WFO/WFH Trends among aB community in 2024

[DominusNovus]

Death to the home office. Give me a desk and interaction with colleagues or give me...well, whatever it was in 2020-2021.

Death to spending multiple hours each week in a commute, death to spending loads of money on a commute, death to paying someone else to take care of my kids, death to not being able to get anything around the house cuz I'm in the office.

I imagine this forum is disproportionately white, male, college educated, and left-leaning politically compared to the gen pop. That may just be projection on my part, but it’s my assumption unless shown otherwise.

This is just an aside that I wanted to share, at the risk of devolving into a political discussion (as I'm certainly one of the most right-wing people on this forum). I find it quite interesting how WFH often gets turned into a political fight, even though it should be entirely orthogonal to the usual partisan divide.

 

[bigeman312]

Death to spending multiple hours each week in a commute, death to spending loads of money on a commute, death to paying someone else to take care of my kids, death to not being able to get anything around the house cuz I'm in the office.



This is just an aside that I wanted to share, at the risk of devolving into a political discussion (as I'm certainly one of the most right-wing people on this forum). I find it quite interesting how WFH often gets turned into a political fight, even though it should be entirely orthogonal to the usual partisan divide.

Totally! I do not view WFH as a partisan issue, but (and now I’m really risking turning this into a political discussion), I’m sure the powers that be can find a way to turn it into a partisan wedge issue if it can help them get elected and/or serve the needs of their donors.

 

[Justbuildit]

Death to spending multiple hours each week in a commute, death to spending loads of money on a commute, death to paying someone else to take care of my kids, death to not being able to get anything around the house cuz I'm in the office.

Totally, it's great to share opinions on these matters. For what it's worth, some people choose to make compromises about where they live, where they work, and what to prioritize. WFH adds a lot of options! Personally (since this is an opinion and in response to a poll) I despise both working from home and long commutes, so prioritizing living close-ish to work has been the answer, and resolves the money and time question on getting to work. Naturally home size is going to be smaller, so that makes the home office situation even worse. So, yes, give me the office!

 

[eber]

I work from home except for maybe 2x a month in the office when I need specific equipment. The office used to be in the Seaport which is walking distance to me (~1.5 mi), however, during covid they downsized the office space to a small spot in Newton Corner (which is now a train + express bus or train + local bus + walk away). I try to get out of the house and go for a half-hour walk at lunch time or walk to go grocery shopping during my lunch hour. The one thing I really miss is the walk home from work in the evening. It was a great way to decompress and the liveliness of the city didn't make it feel like a very long walk at all.

 

[bigpicture7]

Poll closes tomorrow (@ 1 week) for anyone else who wants to vote

 

[737900er]

I currently WFH 5 days a week.
In the past 10 years I have also had jobs I drove to 5 days/week and jobs I took MBTA to 5 days/week.

 

[sm89]

I've been in the office every day for the last year and a half. We have the option to do up to 2 days at home (scheduled) and occasional from home days as needed with 24hrs notice (for appts and whatnot). Every time I WFH though, I hate it. Insane number of distractions (laundry, other chores, tv, pets) and an extreme feeling of isolation. There's also so much occurring at the office that I'm not part of (though I should be) and many impactful decisions being made by casual convo as opposed to scheduled meetings. We also just sort of leave the from home folks out when we meet. We have the camera set up in the conference room, but it's hard for the WFH folks to contribute in that setting. It just doesn't work well in my industry (government).

 

[bigpicture7]

Alrightly, poll is closed. Unclear exactly how representative this is of the active aB forum, but 54 people seems like a decent response.

A slight majority of us (57.4%) go into the office with some regularity ( > 2x per week);
A little under 1/3 of us are predominately WFH-ers;
The rest are somewhere in between

If I ask myself, is this what I thought it would be? I think so, pretty much anyway, based on national numbers I've seen and the fact that Boston is on the lousier end of things commute-wise. I might have guessed the 1-day-per-week crowd slightly higher (I've heard of some employers doing the "anchor day Wednesdays" thing, etc). It is important to note that this whole measure doesn't include the non-office-type jobs, which, if included would reduce WFH percentage considerably. But for this prompt I just wanted to focus on who might be working where from among those with office-type jobs.

Curious if this matches others' notions of what this breakdown might be...

 

[Java King]

Some of us don't even have offices. My company is located in San Francisco, and I think quite a few technology workers have the same condition. I am the sole employee in Massachusetts, and it's been that way for 10 years.

 

[JeffDowntown]

Some of us don't even have offices. My company is located in San Francisco, and I think quite a few technology workers have the same condition. I am the sole employee in Massachusetts, and it's been that way for 10 years.

I first had that situation 25 years ago (with a California company).