Charlie Warzel

Not really about working from home; more about "wfh as a lens for examining issues with the way we conceptualise / structure work in society".

Pretty good tho. Really light on prescribing techniques; really heavy on prescribing focus points.

Main things I took away:
- Flexibility for employees needs guardrails instead of boundaries -- organisationally enforced / designed limits rather than pushing the work to employees
- Remote work, but also management in general needs a huge amount of attention and investment; it's typically been a bolt-on/afterthought in a lot of companies
- Tech / new ways of working are often adopted too quickly / cargo-culted without holistic consideration of the sideeffects (open offices, email, Slack etc etc), iteration is probably really important. Surveillance tech is fucked
- Best thing about remote work is it theoretically gives you space to engage with community, but there's a lot of work / investment required here from individuals. Childcare, Unions, mutual dependence.

All in all, felt like it was saying "here's what we have, here's this weird thing that happened because of the pandemic, how can we imagine something new that grows out of this?". In that sense, sorta utopian/idealistic, but cautiously so.

Didn't feel super... direction-ful? And/or like it was written quickly? But some good ideas to mull over.… (mehr)

I've long been a fan of Anne Helen Peterson's work since her piece on Burnout in Buzzfeed News, and have followed her to the Culture Study substack.

Out of Office is partly about working from home, but more broadly is an examination on how we work, specifically in the United States and trends over the years, like how technology such as email or chat/messenger (Slack, Teams, etc.) are ostensibly supposed to ease communication but in reality let work follow us home, blurring the boundaries between work and personal time. A lot of these have been festering problems that were really thrown into sharp relief during the pandemic, most typically for information workers. It's difficult for the individual to tackle such broad issues (that frankly need to be addressed at an institutional level), but there are suggestions to consider such as defining your boundaries and finding community OUTSIDE of work.

I'm biased because I like AHP's work, but also because I have one of those bullshit office jobs (and having transitioned to the desk from the lab bench, previously interacting more often with production workers on the floor... yeah, I feel like there's more physical effort going on there than what I do, and having to take inventory of my actions before an extended leave only highlights this for me). Still, even if the issues aren't a matter of life and death our employers should still consider how best to treat and accommodate their workers, especially as younger employees will seek out better settings if an employer oversteps.

It's a little bit funny to read this in 2023 when they interview the head of Twitter's HR in 2021 about hybrid changes to disincentivize coming to the office in order to allow for hybrid remote/in person work collaborations, when in late 2022 Twitter's workforce was thrown into chaos in a number of ways including mass layoffs and a forced return to the office.… (mehr)

Non solo una buona fotografia del mondo del lavoro post-pandemico, che spicca decisamente fra le tante. È anche un libro più ricco di quanto si possa immaginare (pensando ai riferimenti del mondo manageriale), che ripercorre elementi di storia degli uffici e della tecnologia mettendone in luce le tappe chiave che hanno condotto all'oggi. Interessante e sorprendente anche la chiusura con un appello alla lungimiranza dei capi e alla capacità di ogni lavoratore di trovarsi passioni libere delle logiche di "performance" tipiche del lavoro.… (mehr)

Out of Office is the most comprehensive study of what working is like in 2021 I've ever read. With the broad shift to remote work just a year earlier due to COVID, the evolving reality of *where* one works is now very much a part of the conversation. This disruption is still new, and raw, and 10 years from now things might look quite different. Though I'm not convinced *how* we work will change all that quickly because, well, we're only human.

The authors refrained from taking sides in the WFH vs In-Office debate, and instead they discussed the realities of both arrangements. And it's clear there are no easy answers here. More so because everything is new and evolving. The goal ultimately is to lift up worker satisfaction along with productivity, two metrics that are difficult to correlate. But that's the crux of it I believe. Everything else is a discussion or an argument in service of that goal.… (mehr)