my wife and i were talking about soap operas the other day. i was absolutely floored that days of our lives is not only still on daytime tv, but is also available on peacock! well, the last two seasons anyway. not that you’re missing much, since season 59 has 243 episodes in it1
anyway, the interesting thing about soaps that i learned from that conversation is that you can basically hop in and out at any time without skipping a beat. while there are some absolutely wild story lines thrown in to keep things spicy, each episode mostly follows real-world time and elapses by roughly one day per show
given that soaps were born in an era where most of the country that could afford television only had four channels and radio shows were still incredibly popular, this chronology makes sense. however, in a world where you have an essentially infinite collection of content to choose from2, not including short-form on social media, the soap opera is a dying relic relegated to the bottom of your recommended feed and your local nail salon or dentist’s office
my feelings about wfh are similarly conflicted
on one hand, i am where i am in my career because i worked from the office. i got to spend lots of time with people more senior than me learning how to be a better engineer. networking was super easy, since people usually went out on thursday nights, and i usually partook in that. shoot, i even learned how to lift from a really kind coworker who introduced me to starting strength! i never would’ve even discovered weightlifting if it weren’t for him. i am also a defective human being and actually really enjoyed commuting, usually by bike. there was also the very coincidental benefit of the office being way nicer than the apartment in brooklyn that i was paying for
on the other hand, like soap operas, seven years of working in an office is a lot of time. there were lots and lots and lots of days that I spent mostly on my own. i must’ve spent tens of thousands of hours on standups, planning meetings, meetings meetings, “should we use this or this” discussions, drive-by interruptions, and many other annoyances that happen significantly less frequently. i partook in a lot of networking events, but they didn’t happen every day. they didn’t even happen every week! while i sometimes miss the insanely good food at Google NYC or the really great working spaces I’ve had at some other places that I’ve worked at, it doesn’t beat me making my own quick breakfast and dinner on my own terms and working in my perfectly curated and super private office setup
but that’s exactly the heart of my problem
we live in a much nicer place now. even though we lived in an apartment during peak-COVID, it was a 2bd apartment in a brand new complex with a small walking trail. we had our own working spaces, space outside to work or relax in, and, especially now, things to do and enough money to participate in them. i’m senior enough in my work to be (mostly) trusted to work on my own, and i don’t need external motivation to chase problems and solve them
that’s not the case for everyone. in fact, i’d say that having a living space that’s good enough to do wfh is a huge luxury!
on the career progression front, i think my journey would have looked very different had i started in a completely remote environment. i get bored easily, and back then, when i was bored, i’d waste a ton of time on slashdot.3 i definitely needed direct mentorship early in my career to get my work ethic to where it is now, and i think that would have been difficult to get in a remote setting
i definitely would have hated working from my apartment, and a nice coffee shop wasn’t within walking distance either
all this said, i’m a big fan of remote-first cultures that have quarterly all-company get togethers. it’s the best of both worlds. everyone gets the benefits of working from home and the best moments of working in an office (including the “collaboration” and “spark” that most execs defending RTO love to talk about)
i don’t think rto is the move. the cat’s out of the bag, and it ain’t going back in
to be fair, though, i’ve been traveling for work for the last seven years (again, i are defective), so my dog is mostly irrelevant in this fight