I.t. Work from home positions

[NotAllThere]

It takes discipline to wfh (discrete office space, no interruptions from wifes/husbands/kids/dogs etc),

Occasionally I'm interrupted by my cat. I have my own office. But I tend to sit in the living room.

[NotAllThere]

Back at the dawn of time, when you were a younger one, you probably worked a lot harder than you do now. I know I did.

I don't have to work as hard. I already know a lot of stuff.

[northernladuk]

Back at the dawn of time, when you were a younger one, you probably worked a lot harder than you do now. I know I did.

I did and that was probably because I was in the office, meeting people, networking, chasing the career. Up at the crack of dawn, home late and still working evenings. I'll bet everything I own if I had to start again, working from home, the comute and people in the office seen as an unwanted distraction and no face to face for days, if not weeks on end I'd not have done half what I did. I have two step lads in their mid twenties and all their mates who started work around Covid and not one of them have anything like the work ethic we did. Those days where deadlines loomed and you busted your nuts to get it out just seems to be a thing of the past. They just couldn't seem to care less.

[SussexSeagull]

In the current market I don't think beggars can be choosers.

Generally speaking contractors are fairly well motivated and are task focussed so can do a lot of work remotely but companies employ a variety of people doing a variety of roles of which not all work well or at all doing the same. Once some people have to come back into the office the rest of us tend to get dragged into it. I know this shouldn't be the case but it tends to be the case.

That said, dragging most people back into the office five days a week really is overkill and if someone does need to be then they need start employing different people.

[teknokrat]

I don't understand why everyone expects workers in the office to be more productive. I certainly don't see any evidence of this. Consider my current hybrid life...

1. WFH
Get up at usual time due to body clock. Shower + coffee. Login to work 2 hours earlier then office due to not having much to do. Comfortable and stress free I make short work of emails, etc and get into the zone. All before I would normally arrive in the office. If hungry, go to kitchen and make a quick snack, ditto for lunch. I can work later if I need to finish stuff as I don't have to bother about my commute home. If there is down time I can do something productive around the house saving me time on the weekend.

2. Office
Get up at usual time, shower and dress. Commute - get to office two hours later assuming trains, etc working ok. Not going to start work without a coffee! Have to go to cafe, probably with several like minded colleagues. Start work significantly later than wfh. Hungry - go find some food - time wasted. Lunch - spend an hour getting food and eating. Try to leave early so as not to get stuck on commute and get home late at night. Any down time and surf the web like a muppet.

How is 2. more productive? For anyone? i'm not particularly disciplined. My work ethic is meh. But I still get a lot more done wfh than going into the office. Plus i suffer a lot less stress when i don't have a commute.

[jmo21]

I'm dreading the possibility of going back into an office in the future.

I've been pretty lucky to have had 2 back to back contracts covering the last almost 2 years, coming off the back of my Covid time contract (started Jan 2020 as covid hit, through to Dec 2022) with a wee 6 month bench time in between (on purpose).

Biggest worry for me is the drop in agent contacts and email from the job sites.

[ladymuck]

I've never minded going to the office or WFH. I may grumble about going to the office but if I make sure I have people there to meet or work alongside rather than just sitting in a corner on zoom calls, then I'm much happier.

[hobnob]

I don't understand why everyone expects workers in the office to be more productive. I certainly don't see any evidence of this. Consider my current hybrid life...

To be fair, some of it will depend on the role. There are some jobs which require you to be physically present, e.g. installing network equipment where you need to plug in a cable for the initial configuration and then carry it to where it's going.

In other roles, you can be more productive working from home. E.g. I was migrating VMs between platforms a while back, and that was a case of "start the transfer, leave it for a few hours, then start the next batch once it's finished". So, I had the flexibility of doing household tasks during the day (while a batch was running); in return, I'd keep them going late into the evening.

Also, some of it will depend on the person. E.g. I've spoken to youngsters (in their 20s) who've said that they can literally spend hours scrolling through TikTok. If they're in the office, they wouldn't do that at a desk (in full view of everyone else) but if they're at home they might be tempted to pull out their phone for a "quick" look, without realising how much time has gone by.

You mentioned lunch - if I'm in the office, I normally take something with me (e.g. a pre-made sandwich from the supermarket) or I might buy something from the staff canteen, but I don't leave the building (mainly because there aren't any shops in convenient walking distance). So, I normally take 30 mins whether I'm at home or in the office, and there's no advantage/disadvantage to either.

There are advantages to being in the office with other people, e.g. if you want to grab someone for a quick chat, but that relies on the team sitting together. If you're all hot-desking in different parts of the building, you might as well be at home.

I've found it useful to pick up things from conversations that people wouldn't necessarily put into an email or Teams chat. In my case, that might mean that I can offer advice based on past experience, even if it's not part of my current role. (Just to state the obvious, that's safer for an inside IR35 contract rather than an outside contract.) For a junior member of staff, I think it can be beneficial to overhear what's going on. E.g. if there's a particular task/problem that you haven't come across before, you could see how your colleagues do it. However, I've seen some people who sit with their headphones in all day. It's often not worth the effort of getting their attention, which can mean that they miss out on those opportunities to pick up new skills.

[teknokrat]

Let me also add; my office is an international corporate that hot desks. So sitting amongst your team is usually unlikely and all meetings are going to be over zoom anyway. I find specialized team chats to be much more effective at sharing information too. It's much better when you have a chance to think before replying, and maybe even run some tests. You also have a history which is invaluable if an issue pops up again. People say you can communicate more effectively face to face but they certainly were not talking about a typical corporate office environment. I find most face to face meetings to be useless and boring, usually taken over by extroverts who want to talk about anything but the problem at hand. Hands up if you've been to meetings that took longer than it would take you to fix the problem!

I should also add that the savings in time and money are not trivial either. My commute costs me £16-18 + 3hrs daily (London). Even if I bring my own lunch that's extra preparation time that I have to waste on the job. Anyway, what do you do if the rest of your team wants to go for a coffee? You go along too. The money adds up.

[willendure]

I've never minded going to the office or WFH. I may grumble about going to the office but if I make sure I have people there to meet or work alongside rather than just sitting in a corner on zoom calls, then I'm much happier.

Nothing worse than going in to the office to attend a meeting only to find that everyone else is zooming in. I remember a recent contract at a bank, starting a new piece of work, the pm went around everyone and carefully arranged everyone to be in for the kick-off meeting. On the day one tosser last minute decided to WFH and we all had to strain to hear him over zoom and ruined the whole thing.

I miss a bit of office banter and going out for drinks and so on.

I think what is hard about the WFH thing is that it means jobs that would go to people in your local area are now being taken by people far away, completely ruining any interpersonal aspects of the work. On a zoom call there is no time for banter, catching up on the weekends events, deciding to go out for lunch together etc, its all just down to business mostly. At least if a job requires X days a week in the office, that restricts it back to the local area again.

WFH trend is lessening, but it is here to say I think. It has also greatly opened up the opportunity for cheaper remote workers in eastern Europe or the sub-continent of battulip-jibbering-scraping-the-barrel-OMG-my-internet-is-down-because-of-the-floods-and-typhoon-IT-workers (you know who I mean!). Which is bad news for us highly skilled and well paid contractors.