No job is worth a commute.

I’ve been getting a LOT of job openings lately. One thing they have in common is that they expect IT workers like me to return to the office at least part time.

The answer is no. I will never take a job that requires me to commute again. Why?

Commuting is unpaid labor.

In order to commute, I have to get up 90 minutes to 2 hours before I need to report to work. I will then spend 30 minutes to an hour doing the most stressful and dangerous work I’d have to do (driving to/from the office) without pay. I will also have to pay for a lunch, pay to get gas, pay to maintain my vehicle, pay higher auto insurance rates, and risk my life just to make a manager happy.

At night, I’d have the same experience, then I’d have to go to bed two hours earlier just so that I can get up to make it to work on time the next day. Instead of having 8 hours for my own purposes, I have 4.

This means that per day, given my hourly bill rate at $100/hr (which is my in-house bill rate, not my contractor rate — that’s $300/hr due to the overhead of getting health insurance, equipment, and software licensing for my build tools, and it doesn’t include the hazard pay increase), I’ll be doing $400/day worth of unpaid labor. That’s just the labor costs. That’s not counting my fuel costs, insurance costs, or increased car maintenance costs. That’s also not counting the increased food costs from eating out more due to my reduced access to my own kitchen.

The office is a less productive environment.

Managers, I get that you feel more productive when everybody is colocated. You feel that the best way to promote synergy (like a boss) is for everybody to be in the same place, exchanging water cooler/coffee pot gossip, and being able to tap on my shoulder to get status updates.

But when you tap on my shoulder, you interrupt me and cause me to lose focus. Go ask any IT worker, and they’ll tell you the same thing. Those interruptions cause us to lose half an hour of productive work time each time you do that. If you want to know why it isn’t done, the answer is because you keep asking whether it’s done yet.

Managers, you know how annoying it is when your kids constantly ask you, “Are we there yet?” Yeah, that’s you. Except that instead of just being able to say no while driving, we have to pull over to the side of the road, get out of the car, and then answer your question.

Meanwhile, we IT workers are sharing memes and having those water cooler/coffee pot conversations on Slack. We’re scheduling team social calls on the office video conferencing system (whatever it may be). We’re doing the synergy thing, just not where you can see it.

Remember that you need us, but we don’t need you. And if we’re being honest, neither does the company. It’s our work that keeps the company moving. Your work…doesn’t. This is especially so if you’re in middle management: your job is a bullshit job, and you ar

Most managers suck at management.

I hate to break it to you, managers, but the vast majority of you were Peter Principled into your position. You suck at it, and you’re trying to cover up the fact that you suck at your job by interfering with my ability to do mine.

Management shouldn’t be something you’re promoted into. Management is skilled labor, too, but we don’t treat it that way. We treat it as a reward for experience or good performance at the job you’d be managing. Unlike me, you didn’t go to college and take courses on management. And if you did, those courses were probably worthless: business schools routinely act not as educational facilities, but rather networking ones. Their curricula frequently lack academic rigor. Your case studies are rarely indicative of overall trends or business processes being implemented correctly.

Sure, you can read the Harvard Business Review, but this isn’t an academic journal. We don’t see business journals asking around to see if someone else has tried the thing in the article to see if the results are reproducible. And if I’m being honest, business journals more often function as puff pieces for potential investors than they do as a means of documenting management best practices.

The emperor has no clothes. Management lacks anything that would vaguely resemble rigor.

But more often than not, managers don’t even have that barest modicum of credentials. They’re just promoted off the floor, and we expect that to work. This leads to a lot of straight up bad management: micromanagers who are experts in doing the job, but can’t lead; managers who do too little because they don’t know what they’re doing; and managers that think their job is to be a babysitter because they managed a pizza joint in college and had to babysit their employees.

We’re not a family. We’re coworkers.

If I had a year’s pay for every boss I’ve ever heard that made this comment, it’d almost make up for the wage theft that I’ve experienced at the hands of this attitude (usually in the form of unpaid, uncompensated overtime).

Managers, if you hate your family that much that you insist that I spend less time with my actual family, that’s your problem, not mine. Divorce your spouse, let them take the kids, and start off on your own again. You’ll be happier. Will it cost you a lot of money? Yes. But that’s your money you’re spending, not my wages your stealing. If it’s just the kids that bother you, boarding schools exist. Again, they cost a lot of money, but at least you’re the one paying to solve your problems, not me. And if you don’t want to go to an empty home because it reminds you of the failed marriage you had and ended, don’t take it out on me. Get a Tinder account like a normal person.

Your family problems are your problems, not mine. Don’t make me pay actual money to provide you an escape from a miserable home.

Our relationship is this: I give you labor in exchange for pay. That’s the whole of our relationship. It is purely transactional.

I can always tell the bosses that have bad home lives, because they’re the only ones trying to push the “we’re all family here” nonsense. Managers that are happy at home don’t care if I log out at half past 4 on a Friday because my work is done. Managers that are happy at home don’t have me put in an 8 hour day and then demand I also be on a 4 hour long release call after hours — and then expect me to work another 8 hour day the next morning. But those that aren’t routinely look to see who’s staying late, because they don’t want to go home themselves.

My coffee is better than yours.

You think you’re buying good coffee because it came from Starbucks. Let me burst your bubble: Starbucks coffee is absolute crap. Sure, it’s a step up from Folgers/Maxwell House/the store brand at the warehouse club, but it’s still not good. Starbucks routinely overroasts their beans because they buy low quality, low altitude beans that provide a consistent flavor profile (and when you’re a mass market vendor like Starbucks, consistency is more important than quality). It’s the only way they can get the bulk they need to satisfy demand.

Even in the office, I kept my own high quality beans, an electric gooseneck kettle, and a V60 there. Today, I can actually pull my own espresso without sitting in the drive-thru at Starbucks. And even if you have on-site Starbucks locations, it’s still Starbucks coffee. It’s going to taste like burnt beans, not like the berry juice it should taste like.

I realize that this seems petty, but my job is quite literally turning coffee from Java into Java. Quality in, quality out.

My desk at home is better than my desk at the office.

The pandemic caused me to invest significantly into a work from home setup. Since my coworkers started being told that they were required to work from home, I have purchased the following:

• Three 27 inch monitors
• A 1080p webcam
• A dock for my laptops
• A much larger standing desk than I have ever had at an office.
• A much better office chair than I have ever had in an office, even when I brought my own.
• An espresso machine
• A better coffee grinder
• A house with a room I could turn into a dedicated office space

It’s just plain better. Not only do I have all of this stuff that makes me way more productive here than I’ve ever been in an office, it also means that when I get hungry, I can simply go to my kitchen and make something with the groceries I bought. I can wake up 30 minutes before the day starts, shower, shave, pull an americano, and fry up some eggs and bacon all before my first call of the day. And for dinner, I can take 5 minutes and drop something into the sous vide machine around 3:30 and have a meal ready within 30 minutes of ceasing work for the day.

And at the end of the day, I can take the two hours I’d be spending in rush hour traffic taking a nice long walk along the greenbelts that line my city.

The bottom line

Allowing and expecting IT workers to be primarily work from home, only coming in to an office on occasions when they need to be there provides a lot of benefits to your company and IT work force:

• You’re spending less on corporate real estate, because you’re not housing so many developers.
• Your IT staff gets an effective pay increase, simply because they’re not driving to work.
• Your IT staff is more productive than they are at the office.

This is a no-brainer. The company’s interests are best served by letting IT work from home. Always. No, your company is not an exception. By demanding we come in to the office, you’re not minimizing your costs, and you’re reducing our productivity.

Your office is the single most toxic asset your company has as far as your IT employees are concerned. Its value to your company is negative. Cut it loose.