Remote working - the future?

I've worked from the office right throughout the pandemic and have no interest in working from home. Too many distractions for me but I understand why it would suit a lot of people.

It's either the 'single person's apartment' or the 'working at the kitchen table with screaming children' scenarios that they use.

it didnt equate to face to face for you. I also attended my GP remotely, got test results and renewed prescriptions online. Worked fine for me and worked out cheaper. Honestly Ive never used tinder so dont know what that means. And again weird tangent - nobody said it is replacing everyone and everybody.

I work in customer facing role but again I think you mean the physical sense - for us (I work in a university) customer facing is not just physical face to face. We moved on from that even before covid - why there is no demand for it.

Congratulations on completely missing the point, which is really quite a simple one. Some people can do their jobs just a well from home, or even better due to lack of distractions and more energy from not having to commute. This will also have environmental benefits in a state where the government has committed to a reduction in greenhouse emissions, this is low-hanging fruit. I don't recall anyone claiming that the work could be done in half the time (although I have managed that in a previous role simply by the boss being absent), or that one person working remotely could do the work of many. If anyone really did make such claims, please do link to or quote them. I don't recall anyone claiming that everyone can do their workload from a laptop either, but while you're at it, perhaps you can provide a link or quote for that too.

RTE rolling out the "WFH is great..but we're sick of the sight of each other" ad which also has moaning about buying food and loading the dishwasher. Haven't seen that ad for months, what are they at?

I've no doubt that some office politicians will be delighted to get back to the office so they can escape their families and do fcuk all apart from chatting and consuming free biscuits, tea and toilet paper. That was what they did before the pandemic and during it in some cases - some people would not stay away from offices.

Give it a few months if not weeks and the next "crisis" may be "record breaking" congestion on Dublin commuter routes with the back to the office brigade wondering how that happened (or not giving a sh1t if they live 5 minutes' walk from work, I'm alright Jack)

Full-time remote working only works well (no pun intended) for those who have a dedicated work-space of sufficient size, and ideally it ought to be a dedicated room. Having now invested in this I have no desire for commuting for 1-2 hours a day even if only once a week, but back in 2020 I was regularly (ab)using essential worker status in order to go into the office because my then-flat barely had space to breathe let alone work.

One thing I have noticed though. It seems that even though people want to work remotely most or all the time, there is still something of a bias against companies that don't have a formal office. It certainly also make on-boarding a right pain.

Just listening to the head of a recruitment company on Bobby Kerr’s Down to Business - she estimates that only 2% of roles are fully remote! Even lower than I expected, and a lot less than the very noisy minority would have you believe!

Why would a recruiter be concerned one way or the other ?

The figure of 2% still sounds suspiciously low. I'd guess that a lot of the companies that have decided to do away with offices are also the sort of companies that see recruitment agencies as a waste of cash.

Only a waste of cash if you carry the fixed cost of your own recruitment team.

well said. You would need to know what their definition of remote working is really.

Also why there is so much hate from some people who arent doing remote working or have no interest in doing it I dont know.

It is all about scale. I take the opposite view and would like to know how many ppl who were doing WFH go back to fully in-office. Economically there are a lot of interests who want a return to 9-5x5.

You want a misery for others because it suits you. While others just want to be happy at no other's cost.

No, not all interactions are better in person. Especially toxic ones.

What exactly are you referring to? Who do I want misery for?

And there is a cost to everything.

Working from home couldn't suit me better but I'll still be going back the office the majority of the time, it works better for the business. Who pay me. And I agree with that.

For the people you're happy to see being denied the opportunity to work remotely. It's pretty obvious from the sneering attitude.

Good advice there.

If you think colleagues are toxic in person - they can be a million times worse when they don't have to look you in the eye, and can simply do the nasty stuff on-line.

And as for managers-justifying-their-jobs: Managers are more essential than ever in dispersed teams. When people are co-located, their is a degree of informal collaboration, which sometimes can lead to effectively self-managing teams. But when they are dispersed, there's no chance of this happening. Someone has to be officially responsible for ensuring that collaboration happens, resources are available and progress-blockers are resolved.