation. For many of us techy types that's no problem, we already have desks and monitors and keyboards coming out of our ears. But for a lot of people, none of that is a given at all. There's a huge difference between reading your emails on your laptop at the breakfast table in the morning, and working from home 8 hours a day for months. Especially if you live in a tiny flat and have to share it with other people. If I were to apply for a 100% remote job, I'd make different accomodation choices than when getting a 100% on site job.
Yes, I think the lack of prep problem is underrated.
As a freelancer, I almost don't notice lock-down other than the cabin fever effects, because my home office is well-established. But, wow, that would have been different if I had been put in the position of building up that office infrastructure over-night, as things were shutting down.
And certainly the place-without-interruptions can be a challenge. I have lived in a home with a toddler and a cat -- well, that isn't exactly conducive to getting into "coding flow". Pre-lockdown, I had a chat with a startup CEO who likes to work from his home office when he needs a block of deep-work time. It is a big source of irritation with his wife that "door closed means I am unavailable" -- so yeah, just a place to hide is nice once in a while.
But we built our business fully remote back in 2014, we've been doing this forever now. While our work colleagues are in their kitchens or on their sofas. It's not sustainable.
Exactly. My spouse and I like spending time in the same room, even if we are not directly interacting with each other. Therefore, when arranging furniture, we deliberately had the computer desk go in the living room, so that video games would not require isolation. Now that same computer desk is also the work desk 8 hours every day, but it is still the living room.
Yeah, I just got a colleague a laptop because their kids are using theirs all day. I think most people do not have a computer per person at home... especially with younger kids.
You cannot overstate the difficulty of putting in eight, or even six, solid hours of work in a day where you also have to coordinate your children's schooling, prepare meals, arbitrate disagreements, apply band-aids, do dishes, do laundry, supply technical support, and a thousand other non-work-related tasks. I was surprised that the article didn't mention this.
Especially considering that _nobody_ puts in eight or even six hours of "solid work" when at the office. That's something I intuitively knew for a while, but it came into stark contrast once I started consulting and tracking my time. I only bill for the time I _actually_ work. And doing 8 hours of mentally demanding, focused work per day is difficult AF. That's why people slack off in the office, have water cooler conversations, interrupt each other all the time, have meetings they don't really need to have, 1.5 hour lunch breaks, etc. If you had to actually work 8 hours a day, full throttle, few people would stick with it.
The flip side is the productivity of doing 8 hours of focused work per day is truly staggering when you tally it up at the end of the week (which I also do, and you should do, too, if you work remote - otherwise you'll be "invisible" no matter how much you contribute). And WFH plus mostly async communication is very amenable to being able to focus.
Eh, people in support work probably six solid hours very often. If there’s an outage or a problem, people in support can easily work 7 or 7 and a half hours of taking calls practically non stop.
And like you said, few people stick with it. Every place I’ve worked at, the Support department has extremely high turnover and people constantly trying to leave for a different department in the company, or a different role in a different company. Being constantly monitored, poor pay, not being able to go to company sponsored events (oh, at 2 PM we’re having a Zoom workout/meditation meeting, everyone is invited *except support they gotta stay on the phone), having to be above certain metrics, and having to talk to people that are generally neutral at best and extremely pissed at worst, is the perfect recipe for people to hate their job and to quit/leave the company/go to a different department ASAP.
> _nobody_ puts in eight or even six hours of "solid work" when at the office
I think this varies by industry. It may not be possible to do intensive coding for 8 hours a day, but lawyers definitely bill 8, 10, or even more hours per day. For lawyers, this could mean a mix of reading briefs, consulting with colleagues, and writing memos. While you do have to be disciplined to bill nearly all of your hours at work, I definitely had months where I billed 10 hours per day every weekday and some weekends (and honestly — I do recognize that some lawyer pad their hours, but I wasn't one of them)
Yeah, lawyers will bill 15 minutes for reading one line email, that is well known. :-) On a related note, I remember reading an article about Marissa Mayer where she bragged about "working" 14 hours a day. It turned out that "eating dinner" constituted "work" for her. I should start billing my clients for posting on HN, I'm sure they won't mind.
There is difference between "downtime is when you want it and is spent socializing, reading, wasting time" versus "supposed downtime is when alarm buzzes and yet another work",
I'm surprised that people see going to an office as a solution to this difficulty though. I'd 100% rather be around family than in an office.
I've been managing fine by being available during the day, not stressing and just living in the moment. I get the heavy lifting done early in the morning or late at night. Just like in the office... my most productive hours have always been either before everyone else gets in or after everyone else goes home.
I've gotten used to WFH but agree that the ideal remote work location is actually a "third-place" -- non-home non-office location -- like a library or a Starbucks or a shared workspace close to home.
The psychological separation between home and work is so important.
That's a matter of habit. The trigger before was space. "I am in the office - work mode on".
In WFH the trigger has to be time. We have a hard 9AM start policy, with 12 to 1PM lunch. That puts everyone on the same page and gets rid of the ambiguous "I wonder if anyone else is looking for me right now, and should I be working". You should absolutely know. If people don't respect it, it's their problem, but you should not be responding to people at 7AM or 9PM unless the sky is falling. No different from how it was before. This lack of boundaries is what really exhausts people.
Also, create a separate account on your computer for work. You should do that anyway to avoid screen share mishaps (no one wants to see your personal bookmarks and history).
At end of day, log out, killing slack notifications and email, and log into your work-free personal account. You are done for the day.
I have a personal desk with two monitors and a laptop arm... I set up my desk with a KVM (just a USB switcher) for the keyboard and mouse and two HDMI switchers.
Three clicks and all of my IO is routed to the work laptop and that allows me to separate cleanly from work. Before work-mode is engaged, I put my Windows workstation to sleep and I bring it out of sleep right after switching all of my IO back.
One thing that helped me with this is routine. So I wake up, take a shower, get dressed, etc. just like I would if I were going into the office. It has to be a different routine than what you do on weekends. This allows me to be in that different "work" mental space. Hopefully you are able to find something that helps you.
I used to be more consistent about this. I definitely don't dress like I'm going into the office any longer. But it's like anything else. Having some formal steps can help you establish a routine and once you've internalized that routine sufficiently (some people) can start dropping some of the formalities that aren't strictly necessary.
>The psychological separation between home and work is so important.
Honestly, It varies by person. I've gone into an office increasingly intermittently for the most part over the past 15 years or so and don't even have an assigned desk any longer.
I have a dedicated office at home (which I also use for video/photo editing, screwing around with electronics, etc.) but I don't feel it has to be just a work-work room. I do videocalls from this room because it's where my good webcam is attached to my desktop system and where I've fiddled with lighting and background.
TBH though, half the time I work somewhere else in the house on a laptop.
But I've absolutely worked with a lot of people who pretty much came into the office every day even though they had no particular need to.
My overall conclusion is that most of the "rules" for working remote or WFH only apply to some people.
I keep an office and a gym in my finished basement and it works perfectly for that separation. Not feasible for everyone but if you have the space it’s totally worth creating the division.
I miss Union Station (I moved away)! It's such a cool place to hang out but never tried working there. Where do you post up, the cafe? I don't remember there being a ton of seats in there.
A simple answer is: working from home requires the ability to hold yourself accountable for your productivity to a much greater extent than if you were in an office. Yes, working at home is a different setting, with different distractions, but, based on my experience, there are a lot of extra motivators present in an office, like peer pressure, justifying the commute, being held accountable for the perception of working, contribution recognition, easy socializing, etc.
For better or worse, none of those are as impactful when working from home and the worker is forced to fuel their productivity themself.
I left my job a year ago to work on my own projects full-time and it took several months for me to find ways to really motivate myself to be consistently productive
It also requires you to hold others accountable to a much greater extent. Part of what drove me away from remote work was the additional effort required to get people to respond to anything. When you were remote, you were invisible.
I have also found that many people have problems with async/written communication or even just paying attention to email or tasks. It is related to their general competence, communication skills and habits, and level of interest.
It is a big problem.
For me if they can't handle git comments or slack then they can usually manage to show up for a phone call. And in my projects that is generally not the best, but it is good enough to be able to keep projects moving forward.
If it was a programmer rather than manager or client who did not reply to chat/email or handle git properly, in my opinion there is no excuse and that is a fireable offense. I mean, it should be fireable for managers and clients too but sometimes keeping the gig seems worth it.
This, for better or worse, drives me to work harder. I have anxiety around being perceived as not working hard enough. I have been full time remote at the same position for around 8 years with a large timezone difference.
I have a small part of my day when I report to my team what I have done the previous day. I always want to make sure it seems like I have a few significant tasks that I completed. Sometimes, when things are going well, it does not take much time to achieve this and I feel good with 5 hours of work. Sometimes I get stuck on a tricky problem and work 9 or 10 hours.
My co-workers (who are not work from home) all seem to think I am very productive, so I guess it works!
I hated this at first but at work when we moved to wfh we started using gitlabs time tracking features on all tickets. At first I felt like it made me rush everything to hit the estimated times and lost quality but after a few weeks I just ignore the estimated time and do it as fast as possible without sacrificing any quality. No one actively checks the time or cares if you go over as long as there is some extra quality to show for it but someone might question the fact that you spent hours on a very simple bit of work which keeps me on topic because I want to have something to point to to show where those hours went.
To some degree that is definitely true. But in the other hand there usually should be communication and tools such as git that record and communicate effort which would make a lack of accomplishment pretty obvious.
I don't work at home all the time, but I've been struggling
to find some metric to hold myself accountable for my own
quality and intensity of work. Do you mind sharing your experience?
Metrics didn't work for me other than a binary, honest assessment of whether or not I worked on a particular day 'in good faith'. I treat it as a negotiation between my present and future selves. When you resolve to do something in the future, you are telling your future self that you know better than they do. This often fails for people because you have a much better understanding of your intent and reasons when you make the decision than when it is time to act. To counter this I decided to strengthen my 'resolve', which I define as the strength of my decisions. If my decisions are strong, they are much more easily recalled and felt when it is time to act.
In my experience there has to be a balance though. I can't always live by the decisions I have made in the past. I have to have some time each week where I live purely in the moment, with no prior plans guiding my actions. This way my future self doesn't begin to resent my past self.
At first it is odd to reason about yourself as different people at different times, but now I find it odd I ever thought to project an unchanging version of my present self into the future, as if time was not a factor to be considered.
I thought this was a pretty fair article that rightly addressed some of the major structural issues with remote work as it currently is set up. I've worked remotely for ~5 years and absolutely love it but think there need to be much larger corporate culture changes needed, along with technologies, to make it a sustainable trend for 30%+ of a modern workforce.
I do also wonder if there might be some wrong lessons taken from this time. This isn't just "working from home" it's "working from home during a global health crisis." Schools are closed, people we know are dying, lockdowns, there's fear and uncertainty to a degree I hadn't before seen in my adult life ... so yeah, it's going to have an impact on our workflows.
Like any change, it's always going to be hardest for large orgs who have to change vs those who have it built-in from the beginning.
One of the most interesting aspects of the remote work discussion is just how emotional a topic it is for many people – on both sides. I've seen die-hards in both the pro-office and pro-remote camps, seemingly without a clear pattern.
This is exacerbated by the fact that people often want to convert others to their side. If you're pro-remote, going all-remote creates an even playing field. If you're pro-office, having everyone in the office creates the collaborative environment that you prefer. Managing these opposing viewpoints in a productive way will be an interesting leadership challenge for many teams.
One aspect of this is that introverts have been living in an world designed maximally for the liking and benefit of extroverts and now the tables have turned completely. It's one of those situations where you have a privilege you weren't aware of, and then lost it, so it feels like an assault.
To any extroverts really struggling, I get it. I understand how difficult it must be. I mean this with no ill intentions at all, but I've felt the way you're feeling my whole working life, working in an environment not suited to my personality at all. I hope you too can have empathy for the people on the other side who have had to live in your world.
Will you stop it with the "oh no extroverts" stuff? I am definitely an extrovert, and I greatly prefer working from home. With only a few days here and there (certainly not necessarily every week) to meet up with people face to face. I am more productive like this, and much happier.
Being an extrovert does not mean that you need or enjoy the company of any people any time.
One useful metric is whether hanging out with your friends after work gives you energy or costs you energy. Enjoying being around people is irrelevant. Introverts love being around people just as much as extroverts.
I would consider myself an extrovert and hanging out with friends does not tire me. But people in the office are not really friends and we are not hanging out. I have found myself with a lot more energy working from home since when I'm really starting to feel tired I can run a few laps of the house and do some pushups and I feel energised again.
I'm not even sure which I am. I like being on stage, going to events, etc. But I have also written books (which take a lot of private research/writing time) and I definitely don't naturally gravitate towards engaging in conversation with people I don't know.
I don't miss an office which I haven't really worked in for a while but I miss events and so forth a great deal.
For me, I've always liked working in an office, but I've always hated, what should I call it - drama/politics/whatever?
I've worked in such wierd places over the years. For example, if you had an office of 100 people, 10 were on your team, I would probably not like 2 of the people on my team and 20 in the office.
Most of the time, this is not a problem. However, you get around people that you really like and tell a joke, or you just say something a bit freely - and all of a sudden, you now have people that don't like you. (The specific office situation I'm thinking of had an average of salary of $15k at the time - but our group probably had an average of $150k at the time).
It was tough. I don't think it was a good idea overall either. I've seen other situations like it as well.
I don't like working from at home. But I hate dealing with that kind of bullshit.
Being an introvert means spending time around people costs you energy whereas it gives you energy if you're an extrovert. Introverts enjoy being around people, some enjoy being on stage, etc. Those things are totally irrelevant to introvert/extrovert.
The world is not split into two distinct groups - introverts and extroverts. Rather it is curve with majority of people somewhere in the middle. Only few people are on the either extreme end of that curve.
I've seen this too. Personally I think both environments are really valuable. I really prefer meeting folks in person, but my home is nicer for hard problems that require concentration.
I just want to split my time evenly between the two.
I mostly don't do that in an office but I do for traveling/events which are pretty much off the table for an indefinite time. I meet far more of my colleagues at events than I do at my company offices. That's the difficult thing for me right now.
That's an interesting idea that I haven't heard discussed yet. I think it makes a lot of sense, as the remote vs in-office divide is more pronounced when the experience isn't uniform.
it's illogical for a remote worker to return to an office, it's a regression to older technology (aside from subjective views). The reverse is not true. Therefore, one side is clearly using subjective feelings as arguments, and the other side is angered by how illogical it all is.
I think you explained it right. Over the last couple of years I started working from home more and more to the point that I'm considering going full remote after this pandemic.
The way I see it is an evolution from old-school thinking to the future of work. Going remote IS going to be the future that we like it or not. Every year our collaboration tools become better and better and as new generation come into the workforce they will increasingly start by being remote first.
It is as if you drove a car after using horse your whole life but a subset of people want to convince you that everyone should go back to horses because it's easier to have that "feeling of camaraderie" with your engine.
I dont think your claim is logical. It is not logical to assume that newer means better for everyone. The return to office can be rational move back after doing move that made things worst.
This is confusing own subjective preference and own evaluation shortcut with "objectively better".
And I am saying that as someone who plans to work more from home after covid ends.
If you're "Pro-office" you're dictatorial. This is a problem.
The cat is out of the bag. I haven't worked in an office in nearly a decade, anyone saying "you have to be in the office" will be drawing from a dwindling pool of supplies.
I mean, I consider myself Pro-office because I like to personally interact with my coworkers, and I also enjoy the feeling of camaraderie that comes when a bunch of people get together to tackle a certain problem. Depending on your company, a lot of things can also get sorted out quicker when you can talk face to face to your manager/colleagues (though good processes and practices can mitigate this somewhat).
I don't have strong opinions on whether other people should or should not WFH, however. I don't see the need to make this an us vs them issue, at least not when talking between us regular programmers (I am in favor of taking the fight to the higher-ups, though).
I'm pro-office, and I'm not a manager or anything. I just prefer working in offices, and prefer when my colleagues do too, because I find face-to-face interaction much more satisfying.
Most of those I know that are hardcore office are:
* in a middle management position
* have a home setting that doesn't work for WFH (kids, space, personality, etc)
* have never worked from home over an extended period of time but are still opinionated
WFH today vs. pre-coronavirus is drastically different. Grocery shopping has changed, working out options have changed, socializing. I've noticed that it's been wonderful having my wife here. We can get delivery or curbside pick up for groceries. We can focus, eat healthy and take meaningful breaks.
Article upholds author of "4 Hour Work Week" as an example of an ultra-remote worker. Someone who made it rich selling supplements of questionable benefit and with much self promotion may not be the best anecdote for remote workers.
I think the aspect he offers to someone that wants to stay at the job but do some remotely is still very applicable to today's WFH situation.
The Parkinson's law and 80/20 rule are great. I think more could be written about that idea of a FAQ that is maintained by customer service. This could be more broadly applicable to any documentation or how to material both internal and external to a company. Knowledge management is not an easy task.
Read the book if you haven’t, it’s all in there. You’ll get much more benefit than finding out about the supplements I suspect. I recall something about him introducing himself to people as a drug dealer when asked what he did for a living.
One thing that a lot of people miss in the whole "Work from Home" discussion is the fact that not everyone has the ability, talent, skills and experience to be able to work from home. It is the hard truth and lot of us don't want to admit that. It is extremely hard to work from home and stay accountable, productive and not to mention focussed. It is just very hard. Even for senior/experienced folks. It is not a one size fits all solution. If you are junior who needs a lot of guidance and help on the job, WFH is even worse.
I'm terrible at it! For years, I've organised a day a week to work outside the office and outside the home. I know I need a planned task saved for that day, and I need physical separation. Covid is a giant pain in the ass and I hate it because it makes that "not in office" time no longer special and focused/effective. It's just one huge slog of Slack, Zoom and mail hell.
You know you can disable notifications right? That gives you the same peace of mind. If it's someone important you just tell them hey, I'm in the middle of x, I'll get back to you at y time. Most bosses respect healthy boundaries, and if they don't that's usually a red flag.
Way too many people enable way too many notifications on all sorts of platforms, which is admittedly the default. (And way too many people expect people to always be instantly available when they send a message/chat/email/phone call.) I'm actually pretty reachable during the workday. But maybe because I worked for the first part of my career in a world where I wasn't reachable if I wasn't sitting at my desk, I'm not terribly sympathetic to those who feel they need to reach me instantly.
I have not had any issues with this. I do not have work email or IM on my phone. I work the same hours as I did in the office. At the end of the day I close my laptop and put it to the side.
The guys on our team who have been working together in the office for a while are continuing to work together online. No Problem. The two new guys we hired get little help and they're drowning I suspect. Its just too difficult to help them. If anyone has success with onboarding new people remotely I'm interested in hearing tips.
My current thinking is to schedule daily 1:1s at first. As they get their feet under them, scale it back to a few times a week, then once a week.
If the onus is on the new team member to ask for help when they need it, they'll have to figure out what difficulty and quantity of questions are considered appropriate. That's pretty stressful to try to figure out remotely. Much easier for them to have a senior person looking them in the face and asking "How'd it go yesterday? What questions can I answer for you this morning?"
Wow, you've hit the nail on the head about what I need as I continue onboarding on to a new team at work. I was shuffled around right when our state shut down. Indeed, figuring out how and when to ask what questions has been exceedingly difficult. It's super hard to ask for time with people I haven't even met properly.
Ugh, I feel for you. New teams are complex in the best of times... what has worked for you in finding out those questions/limits?
When in office, there is a lot of unstructured conversations. I have found that having 2 hour blocks of video conf 'coworking' do help a lot there in terms of surfacing questions in an unprompted and organic way.
I have been working remotely for a decade. The best way to onboard remote workers is to have regular one on ones. Weekly is easiest. Just having an open line of communication does wonders. Often people are afraid to ask for help but once they get to know people those fears dissolve.
When I was last onboarded--well, quite some time ago--one thing my manager did that was useful was to connect me with a number of different people in the company and had me set up 1:1s with them both as a get-to-know-them thing and to start working together on various areas of interest. Many, maybe most, of them weren't in the office as I was anyway.
People will be on different schedules, but it is nice to have a weekly sync at the beginning of the week. Gitlab and Zapier have alot of great resources on setting up remote teams
I 'm surveying people from zoom calls to figure out the trend. So far, here in europe, it seems that people who live in small apartments (e.g. Berlin) prefer to go back to the office. People who have larger houses, or access to outdoors have stayed home even if they could go to the office.
If enough people stay back home after covid, remote work will be a self-accelerating trend: if enough people are not at the office , the office is boring and empty, and home becomes more fun.
I've been (unofficially) mostly remote--to greater or lesser degrees depending on what I'm working on--for quite a few years now. And you make a good point.
I have a relatively convenient local office. But most of the people I work with regularly aren't in that office, mostly work from home themselves, are on calls all day, or are traveling. I can go into the office and there's a good chance I basically won't see anyone I know. (The company has also grown a lot.)
If I could go in a day or two a week and bump into a lot of people I know/maybe have lunch with them/etc. I'd be perfectly happy to go in a day or two a week. But the reality is that I'd go in, grab a random desk, work and head back home. I can do that in my home office without a 1 hour roundtrip commute.
And layer on top of that, going into the office is going to be a weird and awkward situation for an extended period of time. I certainly don't expect to be in an office even for a meeting for the rest of this year and very possibly an extended period of time beyond that.
I love to have the ability to work from home, but I'm gonna be honest with myself - I love the social aspect of work. Maybe it's easier when you have great colleagues, but it's been a very nice breath of fresh air to come back to the office, for that reason alone.
(And unfortunately, for many people, work is pretty much the only place where they get to socialize. I've seen this with older workers. After they retire, they still pop by on a regular basis, just to talk and see how things are going)
There's a lot of discussion in this thread, but I think it all comes down to the fact that we are all individuals with individual preferences. What is comfortable for you, may not be for your coworker. Great companies try to reconcile those differences with proper communications channels in place, bad companies try to exert control over something they don't understand.
Remote work is changing the world with its impact and especially due to Covid-19 people are forced to work from home. Some say they have got higher productivity and some say they have got the lowest!
What are your thoughts? Will you prefer working from home or let your team work from home?
This depends on so many factors: home environment, office environment, commuting, personal preferences...
My personal preference is to work from home, even though I have a really nice office environment. It's quieter, and I don't have to commute, but that's just me. I have colleagues who can't wait to get back into the office.
What I hope is that managers get more flexible, now that they've seen that remote working is a realistic option.
So there is no doubt that the current WFH situation has decreased productivity in general at the large tech giant I work at. It is definitely not across the board, some teams have adapted to it better than others. Some teams are having issues holding team members accountable in this remote based environment. On these teams it is easy for some team members to not pull their weight and severely impact productivity.
I am sure a lot of it is just dealing with covid in general. This is not your average WFH situation. Also it will take time to adjust and I do believe that how projects and teams are managed has to change significantly based on all remote workers.
I've been working remotely and from home for over five years now. I think the hardest thing for me about working remotely is dealing with differences in the timezones of my colleagues and the demands that puts on me and balancing that with non-work life. I think if you can get your work / life balance figured out and enforce decent hours, working remotely can be a massively positive thing for your life.
I love the cozy warm fuzzies that 'face-to-face bonding' bring up. I'm sure those same managers pushing for that bonding would be just as sensitive and show just as much concern for the team when they 'reorganize' and layoff part of the team.
The circles I follow like to rag on him as someone whose opinion keeps being given weight despite being wrong on basically every prediction he's ever made.
Was just curious if that's what the commentor was implying or not.
He has a very good track record when he talks economics, not always as spot on outside that, but not worse than other pundits. He’s quite condescending towards conservatives, so if that is the circles you follow I very much understand that is the impression you have been given.
Considering that he has written a couple of thousand columns, it would be surprising if there weren’t a few where he got something wrong. I didn’t much more than check the headlines of the links below, but what was wrong about warning about a housing bubble in 2005 or saying that austerity is a greater danger to the economy in 2009 than deficits?
Right now, WFH is a struggle not because of the "FH" part, but because of "cabin fever" effect of being around everyone all the time, the complexities of avoiding the disease - things which were done by professionals is back to self-run, everything from cleaning to child care.
In the past, I've WFH'd only when I have had a good reason to justify that. This was in the pre-Marissa era @ Yahoo and I was probably one of those people, if you counted VPN time. However, the good reasons which required to be remote are often the opposite of productive - my reason was that my dad was on suicide watch for 4 months.
But with EVERYONE being WFH without choice has changed several people who have held similar opinions in the past about remote work - the managers might still consider the "from home" to be bad, but they might have realized that they can maintain an effective organization, without constantly talking to people in person.
The next wave of this "remote work" revolution will probably not be people working from home, but people choosing to work in an area close enough to home, but far away enough to avoid the internal pressures of pending chores.
Before Covid, my favourite "remote work" location was the SF public library in Potrero & the Burlingame one which even has private offices. Wasn't exactly WFH, but it was remote & great.