Flexibility sounds good but what I have seen over the last year is that all boundaries in terms of when and where work begins and ends are being eroded. This started accidentally but it is now being actively exploited on an unprecedented scale.
At will employment is the problem. You should be able to switch off at a certain time and ignore work comms. But I think in US you’d be scared of being fired. In other countries like UK this has never been a concern, and WFH doesn’t change that.
Yeah tell that to my teaching assistant wife who works at a Lincolnshire village primary school and is now 'always on' to the whims of the go getting headmistress 24/7.
She feels she can't practically ignore out of hours requests and she doesn't want to challenge the practice for fear of rocking the boat.
I empathize after two years in UK education. The working culture is almost cult like and self reinforcing - the Peter principle in action turns the best teachers at reinforcing the status quo into headteachers.
Unions are really powerful in education - it's one of the only benefits of the sector I can think of. Hopefully your wife has a union rep they can teach out to on behalf of all the staff if not just herself? Teaching assistant salaries definitely don't to high enough to compensate for anything outside of school hours!
As a counterpoint, I'm not in teaching but many of my colleagues workdays are heavily disrupted by childcare, so they compensate by working odd hours, sending emails or slack messages at 5am or 1-2am etc.
It's not that they expect everyone else to be working these odd hours at all, just that it's the only time they themselves can catch up on work.
One colleague who is a manager even has a note to this effect in his email footer, explaining he doesn't expect others to action or respond to messages outside of normal working hours.
I'm based in Ireland. I think your view is a bit one dimensional in terms of the employer-employee relationship. A lot of soft pressures exist for employees even when their actual employment is secure.
Agreed. Sone time ago I was in a meeting where my Head of HR was (US) talking with an auditor (US) about how amused the workers in Mexico are of the "at will" language of the US contract. Laughing because we do not have that here in Mecico. They had a good laugh about it.
I was silently thought it was very interesting how they have been convinced that at will employment is a good thing... and thanking my government work laws which require any company to pay for 3 months compensation if they desire to fire me.
The UK is basically 'at will' for the first two years. I've never worried about getting fired in that period. Just pick who you work for carefully and make yourself valuable.
The standard probation period is six months in the UK. I haven't encountered two years yet, is that even legal? And it's called probation period for a reason, it's a time for both sides to figure out if the arrangement works out and be able to quit with no or little notice otherwise. After that, 3 months notice periods are completely normal so it's good to not get locked into that from day one.
I'm not talking about contractual probation periods. There's a universal two year threshold after which you get extra protections, and before which you can be fired for any reason that's not specifically discriminatory on race, gender, etc + some other very narrow cases. Pretty similar to what 'at will' means in the US. We just have a short statutory notice period.
> Even though an employee has fewer employment rights in the first two years of their employment, an employer would be foolish to assume they have carte blanche to dismiss at will.
So while it's true that there's less protection for workers, there is no at will employment in the UK. Probation period probably comes closest to it but is much shorter.
What are you talking about? The US doesn't give carte blanche either. Discrimination law exists. Other labor laws exist. Exactly as this article refers to as being 'not carte blanche' in the UK.
'At will' in the US and the 2 year qualifying period in the UK are practically identical, apart from that the UK has a 2-week statutory notice period. The protections that remain in both the US and UK are almost entirely about protected classes. Even the classes themselves are virtually the same.
"Have they been there less than 2 years?" is the first thing legal will ask you when you want to sack someone in the UK. It's a wholly different status to being protected after the period.
I've worked crappy jobs and never worried about getting fired. The crappier your job, the lower the threshold it's considered 'expensive' to replace you. It's not that hard to meet that threshold of contributed value. Employers generally have an incentive to keep you for this reason, unless you're truly terrible or something else is going on with their finances.
It's a little patronizing for you to assume I have no experience of being unprivileged just because our opinions about it differ. Or that those without privilege can't manoeuvre their way into choosing a slightly better job, even if they don't have an absolutely free choice over the space of all possible jobs, or even if they have to take a worse one temporarily in order to transition to where they want to be. Not all poor people are mindless cattle devoid of planning or agency.
Tech workers have a much stronger hand with their employers than many other groups. As a result I think we often don't see the kind of power imbalance that is going on and how hard it is to simply "do the rational thing" which seems so cut and dried to you.
The point I would make is that the WFH experience is very different for different groups. Like everything about the Pandemic it has had totally inequitable impacts on different people.
I'm in tech and I've had no issue, but many people I know are not and I've seen how it works out. Not everyone can just move to another job. Perhaps most people can't.
I disagree. The company has a responsibility to set rules around when it's ok to call people. Especially for junior employees it's very hard to decline calls from their managers late in the evening.
This has become a bigger issue as all communication is via phone or computer. Before, a lot was via personal interaction which just wasn't possible once you left the office. Now, no one really knows if someone is working or has already called it a day at any given point.
Get a work phone/computer. Make it clear that you won't be available outside of business hours unless it's actually an emergency.
My Dad resisted getting a mobile phone from his company from the mid eighties to the 2000's, on the principle that if they can't contact you, they'll figure it out themselves.
I wasn't talking about myself or really any senior person. But tell that to an intern or someone in their first job. And that's the problem with flexible working, it's often especially terrible for the most junior employees.
Not only that, but there's a great deal of privilege in being able to say "no". It is something the talented tech worker gets used to being able to do, because they have options elsewhere. They can design their employment because they have in-demand skills. But it doesn't necessarily mean everyone is comfortable with it or can afford to risk the consequences.
This might be a blessing in disguise. Hopefully it will force us to really examine our work culture, and begin to challenge this notion that 40+ hours a week of our lives should be devoted to work (unless of course, you're working that many hours voluntarily on something you love).
That only works if you don't have the chat/emails on your phone and if you can just switch that off. There are enough companies that allow business phones for personal use (can be great to save costs) which means you always have your business phone with you. And on the phone no one sees if you're working before they call you.
a) I feel sympathy for the young, single-types who benefit most from working in a busy environment. The WFH change is wonderful for the older types a bit fed up with long-commutes and open plan offices. I hope the hybrid approach allows us to treat the office like an old-school marketday where once or twice a week, everyone is there and the goal is to be as social as possible. The softer skills of work arent easily passed on via a Zoom call
b) The world has had to quickly adapt to WFH, and I suspect much of the dislike some people have experienced with WFH is due to things that arent fit for this purpose. Many of my colleagues live in small London flats with both parents trying to hold simultaneous zoom-calls and with schools being shutdown, having to manage their children while also doing their jobs. As WFH (hopefully) sticks, these problems iron themselves out
On your b. topic, that's what my company has been pretty clear about: we aren't working from home, we are at home, during a global crisis, trying to work.
It's not the experience I had before, around 2010-2011, working completely remote/from home for 2 years with processes and companies adapted to that. Being able to take 2 hours during an afternoon to meet people for a coffee somewhere, or go to the gym.
We are just trying to work from home now, not really living through a proper experience of that with all its benefits.
> On your b. topic, that's what my company has been pretty clear about: we aren't working from home, we are at home, during a global crisis, trying to work.
Mine was too, and I really appreciated that they made a point of it. Lowered expectations led to lowered stress, people did their best without fear of negative consequences for decline in productivity - and, as it turned out after management reviewed the issue few months later, productivity did not suffer.
For (a) can we do barbecues and cookouts and happy hours instead? We can bring whiteboards if needed but I really don't want to spend even 2 hours a week commuting again.
I really much appreciate this aspect of the pandemic. The "home office revolution" has long been possible, but still would not have happened for a long time without COVID.
People with friends and family can't gauge how bad of a toll this has taken on lonely single guys like me. For most of them WFH been a Godsend. I really wish this ends or at least there remains enough places which require working from the office.
It's a mixed blessing. On the one hand, you're always with your family. On the other hand, you're always with your family.
Fact of life is, many relationships have trouble finding balance between "me time" and "us time". Going to work is, for many, a way to catch a break from their home - with perfect plausible deniability, since it's socially approved and demanded externally.
Some people don't need it. I had a co-worker who would come super-early in the morning, so he could leave early and spend time with his kids. At work, we could see his kids were his whole world, and he was always happy. But at that same job, I also had a different co-worker who went out his way to find reasons to stay overtime - he dreaded coming back home. I don't keep in touch with them much, but I imagine the former one was super-happy about forced WFH, but the latter very much not.
Add to that, quite a lot of people in cities bought their apartments on the assumption that both partners are working 9/5 at the office and the kids are at school/daycare - this let them buy smaller places for less (or closer to work). Such apartments become living hell when all dwellers are present simultaneously for the entire day, and each is trying to do their work/school.
This is not to trade who has it worse - just pointing out that it's not smooth sailing for those of us with families either. There's a tight line between being happy to have people around, and hating their guts for it - this pandemic pushed a lot of us close to that border.
Optimizing your lifelong estate purchase for a style of life that won't always be there seems crazy to me. Why?! Because you get to buy a cheaper estate -- is that the main reason? But you will not always work 9-5. You actually get to retire one day. Also there are the occasional long vacations when everybody is at home. Etc.
The elephant in the room: if you can't tolerate your partner in the same flat/house for longer periods of time then IMO you shouldn't marry them so... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I get it that alone time is extremely important. I practice it as well -- my wife too. But what you describe just seems... more like a good roommates' arrangement / contract, and not an actual relationship?
Please understand that none of this is meant to offend or generalize. But what you describe is just legitimately baffling for me.
> Optimizing your lifelong estate purchase for a style of life that won't always be there seems crazy to me. Why?! Because you get to buy a cheaper estate -- is that the main reason? But you will not always work 9-5. You actually get to retire one day. Also there are the occasional long vacations when everybody is at home. Etc.
For most 20-30yo, the 9-5 lifestyle is absolutely expected to be there for the next 30 years. Vacations are often handled by traveling, visiting extended family, etc. There normally are many options available. And by the time retirement comes, children will have moved out, or perhaps the parents will have sold the flat, or left it to the children, and moved out elsewhere. I don't think there is something as a "lifelong estate purchase" these days in the cities. Not when you're in your thirties.
> The elephant in the room: if you can't tolerate your partner in the same flat/house for longer periods of time then IMO you shouldn't marry them so... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Easy to say :). But some people only discover that quite late - once some unpredictable circumstances (like job loss, or a global pandemic) force them to actually stay in the same flat for long periods of time. Most working-age adults don't experience that ordinarily (and I think every couple expects they'll work such issues out by the time they get to retire).
> But what you describe just seems... more like a good roommates' arrangement / contract, and not an actual relationship?
Relationships are complex, and every one is different. They get even more complex if extended family gets involved, or when children appear. And sudden events like a global pandemic have a way of revealing previously unseen cracks in the foundations. If people were aware of all this up front, humanity would have died out centuries ago :).
>For most 20-30yo, the 9-5 lifestyle is absolutely expected to be there for the next 30 years.
I would be very careful making any claim going as far as the next 30 years, given what has happened in the last 2 years, let alone in the last century. If that wasn't enough to convince my fellow 20-30yos, nothing's going to shake them awake to how volatile life can be.
> But you will not always work 9-5. You actually get to retire one day.
I think most people around my age in Europe (in their thirties) started working around 25, at the latest, and will work until they're at least 65. Probably later, since in many countries the retirement age is starting to be indexed with life expectancy. It's quite realistic that by the time I retire I will have worked 50+ years.
> Optimizing your lifelong estate purchase for a style of life that won't always be there seems crazy to me. Why?! Because you get to buy a cheaper estate -- is that the main reason? But you will not always work 9-5. You actually get to retire one day. Also there are the occasional long vacations when everybody is at home. Etc.
Simple answer: You aren't locked into a home for life, so you buy a home for the life you want now. My parents are on the verge of retiring, so they bought a beach condo and plan to sell off their suburban home.
My wife and I are looking at smaller city homes, but definitely do not plan to retire in it, we're looking at maybe a 5-10 year timespan of ownership.
> Because you get to buy a cheaper estate -- is that the main reason? But you will not always work 9-5.
The extra time spent commuting from a distant house are real costs paid every day. The potential of owning a home that you can retire in is a hypothetical payoff many many years in the future.
Because it costs a lot of money to buy a house with enough room for 2 separate offices. Paying for that if you have no reason to believe you'll ever need it would be well into the stupid range for most people.
You need a place to live now. You can always sell it later - perhaps at a profit, perhaps at a loss - but a place to live optimized for your current conditions will let you save up money to buy a better place later, that will be optimized for your future conditions.
Prior to the pandemic, if you and your spouse both had jobs where you worked in company offices, then paying extra for a house that would support home offices for both of you is a huge expense. If you think every couple should do so just because they might both need to work from home some day, then you seriously overestimate how much extra money most families have available. Or underestimate how much money those extra rooms add to the cost of a house.
Family is fine, but working from home while my neighbors in the neighboring apartments are also all at home with their children - is too much.
Also, construction. I currently have two construction sites in my 100 meter radius. It's almost like they compete who can use the jackhammer more.
Is all of that loneliness from WFH or can some be attributed to National lockdowns and limits on social interaction outside your household?
In a post Covid world, WFH could involve coworking spaces and cafes. I expect that industry will grow massively over the coming years as we migrate into a more distributed working style. It’s a new way of doing things things and it’s going to take time to adapt and replace the social side of the office.
Exactly. I “worked from home” for several years before covid, but I never worked exclusively at home until covid. I’d usually spend a few hours of a few days a week at a coffee shop, library or park, and not being able to do that during covid has definitely made remote work feel more isolating.
While there‘s truth to that, it doesn‘t bring home my own issue with WFH: It might be okay to much better for individual contributors, but it‘s harsh for me as a manager.
Zoom (fatigue) meetings all day, staring at the screen instead of real people and any form of "managing by walking around" and watercooler chats are gone.
This might not make a difference if my job was a corporate mess and sucked before already, but for people like me who actually enjoy their peers, it‘s a net negative.
I feel completely out of touch with what happens in the company and everything feels super transactional.
I mean, nobody opens a Zoom call to just chit-chat about mundane stuff. Well, some do but I‘m sick of taking any additional video call beyond the 4h I’m enduring every day.
Sure, we could adjust to an even more asynchronous workflow like the poster child remote companies, but to me it would make this issue even worse.
I can see how this benefits introverts and people with social anxiety, but as for extroverts me, I‘m getting more depressed every day.
> And at the end of the day if the employees who write code/produce output are doing that efficiently that is the goal right.
That is the short term goal. But it isn't the only goal. I want my reports to trust me so that if things change or they are having problems that they'll be honest with me and provide feedback so I can make things better. I want my reports to feel valued and emotionally satisfied with their work. This means understanding their career goals and what makes them feel happy so I can make sure that they get the kinds of rewards that matter to them. These sorts of things are important for the long term sustainability of a team even if a team is delivering efficiently at a given moment.
Good one, actually most of my employees feel the same way.
You might have a bad case of a micromanager there, but here‘s my definition:
> Management by walking around emphasizes the importance of interpersonal contact, open appreciation, and recognition. It is one of the most important ways to build civility and performance in the workplace.
I started doing the "walking around" bit after negative feedback ~20 years ago, and stopped again pretty soon after it was clear that while it works, it's a band-aid for getting people confident that it's ok to talk to you whenever, and the real problem was that I'd been pretty burnt out and shut myself off for a while, not that I didn't literally walk the room.
With remote teams what I've done as a workaround with some teams have been to enforce a short 1-on-1 weekly, and tell people if we don't have anything to talk about, then we make it brief. It prevents team members who are reticent about taking your time from having issues build up because they feel it's too small or too personal to schedule a meeting about when they have a time slot they know you'll schedule regardless. For some it was almost always a 5 minute annoyance of me asking if there were any issues, them saying they had nothing to talk about, and for us to leave it at that. But it acted as a safety valve, and every now and again something absolutely critical would get brought up in those calls.
And many times when they had "nothing" to talk about, I'd ask them followup questions about small stuff like e.g. how they got on with specific people, or how a certain project was going, and suddenly it turned out they had plenty of things to talk about.
In teams where you know everyone will speak up, you can dial back both the actual and "virtual" walking of the room, knowing they'll come and tell you, but "walking the room" effectively acts as a way of lowering the barrier to bring up an issue, because they're not "bothering you".
I started a job as a manager during the pandemic, with everyone working from home. It sucked. On top of the usual difficulties with onboarding remotely, I had to deal with getting to know everyone around me in a 360 degree sphere, and forming relationships when most people had already been able to get to know each other in person.
Can not wait to get back to being able to meet people in person, even if remote and WFH is allowed and accepted in the future, which I think it will be for all but the most dinosaur of companies.
> I mean, nobody opens a Zoom call to just chit-chat about mundane stuff. Well, some do but I‘m sick of taking any additional video call beyond the 4h I’m enduring every day.
Some indeed do, but for some reason it requires more effort than meeting physically did. I never did that, but I had co-workers who did it regularly even pre-pandemic.
What more people do, though, is chit-chat about mundane stuff on IMs. Depending on the company, your subordinates may already have their own #random / #offtopic channel. Of course, as a manager, you need to stay away from it and pretend you don't know it exists :).
But I wonder if there's a space for managers to create a second off-topic channel for their team - one that contains the manager as well. Most of the casual talk will of course stay on the original #random (the boss/subordinate separation cannot be bridged, everyone knows it's there even if they pretend it's not), but the #random+boss chat could capture the kind of conversations you'd ordinarily have on the corridor/around the doors to your office. I know I had plenty of semi-casual chats like this IRL with my boss back in my office days, and they were good for morale. I think this concept didn't translate well into pandemic/forced-WFH world.
Of course, if you don't like casual IMing and prefer synchronous communication, then that's not an option for you.
> I can see how this benefits introverts and people with social anxiety, but as for extroverts me, I‘m getting more depressed every day.
I sympathize. I hope this will end soon, and that we all find balance again. Your company may not return to full-office, but when the restrictions end, it'll be easier to see people IRL even if everyone's mostly working from home.
For what's worth, I'm more on the introvert end, and yet I sometimes feel I'm on the verge of losing my mind - we introverts have limits, too, and this pandemic situation is stressing them.
> What more people do, though, is chit-chat about mundane stuff on IMs. Depending on the company, your subordinates may already have their own #random / #offtopic channel. Of course, as a manager, you need to stay away from it and pretend you don't know it exists :).
Why is that? At all the companies I have worked at the managers would join in with these kind of things same as everyone else (not all of them, but then not of all the ICs were interested either).
You're asking that as a manager or employee? If the former, I suspect there were channels you didn't know about. If the latter, I don't know - but maybe they were channels you didn't know about :).
But the reason is, these chats are for conversations you won't feel comfortable having with your boss around. Cat pictures, stupid jokes, random topics. Even if people felt comfortable with such topics around their manager, they might still be worried that the volume of communications will be seen by the manager as evidence that people are slacking off.
There's pros and cons. But I've seen it be useful for teams to have a "manager-free" space where they can shoot the breeze and complain about stuff without feeling like they are being watched or judged or that their complaints will be taken too urgently.
> without feeling like they are being watched or judged or that their complaints will be taken too urgently.
I guess my feeling is that if your manager is doing that then they aren't a good manager (of course there are plenty of not-good managers, but it's not part and parcel of being a manager)
I'm introverted, and generally have most of my social interactions online. I like interacting with people, but it's draining to the point that I've loved working from home 80%-100% the last several years, and rarely go out other than for errands and to meet my girlfriend. First lockdown was an absolute breeze for me. I loved the solitude.
Yet the subsequent lockdowns have been enough even for me to nudge me into what feels like (very) mild depression. Low-level enough that it's a nuisance rather than a problem, and I'm confident it will just go by itself once I am able to spend more time doing other things, but nevertheless it's a noticeable deterioration in mood and happiness level.
I can't imagine what it must be like for people with stronger social needs... It's also the main thing that keeps me from getting judgemental about people skirting lockdown restrictions.
You're not alone. I just couldn't work without a varied selection of places to work from. I kind of froze, and couldn't bring myself to wake up and go 2 meters to my desk and work all day. The office was worse, but having coffee shops to go to was my previous solution.
It's been very cold to be tryping in the park as well! It's getting better now, but is still not ideal. I have particularly cold extremities so it's very painful to type in that weather.
I think the co-working space could grow in some really interesting ways. However, in traditional companies the budget for office space tends to be out of the control of normal employees. People will have to choose between the official office or paying out of pocket. I am not sure how many people will want to do that. Giving employees more choice could save lots of money. But only if managers are prepared to lose some control.
I hope this is going to take off. I'd happily take a stroll across a park to a shared workspace, then go back home, rather than spend 3 hours commuting.
The problem (not for me, but potentially for my employer) is that I will not be sitting with my coworkers, so building this sense of "community" is going to be much harder for them. The solution? Force everyone back in to the office as soon as possible...
an anecdotal example: a relative of mine is an electrical engineer, and has worked on satellite on-board software for the last 34 years or so.
she used to loathe working from home during the lockdown, but when the restrictions were eased she started enjoying it a lot.
if anything, she says, she's getting at least one hour and a half more sleep in the morning and she's skipping the commute on the way back, so that's another hour saved.
she still has to go in the office on friday, but according to her that's more of a management wish that anything really useful.
I'm wondering to what extent social working has to be within a company.
A fitness club I was part of a decade ago had this amazing 'cafe' space that was often used by folks with laptops and the odd bit of chat. It felt social. If work anywhere becomes the thing, is there is scope for work 'clubs'? Or without the fitness reason to be there at all, is it a nonstarter?
If you work at a bank that's basically impossible. Most people will deal with data to some degree, anyone else in the room needs to be cleared for that data (i.e. employee of the same company).
And banks aren't the only companies where that applies, anyone dealing with customer data cannot just use a shared office with people of other companies. If you deal with code that can also apply to some degree.
I've often enough seen confidential data on trains/planes because people were working on the go and not using proper screen protectors (in the past those were mostly consultants). Luckily that never included sensitive customer data. The more people work in public places, the higher the risk for data breaches.
I love working from home but I think it has to be either home or office for many, cafes or co-working spaces aren't a viable solution and a nightmare for anyone in IT security.
It sounds like you are describing co-working spaces that have already existed for a few years. Some are subscription, others are drop in (e.g. if you work from home but want to book a nice room for a meeting). I assume each has their own culture depending on their clientele.
I'm in a similar solution - 1br, 1 living room, 1 kitchen, 2 people - so while everyone's been showing off their fortress of solitude, I've spent 12 months at the kitchen table. Watching people on youtube build stylish and spacious home offices has become our new fantasy porn.
I've heard a lot of people saying that companies are going to realise this means they can cut down on their property costs, but far, far fewer mentioning that they're moving the costs for us. We're looking for somewhere with 2-3br so we can dedicate WFH space, and it's going to mean 2-3x our current rent.
I think permanent WFH means tons of savings for employers, and meager tax savings for employees. Our costs have gone up substantially in one year of working from home, and the government doesn't allow us to write almost anything off.
Whereas an office could write off coffee, TP, cleaning staff, electricity, the whole rent etc, we are stuck with only being able to write off equipment we bought specifically for working and wondering if the tax authorities will come after us for that.
It's kind of a ratchet, possibly still underappreciated. If WFH was to become the norm, the rational thing for a person in your situation to do would be to find that 2-3br place in a location where it costs 1-1.5x your current rent. There's no point in living in cramped, overpriced apartment in the city, that was bought on the assumption that everyone living in it will be out at work/school for most of the day, when there's no work to go to! And once enough skilled workers move away, it might be tougher for the companies to bring them all back, reinforcing the pressure for WFH.
I am fortunate enough to be able to afford a 2br (65-70m^2 internal) to myself, so I have more than enough room and don't feel cramped. As such, I tend to go the opposite direction - 4 days at home, 1 day in the office out of obligation. Sometimes I just skip that 1 day a week if my workload requires more focus time, as office time is generally me helping more junour staff. I agree though that a mixed mode can be a best of both worlds scenario.
If we as a whole continue down the path of more WFH, open shared office spaces may eventually begin to find their feet and fill that 'mixed-mode' equivalent if the company itself does not have office space. I predict there might also be more public spaces such as libraries opening up with work areas for people to get out of home when working.
The other challenge is the social component of work, but I think that will change post-Covid too. Being in Australia has afforded me the extremely lucky capability of being able to get out and socialise almost completely freely during the last year, and it undoubtly helps immensely. I think that for people who live alone, working from home will become less isolating when they can socalise outside of work hours more freely again. For example, social sport is a lot easier to fit in to your day when you're not then also losing an hour or more in your day to travel. You can do it and still easily have time to prep dinner or do your daily chores.
In short, I think that the shift to WFH due to covid will be a lot easier for a lot more people once the restrictions of Covid subside.
There's a whole new world of opportunities for co-working, mixed-working out there and they'll explode after this pandemic is over.
I had to cancel my co-work subscription when no client would accept my proposal to work remote. When the world reopens I'll never go back.
In your case, imagine yourself pleasantly walking to your local co-working space or to any of the urban entertainment facilities that will inevitably proliferate in the effort to capture all the time freed from lousy daily commutes.
If I were you I'd take that as a sign that you shouldn't double down on work to give you a social life. If I were you I'd take this as a hint to put strict boundaries between work and personal life and try and have more of the latter.
It's more likely that we'll end up in a hybrid environment. Previous companies I've worked for already had clean-desk policies. No-one, not even the CEO had a fixed desk.
Teams were assigned areas so they knew where in the building to meet, but if you arrived late and all the desks were taken you simply went and found another area (or if you needed to hide to minimize disruptions).
In a hybrid-model this becomes even easier, because the hardest thing with the above model is keeping free capacity in a growing company.
It will probably end with a better balance than right now. I used to enjoy working from home a couple days a week as focus days with minimal interruptions, but doing this all week with a lot happening inside the house at the same time (schools and daycare closed, spouse also wfh every day, grandparents in the house taking care of the kids, 3 different package delivery services at the door etc.) is not that great and I can't wait to work from the office again.
Obviously there are also numerous negative effects. That‘s why I qualified my statement like this.
To respond to the point you made: I am a young single guy loving on his own. Still, I do not mind the lockdown so much. Granted, I may not be very representative, but just another data point.
There is too much investment into office real estate for it to vanish. I think once things are back to "normal", you'll easily be able to find a normal office job. I would expect the majority of people are more in your camp than the 100% remote camp.
I don't think WFH during a pandemic is a good point of comparison to regular WFH. It'd be like me judging it by my current situation where we just upgraded our lockdown again very severely. I've got a 7 year old and a 4 year old playing Twister next to my desk right now at 0842! All the things I like doing during the day are closed or extremely restricted. I know this is going to suck! Some of my friends have been stuck at home trying to keep kids on remote learning going whilst working in open plan houses for over a year. This is just not a normal situation.
i'm optimistic here; you're not the only one and society will adapt to this new void if WFH persists. we are after all social and want to spend time with other people.
covid is still very much among us so don't expect much socializing until people feel safe to leave their basements.
Work isn't the only place you can socialise with people. You seem to have a deeper problem if you're using work to fill that void. Do you need help on finding alternative sources?
On a weekday pre covid many people would spend about half their waking hours at work so its reasonable for work to be a major social component in their lives. I'd guess that other social activities they might have been doing were also curtailed due to covid. As another single person I can definitely relate to feeling very isolated over the past year.
That's unduly personal and crosses into IPD (Internet Psychiatric Diagnosis). Please don't do that here–the odds that it will land well with the other person are vastly smaller than you expect, no matter how helpful your intentions are.
> Just like every other human being you can socialise with the people around you (unless you live in the middle of the desert with nobody around, in which case I apologise)
Or, you know, if we’re in the middle of a global pandemic.
Where should he socialize? Everything's closed and some have even curfews and rules against socializing anyone outside their household? What options does it leave to a lonely guy like op? Pretty much none.
It might really be a liberating moment for people (and economies, but let's care about people first). I don't know the future but I've seen way too much absurd friction in too many workplaces not to believe this can be a good step.
Meanwhile, here in Belgium, some companies force employees to come to the office despite government plea to allow remote work. Subjectively, there's been much less traffic on the streets in the beginning of the pandemic. Now, it seems like far too many people are still commuting every day.
You are completely right, some employers just can't cope with the tiny bit of control they lose when their employers work from home. A friend of mine (who is also in IT) still has to do an hour and a half drive 3 times a week just so that a client can 'see' that he is working. There is no reason for him to go work there, other than inspection. We're in IT, all we need is a decent computer and a network connection.
It won't be for everyone but there has still been a huge revolution. Many businesses didn't even have laptops for employees before. Having the technical infrastructure makes it much easier to allow 1-2 days per week from home.
I've also seen WFH advertised much more in job ads. That in turn probably means that more candidates ask for partial WFH as part of their decision to join the company. In the end, that will drive change even if some managers object it.
Only mid-sized towns, really. At least currently, very rural areas often lack the infrastructure to allow several people in the household to use video streaming (calls for the parents, youtube etc for kids) simultaneously. Starlink could change that, let's see. But unless you get at least 50mbit/s to every household, remote work won't really be possible for many. And sadly, many countries are far from having 50mbit/s available in rural areas.
I personally love the Scottish Highlands but internet is unbearably slow anywhere but in a few major cities. Let's hope Starlink can meet demand of those areas.
So Anecdata for me. I live in the rural west highlands in a village of 200 people.
I have 900/100 FTTP and 4G connectivity is available anywhere in the village on EE. With lack of contention you can get 100Mbps down stream over 4G
I did have to pay for the FTTP install (FTTPoD) but when compared to the reduction in property prices it was easily offset.
Even without extra money for FTTPoD, the village has FTTC and a couple of cabinets so most get decent coverage, and the houses next to the exchange have straight FTTP.
Ok maybe I should reconsider moving there, last time I visited (just before Covid hit) I had the impression that most smaller settlements have very poor connectivity (both mobile and from talks with people living there).
yeah it's definitely still worth checking where the local cabinets are and distance to any property, but it's possible to get good Internet in most areas, and property (outside of places like Skye that are super-popular with tourists) are a lot lower than cities like Edinburgh.
I've lived here 7 years and gone from using 3 Bonded DSL lines to get 12Mb/s to where I am now over that period.
Come school holidays I put all the TVs/iPads etc on one and the other for my work. Still a pain with slow internet but it limits it. ADSL is 3.5mb down and satellite is 30mb but latency is worse.
I'm looking at bonded networks currently to improve, plus when Starlink gets to me I think I'll keep a second connection as I heard there are a few dropouts and will be a while for the satellites to number enough to mitigate that.
Anyway, it's not ideal but it works ok and lets me live rural.
I live just outside a small town (3,000 population), and I get 20mbit/s up and down via a local WISP that uses Ubiquiti PTMP hardware atop the local water tower. I pay $125/mo for the privilege, but it is enough for both me and my wife to work remotely with both of us nearly always on video calls.
Fort William had decent internet last time I was there. Probably not a city by most standards but the biggest place around there so it does feel like a major center. But maybe their connectivity is also a result of the tourists coming for Ben Nevis.
40km from Berlin isn't really rural though. Try going 100km further. I recently drove through rural Brandenburg & Saxony close to the border to Poland. Some villages had 2G, I also encountered (tiny) villages with basically no mobile connection at all. I can understand why people are forced to leave for bigger cities if you cannot even get reliable 4G or decent internet at home.
The highlands are difficult. They have lots of hills, lots of bedrock very close to the surface, and low population density. It’s hard getting any mobile coverage in some areas let alone 3, 4, or 5G. It’s even tougher on the islands as cables can get damaged and microwave links perform poorly during winter storms.
4G in the highlands has massively improved in the last 5 years thanks to the ESN project.
The area I live in (west highlands just past the Rest and be thankful) has good 4G coverage anywhere in the village and even on the road up to the A83 now.
Whilst the ESN project has been a bit of a disaster overall it's really helped rural connectivity.
I'm really curious if Starlink et al. will change the region over coming decades. Its attractiveness is undeniable. I'd be surprised if remote places (esp islands) receive more interest if fast internet is available everywhere.
Mobile data in Germany is very, very, very expensive. An hour of video meeting consumes around 1GB (I think, probably even more), you can not keep up with the cost, I think.
Absolutely. Vodafone sells unlimited data (incl. 5G) in the UK for £26/month (~30€), in Germany the maximum you get is 40GB for 60€/month. And 40GB is nothing if you are on the road a lot. Other providers are similar.
I posted a couple days ago my anecdotes about Germany's internet when visiting there, even inside big cities the 4G connections are spotty. I have first-hand experiences with Hamburg, München, Frankfurt and Berlin.
I still experienced many times signal drops from 4G to 3G in Berlin late 2019, it's baffling coming from the perspective of Sweden.
As an employer (given our revenue didn’t deflate), I’d be happy to do that, but the administrative hurdles is what annoys me.
Laws of France says I can offer an allowance, but only if I gather every single receipt and do a pro-rata of, for example, the additional electric consumption caused by WFH. The administrative overhead of admitting a dozen invoices per employee of $7 each is probably around $7 each (their time, my time, the accountant time, and the opportunity cost that we spend 10%, 15%, 25% time dealing administrative matters rather than interesting software work - making our work boring is a huge cost). If I give it as a bonus (and pay taxes like on a salary), god knows whether I’ll be required to keep paying the bonus when they come back to the office.
I’d rather the govt say “Allowance is $10 per day”, but it is considered unfair between those who have to purchase their own desk and chair, and those who had the Aeron chair provided by the employer. We’ve succeeded to negotiate our social framework so much that moving in any direction has an important cost.
Having lived in Australia, it’s incredible how administrative overhead impacts morale in a huge way. In France you are always late for some paperwork, never free of mind.
I was always a “pay for your own telework stuff if you want to telework” kind of person, but after teleworking for a year in a crappy chair, I really wish my org would buy me decent office equipment. I took a chair and a desk for granted. And it seems like a good deal for orgs if employees all start buying their chairs and desks and whatnot.
At least in France it’s an OHSA equipment. They did mandate stupid stuff (they required me to give wireless keyboards); but shoulder, back, elbow and wrist inflammation are serious in IT jobs, and if an employee is at risk, the employer must fund the risk mitigation, i.e. the chair. I’m happy to do that.
Fun stuff, I work more than my employees, so OSHA asked me to have an Aeron-type chair (500€, Enjoy model), while my employees will be fine with just a good work seat for 7hrs a day. I actually wish I could give more stuff to my employees but they are a bit afraid to ask - It’s important to have regular talks about comfort.
I’d like to think that most employers that have spent the time and effort to make this work would have policies that cater for the cost of working from home, rather than just saying “you’re saving money on your commute, deal with it”; but this may be naive!
I know that at Spotify this is the case. When choosing to work from home you receive Wi-Fi allowance, as well as being allowed to expense a standing desk, monitor, desk lamp etc. You are also allowed to claim for coworking space fees, but only if you are > 50 miles from the office. Since working from home has begun all employees have been given a prepaid food card for lunch expenses, and after the pandemic this will be available to both home and office workers. The other benefit for a multinational like Spotify is you can work from any country that they are legally registered. I don’t know how other companies will approach this.
In my case I'm happy enough to not be paying $150 gas a month and a 1800 min driving commute a month (30 hr x $50 per hr is $1500) and $100 parking that I dont mind to continue paying for the internet I already had and the little extra electricity I use by WFH.
There are tax exemptions but during corona Skatteverket has stated that most of those cases aren't eligible for 2020 [0] (answer to the question "Kan jag göra några avdrag med anledning av corona?"):
> Du som under 2020 har jobbat hemma med anledning av pandemin kan som regel inte få avdrag för exempelvis arbetsrum, bredband, möbler eller kaffe, även om du har haft de kostnaderna för att du har jobbat hemma.
Translating:
> Can I make deductions due to corona?
> If you have worked from home in 2020 due to the pandemic, you cannot normally receive a deduction for, for example, workplaces, broadband internet, furniture or coffee, even if you absorbed the costs by working from home.
I like the mention of being able to work from your local branch. It may help keep more branches open if they're doubling up as workspaces for the "office" staff
Unlimited vacation is such an obvious lie, I'm surprised so many people see it as a perk.
It's like claiming to have flat structure. Nope, there is still a hierarchy, just like there is still a limit to the "unlimited" vacation days you can take. You just took something explicit and made it implicit to the detriment of your company.
It's a red flag when I see either of these advertised as perks and it makes me less likely to work for the company.
I've turned offers down over that. I will not work for a company that claims "unlimited" vacation, unless they're at least prepared to specify a contractual floor.
I also don't like it and I believe it's not necessarily legal in all countries. Many European countries have a minimum amount of vacation days and companies need to make sure employees also take those (not all do but theres no enforcement unless someone complains). "Unlimited" without a floor might lead to more vacation days for some but likely to fewer days for most.
And if they were truly unlimited, why would anyone work part-time? You could just work full time and take 2 days off per week (plus vacations) at full salary. But I doubt many companies would accept that.
A mix of both home-office and going to the actual office is probably the way to go for most companies. Sometimes being in the office just isn't necessary and colleague interaction can be done by phone or chat/video apps.
However, going into full time home-office mode isn't great either since you would miss out on the random meetings/talks when you run into each other in the office.
i read a lot of studies about how productivity increases when working from home.
so i decided to superficially calculate this after a year of working from home for all of my very diverse clientele (fortune 500, small agencies, etc). i felt that a lot less work was being done, but i didn’t know how much. or why.
since i’m a coder at heart i looked at tickets/features and commits. something easy to measure.
what i found is a big productivity drop. in some cases there was 40% less work done from home than from the office. and this happened gradually over the course of a year.
and since i know people working for big corps in HK i’ve asked them to do the same. their company’s productivity increased slightly (5%<). they were never forced to work from home.
this is by no means a scientific study, but i was surprised at the huge drops i was seeing, and even more surprised at the continuous drop off across the time line.
did anyone else notice this, or are just my clients outliners?
what will wfh do to the productivity difference between asian countries and western ones? will this apparent productivity loss be offset somehow?
You're ignoring the variables that conflate. Plenty of people I know are burnt out, tired, and not as productive as they are at their peak. This isn't "WFH". This is WFH and quarantine and not being able to travel or take travelling vacations and worrying about your health and the health of everyone you care about and schooling at home and a pandemic and......you get the point. No data claiming a productivity drop during this pandemic can be isolated to WFH with any reliability.
I'm burnt out. My productivity has been garbage this month. The cause isn't WFH or even work in general - the cause is that it's been an utterly miserable year for the world and it's wearing me down. I'm tired of isolation and I'm tired of constant reminders in the world around me that I'm surrounded by idiots without empathy who would rather protest their right to put others in danger than take basic precautions to protect those around them, and I'm ABSOLUTELY tired of the fact that these people haven't learned or changed in an entire year.
I have been working from home for about 10 years. I have been a top performer in most companies I worked with, promotions, etc.
My productivity is down this year a lot. And I mean a lot. This is not because of WFH but do to the situation we live in. I think I wrote like 50 lines of code this month. I just can't stand it anymore, being locked inside the house with a computer on. I was WFH pre-pandemic but travelled, surfed, played social sports, went to cafes, beach. I was productive but my life was balanced and nice. Lets not even talk about the home schooling period where I had to be a teacher and full time worker (like many parents).
Now? I hate my life. I just wake up with the desire for it to be night and go to bed and have the day behind me.
I actually think during this pandemic I would be more productive in an office, due to having some kind of normal, getting out of the house, see other people and talk with others. My gf just started a new job this week that required her to go to the office. You can't imagine how much I envy her right now. I wouldn't mind a 50 minute commute or whatnot, just for a sense of going back to normal.
So yeah, I think you are doing a very unscientific 'study' based on the current situation the world if going through.
What you failed to account for is that we are all working from home during a global health crisis.
I never felt burnt out before, but I do now. I haven't worked much more than if I was in the office, but conflating not having an office space for the usual water cooler discussions that helped shape architectures, having to schedule any kind of small conversation, be ready in your seat, etc. Having to be on during the expected office hours but from home, with no contrasts in life apart from the occasional walk, biking outside.
The drop is not necessarily due to working from home, more due to: working at home, during a crisis, while trying to build up completely new processes for working remotely, adjusting team spirit for that, adjusting means of communication to not be overwhelming (how many of us haven't already experienced Zoom/videocalls fatigue and started to give up on them? I know I have).
We are all mostly just at home, trying to work, I would hate to see this kind of data being misused to state that working from home is less productive. Working during a pandemic while loved ones are dying or in danger is less productive.
You're close to the right idea, but "easy to measure" is exactly the problem here. Tickets close is not a meaningful measure of productivity. It's better than commits, though. I've been pushing commits far less frequently since working from home, but it isn't because I'm actually pushing less code. It's because I no longer need to push to a central Git server in order to share with myself between a company-issued laptop I use when I am contributing from home and my office desktop when I'm in the office. I only have code in one place, and I only need to commit and push when I'm confident it's actually working, not as an adhoc sharing mechanism between devices that can't share storage.
Ultimately, the only metric that matters is company value and that has gone through the roof for virtually every company out there in spite of the pandemic. Unfortunately, that seems largely due to central bank action, not because their products have gotten any better, so that confounds any attempt to reduce the causes of value changes to anything you can easily measure at the individual employee level.
But currently I'm burned out. Living a groundhog day esque life. Getting up, sitting in front of a computer for 8 hours for work, sitting in front of a TV or a computer for 4-6 hours for "fun", go to sleep, repeat.
I'm trying to spend a few hour outside a day, but I have already seen every street in the 5 miles radius of my home at least twice.
I haven't been on a real vacation in the previous one and a half years. Taking PTO for sitting home is not relaxing.
Definitely down. Not sure if because the amount of distractions at home, kid, pet, things to tidy up... or if because people are taking this more like exceptional times, so it is OK to slack.
I only had time to go through the gentoo one. Although I never used gentoo and think that minimal perf improvements like those mentioned throughout are silly in exchange for having to know all the incantations and borking your OS every other monday, vs having something that works out of the box, I don't disagree entirely with the binary/source idea.
But it would need a different kind of OS and lib organisation than the ones we have right now to make it feasible.
It's a super old joke from at least 10 years ago, when computers were much less powerful and compiling everything was silly for a desktop OS. You'd get 1-2% increased performance and you'd have to spend tens of hours compiling everything :-)
A bit of a shame since Gentoo is quite a nice distro.
Read the second one, it's much shorter. It's just a joke about people "unrolling loops" manually, i.e. not using loops, so that their line count goes up (for people paid per LOC).
Something I haven't seen brought up much, probably because most of the people commenting on these posts aren't disabled, is the positive impact on disabled people. I have spine problems that effectively prevent me from being able to commute. I was able to get around that in the past by taking trains I could stand/sit on, but that required me to both live and work within walking distance of a train station, which in the US is not very many places. Then I was able to get around it when my wife started working at the same site because I could just carpool with her and be reclined the whole time.
But nothing truly freed me like the ability to work from bed. The possibility of a bad flareup or injury always haunted me because in the past it has meant possibly months of missed time while I go on disability or even having to change jobs. Now it means nothing. I mean, something because I'll be in more pain and miserable, but I can at least keep working.
i do hope that you are still taking a break when the pain flares up but i can totally see the difference to being out of commission for a week just because it's to painful to get in a car, when you could otherwise work, as long as you can sit comfortably and lie down for breaks, or whatever it is you need to do to get relief.
not to mention the difficulty of finding work that will accommodate your needs, since, even if it's required by law to not discriminate, some companies still find an excuse to not hire, or are making it difficult to get your workplace adjusted to your requirements.
Is there a risk of wide adoption of home working becoming discriminatory against people with low incomes?
I am lucky enough to have a 4 bedroom house that I share with just my fiancée. This means that I have space to have a nice office, that is separate from whatever else is going on in the house. This is not a luxury that everybody has. In most cases it will be because they can't afford it, but in some cases it will be because they prefer to or need to live in a big city where it is affordable to very few.
If you're in that situation working from home is going to be a less pleasant, less attractive option. If a large portion of workplaces become remote-first are you going to be at a disadvantage if you prefer an office?
We're not there yet - there aren't many remote first companies, and most companies offer the option but I worry that what for a lot of us is a blessing will become a curse to some.
that's a very good point. i could not get any work done if i didn't have a separate room. it's a small one (4-5sqm) but that's enough.
however that's the thing. most apartments i looked at in one particular city didn't have any small rooms. in order to get four bedrooms (one to be converted to an office) i could not find anything smaller than 150sqm. a friend of a relative has a 100sqm apartment with 5 rooms. two of them are mere closets with a window, but that's the perfect size for a home office.
another issue is tax relief. if you don't have your office in a separate room, you can't write off the full cost for that office as a work expense (which would be subtracted from your income, so you pay less income taxes). if your office is a desk in the living room, then you only get to write off half of the cost for that desk (or less) just because the room is also used for other purposes, and your kids, god forbid might use your desk for other activities when you are not working.
Absolutely. You learn so much more during the first years than just technical content. It's all about behavior at work, socializing, office politics etc. Sadly, anyone deciding if people should work remotely has already done that and is most likely in a position where they have a family and enough space at home for a nice office. Few people in upper management work out of a studio apartment in their first job.
I bet they'll walk back this advice when employees start moving outside the UK and start living across the world, and suddenly Nationwide has the laws and bureaucracies of hundreds of countries to deal with...
"Hi HR, you need to pay be the 8 years maternity pay you owe me because I live in Svalbard and the local laws require all employers pay that".
That would be an issue, but thankfully isn't necessarily the case.
you're usually bound by the locality where the contract is signed, so you dont suddenly gain rights just by moving abroad until the employer actually creates a new contract. for that to happen, the employer would have to create a legal entity in that legal region.
do note however, that some nations dont allow you to work while on their soil, unless you specifically get a visa permitting it.
This is not true in the US as state laws apply for where the employee conducts the work, not the location of the employer.
The employer will need to withhold taxes for the state of the employee as well.
This is frequently hard to detect with everyone teleworking, but rest assured that HR is getting a call if someone works in a state with maternity leave laws requiring it.
While not generally applicable for digital jobs that telework, I think the most obvious would be minimum wage. If I live in Seattle and telework to a job in Alabama that pays only $11, that’s a liability for the employer.
Of course, I think that if an employee was teleworking from a location without approval that’s likely grounds for dismissal.
A nation who has laws as you suggest opens their population up to remote slave labor. Ie. Some foreign company encourages citizens to work for less than minimum wage, paying no employment taxes, in conditions that would otherwise be illegal. That in turn also hurts local employers competing for the same labor pool.
Therefore I believe all nations will decide that work done on their soil must follow their employment laws, even if done for a foreign company.
There is precident for that interpretation pre-pandemic in many western countries.
This may or may not be true in all locales, but one issue described to me is that having a legal entity in one jurisdiction with employees in another jurisdiction can expose the company to be also tax liable in the workers jurisdiction
Just like taxation regimes have scrambled to keep up with the fact that you can order something from abroad and have ambiguity of where the sales tax will be applied - this is the next big thing about to happen:
High skilled, (comparatively) rich, healthy knowledge workers will leave the place they reside, move somewhere like Dubai (no tax, few free public services - doesn't matter they're not going to need them) to work for a company based - on paper, somewhere similarly - meanwhile the sick, aging and destitute back in the old country depend on tax-funded public services that have lost their tax base.
I don't know what the solution is - but it's something I think needs to be considered. Conversely, people might want to move the other way (say to the nordics), but, I'd wager it being heavily skewed in the first direction.
I think only a fraction of people would move away from their home country just to gain some tax benefits. Doesn't seem like most people I talk to are interested in that.
It's not really the tax benefits. I'm using Dubai as an example because I can't think of anywhere else, but plenty of people move there because it has:
Better weather, better housing, better roads, lower crime etc than a lot of, say Europe.
Of course, it also has a dark side such as no real social support net or anything (criminals, the sick and unemployed can just be deported), but the people moving there don't need that.
Yes of course, society, solidarity, etc etc - but in the past that model kind of worked because people didn't really have the ability to just pack up and go - whereas now they can just bring a laptop and their credit card and have a plane ticket, airbnb, leased car and new, and to them better, life with barely any effort.
I would actually say the opposite: many people I know (in the 20-28 years old age group) who work in IT and earn good salaries in their countries have said they'd move if they can make much more elsewhere. I think its not just about tax benefits but also the actual potential salary.
You raise great points. I think what countries would need to do is to lower taxes (potentially considered to be controversial by some) to attract talent from other countries and keep existing talent.
I think a lot of ageing countries would have a hard time with that. Germany for example, is constantly looking at new ways to generate tax income. For them, lowering taxes, especially middle-class income taxes, is completely out of the question.
This isn't quite true - Scotland's income tax rates are slightly different from the rest of the UK's, so residence inside or outside Scotland is relevant.
But that’s the same now. Work in Carlisle and live in Dumfries and you get a Scottish tax code. Work in Dumfries and live in Carlisle and you get an English one.
I don't think they're saying work anywhere in the world. They're saying work anywhere within the UK, including HQ, local high street branches, at home, or a mixture of the above.
The other advantage of the UK being small and everyone working in country is you can therefore still meet up easily say every couple of weeks, or for smaller groups to work together for a short time.
I guess in the US people can fly for this too. Does anyone do "work anywhere but must be in the same state"?
No, Europe tends to have the same tax rates and rules per country. But in a way you can compare the EU and US here, moving countries within the EU also has tax consequences. But due to language barriers, that happens less often than people moving states in the US. And the UK isn't part of the EU anyway.
I doubt it's anywhere as in 'you can work from the beach in Thailand'. Going abroad means complying with the local tax regime and if spent enough time outside the UK, no taxes need to be paid there.
It's usually the 180 day rule. So unless you move abroad that shouldn't be an issue. But moving abroad has more issues here. Nationwide is a bank and customer data leaving the UK could cause regulatory headaches for them. So I'd be surprised if they let people work from anywhere in the world.
