I live in a studio apartment with high rent, with a half mile walk from my office. I did this on purpose so I wouldn’t have to commute. Now I am spending high rent for a small space. My company keeps stating that we will have to return to the office in some unknown “near future”, otherwise I would plan on going full WFH and relocating to a larger home somewhere cheaper and more rural. But I’m stuck.

I also miss my dedicated workspace, and I miss being able to separate work and home life easily by going no contact after 5PM without management thinking that means I am a bad employee.

But most of all, I miss being able to let my bosses "micromanage" me in a way that didn't disrupt me. “Office Politics” has changed at my company in a way that is taking up a lot more of my productive time than it used to, and I hate it.

Before the Great WFH of 2020, my boss would walk by my cubicle or speak to me in person regularly. Short conversations, didn't ever bother me, and allowed me to focus on work. Made him feel busy and made him feel I was busy. Ultimately I was able to spend less time "appearing busy" and more on actually getting work done.

Since management at my company doesn't know how to actually track real work output, they have always used proxies like "how long does this person stay at the office?", "Are they still in their cubicle when I am leaving?", "When I walk by their cubicle do they have their IDE open doing 'coding stuff'" etc. etc.

I’ve always been decently performant at code production. So all I had to do was stay on my coding tasks for a few hours each day, have an IDE always open on at least one of my monitors and wait til exactly 5:01 PM every day before I left as that was when my boss went home. I ended up getting stuff done quick, got to avoid most meetings, and could screw around the rest of the day if I wanted. Personal projects, internet surfing, etc.

Great reviews from management. I would prefer an actual meritocratic standard based on actual work done, but that really has never been the case at any of the companies I have ever worked at so far in my career as a software engineer, so I’m used to it at this point.

But now that we are all WFH, they really don't seem to know what to do. They don't know how much work anyone is, or isn't doing, instead daily standups have changed from 10 minute short succinct updates to “how aggressively and for how long can you technobabble bullshit about your coding tasks you did yesterday” turning these stand ups into at least an hour or more, and now I have to also technobabble bullshit or management will think I’m slacking.

Even more so than before, they now seem to think pointless emails and multi-hour zoom meetings are the true marker of productivity. I hate this. I don't want to have to spend hours per day making up bullshit technobabble emails and sitting in on multi-hour long zoom meetings talking about unrelated boring bullshit. I just want to be able to focus on getting my coding tasks done for the day. Some of the lowest performers on my team love it though, because they are great at meetings, scheduling meetings, and making themselves feel important with pointless technical presentations during these meetings. Not to mention we are expected to have our webcams on at all times during these meetings, so I can’t even “pretend” to be present while I go make myself tea or something.

The barrier to entry for meetings has lowered. Before, scheduling a meeting in the office room down the hall and giving a presentation on why we all should add “bureaucratic coding standard addition xyz” was both too scary and too much work. Now, its “why not, management will think I am showing leadership skills!”.

Thanks guys, I love more poorly managed bureaucracy. Test driven development might be good if someone actually managed it and maintained standard during code reviews, but now everyone just creates shitty unit tests to meet the
70% code coverage requirement we are told to meet because the literal lowest performer on my team scheduled multi hour meetings with management on why we should all follow tde and convinced them it was a good idea.