i know when i was looking in boston in 2019/early 2020 (IT), everything i saw in boston was full on site with no remote option.

that commute was a total deal breaker (especially in an industry that realistically should be AT LEAST 50% wfh).

Design/UX in tech, I would do maybe one day at home max, pre-Covid. Often not even that.

Folks in our office with kids and/or long commutes would do two or more days at home pretty regularly though, and it wasn’t a big deal. There were always a couple people fully remote, usually high skilled individual contributors who could ask for something like that and be trusted with it.

People with very long commutes (Newburyport, Worcester, NH/ME) would work from the train too and count that as part of their day.

So it was sort of a thing! Tbh, even just 1 WFH day makes a huge difference. I wanna live with my parents until I start making real money, which would be at least 1-2 yrs post grad. My commute , by train, could be upwards of an hr, but just one day WHF would break that up, you know?

That's insane.

My wife was a contractor to an IT company. As a contractor, they couldn't require she go into the office, and she worked from home 3 days a week, even though it was a ten minute commute.

She's now got a salaried IT job, based in Cambridge, but the team is remote 4/5 days even though they are all local.

I had one wfh day in the before times and it was a pain to arrange. I work in an office in Higher Ed. Now it’s the reverse, one day in the office. It would be different if I was a new hire.

What's the rule for new hires? First yr fully on site?

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I believe some departments have 3 days in, 2 from home. Others are 5 days in office.

I had my own office and only barely interacted with anybody because they were in their own offices all day, yet our bosses made us come in 4/5 days a week. Soon as Covid hit I hadn’t stepped foot in that building in over 2 years.

It depended, and still depends on the company. In tech, 2 days was tolerated with occasional 3 remote days allowed for top performers but the expectation was that you'd be in office a minimum of 2, preferably 4 days a week. Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday were and are still the most popular days to go to the office to have extended weekends.

Commute times on the other hand were much looser. People always used to come and go way past 9 or way before 5 to try and beat the commute which now turned into an all day rush hour during office days that seem to be Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday for most.

I can understand 4 days a week, but 5 days a week?! That's nuts.

edit: I misread. My bad

Meant 4 out of 5

I work in a field where we could have primarily WFH/Hybrid but norms were that you WFH no more than once/week at most and you were pretty much expected to be in the office.

Right, 4 out of 5 days a week is understandable, but why make you folks come in 5 days a week, if you didn't interact with other team members?

edit: I misread. My bad.

In startups, there was always one super senior engineer who would work from home each morning and call into stand-ups, then come into the office for a few hours, then go home and call into afternoon meetings.

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The rest of us weren't allowed to do this. "Working from home" was a euphemism that we were taking the day off. Everyone knew it.

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Now I'm 100% remote and I love it. I never want to be forced back into an office and I'll do whatever it takes to avoid it. My performance review was fantastic so any concerns about loss of productivity are crap. No commuting and the ability to get appointments/chores done while listening to meetings? Quality of life is just way, way up.

Yeah I mean Im just a quick red line trip or 20 minute bike ride, but there is absolutely no way on earth I will ever EVER go back to working in an office lol. That era of civilization is over.

My dad worked remote in sales since 2002

I would do one to two days at home pre COVID. Creative Director here and it was just an easy way to focus on reviewing projects, or designing.

I worked remotely from Boston since 2016. Didn’t seem common at the time, but startups were much more flexible even back then :)

It obviously depends on your role and the company you work for. I was WFH 2 days per week since 2015 and have been full time remote since COVID. That's with 4 job changes.

I decided to make a career change into tech in 2019. I was living and working on the South Coast at the time. I applied to a lot of Boston-area tech companies, and I don't think I saw a single entry level or mid-level role that was remote-eligible. The first thing every interviewer asked me is if I planned on relocating to Boston because that commute is going to kill me. In my very limited experience of simply interviewing for tech jobs in Boston, remote work pre-pandemic seems like it was unheard of for entry and mid-level roles. FWIW, I did know several people who were senior engineers with 20+ years experience who negotiated work-from-home, but that seemed like the exception not the norm. Pre-pandemic, a lot of the "name-brand" Boston-area tech companies built up their in-office cultures as a kind of "perk" and it was seen as a benefit to go into the office, even if the commute sucked.

As for what happened to me, I gave up on Boston and got a full-time in-office tech job along the 495 belt in February 2020. Good that I got a stable job in a new field just before the world went to shit, bad in that the owner of the company refused to allow remote work and forced us all back in mid-2020 (before even vaccines!). Quit that job in 2022 for a fully remote Boston-based tech company that DGAF if I ever come into the office, which has since been significantly downsized due to becoming a remote-first company. I will say when I was job hunting in mid-to-late 2022, things had completely changed in tech. I couldn't even find a full-time in-office job if I wanted to. About 75 percent of my interviews were with out-of-state fully remote companies, and 25 percent in-state hybrid/remote companies.

Well, fully remote is still a big ask, even in the post COVID world. I'm more thinking of being allowed 1-2 WFH days a week. Of course fully remote is another thing.

in 2015 i worked 1 day/week from home at an advertising company. Between 2005 and 2015 i was front end dev freelancer and worked remotely for more than half of my clients who were mostly ad companies.

It really depends upon the job role and industry. I work in tech, which is one of the easier areas to allow for remote work.

I have been at least hybrid for the past 15 years (2-3 days remote per week). I've been fully remote for the past 5 years.

For me, I work with cloud providers (AWS & Azure), so if I commute for 1-1.5 hours into the city to be at the office, I am still working remotely from the environment I am supporting. My employer recognizes that it makes more sense to save 2-3 hours per day for me to work from home.

Not everyone has this luxury though. I am very lucky with the companies I have worked at to allow this situation.

That's sounds more like it makes sense to me. When I was an undergrad pre COVID, my professors did make it seem like Bioinfo was remote work friendly. I think the idea was if you worked Bioinfo in Boston and had a long commute, 1-2 WFH days was much more manageable, as opposed to entry level biotech jobs, where you need to be on site due to the nature of the work.

My husband is a software engineer and worked fully remote for a small startup/government contractor before the pandemic. In fact, they were in the process of opening their first small office when the pandemic hit.

I’m also a software engineer and would wfh when I had an appointment, at the end of my pregnancy, when my kid was sick or on a random Friday because I felt like it, but I was in the office more often than not and regular WFH weren’t super common.

Accountant… 5 days a week with basically no excuses. Even when we had to work a random Saturday, it was in office. Now, for a different company and post-Covid, I’m 100% remote and will never go back!

I'm still pretty skeptical of companies that call themselves "hybrid" and only offer 1-2 days of WFH a week tbh. It seems to me they really despise remote work and throw you a limited bone as a carrot on a stick. From talking to my friends who work remote one day a week, they tell me their employers usually don't do the WFH part well because they lack the infrastructure and culture to make it work. Which makes sense, because you're in an office most of the time. And you know they'll eventually use that to get rid of it altogether.

Idk, one of my friends workes regulatory affairs for a company based in suburban MA (far from Boston), and she works from home twice a week with no issues. It actually does save her for her commute ( she lives in NH).

I was five days a week no exceptions.

A lot of friends in cooler industries had one or two days a week hybrid.

Now I’m hybrid and those friends are mostly remote 100%.

What industry?

Our office was WFH on Friday. Even with that, you'd have to be at the company for a while to take advantage of that.

Now we are basically the opposite. One, maybe two days in the office.

My dad did regional management in sales and his company let him work remotely for a few years while he was battling cancer until he retired. That was the only time I saw remote work outside of freelance non-salaried work until COVID.

Same as a lot of people here where everyone with a job that did not physically require you on site was allowed to work from home one day a week.

Of course one of the last bosses I had at that job was a fucking micromanager who never would have let us even do that if it wasn't a blanket policy for everyone. She required you to send a detailed list at the end of the day of what you were working on and made scheduling it a pain in the ass to avoid having overlap of when people were working from home on the same day.

I sometimes imagine that she died at the start of the pandemic because she had a massive stroke over not being able to hover over people's shoulders all day.

I was 3-4 day wfh a week for about a year before covid hit, now I am permanently remote.

Pharma/biotech - we had an official telecommute policy where you could work 2 days from home but not everyone did it. My (and my bosses) feeling on it was - just come in when you need to come in. If that’s 5 days this week and 0 days next week because of meetings scheduled - do that.

Why are you asking this question and then arguing with people about how terrible the situation was before covid? Do you have a different question you were actually trying to ask? Remote work and hybrid work wasn’t a common thing in the Boston area. Or anywhere. That’s why people talk about “rush hour” and “beating traffic.”

I used to work from home twice a week but sometimes it was 3-4 days a week.

They meant they only had to come in 4 days a week.

I did two days in the office pre-covid.

When we returned I was told three days was expected.

I got a new job.

I worked at least three days in the office before the pandemic and at home a couple of days a week or sometimes more. We closed a lot of our smaller offices over time and let people work from home full time. We were agnostic about whether people should WFH or come into the office. We started doing that around 2006.

Just before the pandemic we had a new CIO who decided everyone needed to be in the office at least three days a week which meant that people had a choice to move near an office or get laid off. Most took the layoff. I retired before the pandemic so I don’t know whether they still want people in the office, the CIO didn’t last long. I had team members all over the US and could have cared less whether they were in the office. I had no clue where they were and couldn’t do hallway conversations with them. As long as I could reach them via IM or phone easily it didn’t matter.

Virtually everything was coordinated remotely. As a manager I had to make sure I did regular 1-1’s and team meetings to keep everybody in sync at little more formally. Telling everyone to come in the office unless they need to be there to actually do stuff seems lazy and dumb.

I'm in tech sales and have worked 100% remote since 2016. It was glorious before everyone else could also...

In IT, we had a few people like myself that worked one day at home and felt lucky. Getting to go to a Dr appointment or leave early to get your kids is what we called flexibility. Strong in office requirement, even getting judged if you worked at home on snowy days. Also at one point I wanted to work from a CA office for a year to follow my spouses job. My boss said I’d have to give up my job as project manager since that job was impossible remotely. Lol.

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I work for a local healthcare system on the administrative side and never worked remotely, except for maybe an extreme snow day or two. Now I'm more or less remote full-time.

Does it seem like I'm arguing? Im just commenting on how insane it is.

Like " Wow thats crazy :o" kind of way. Not doubting that it was real.

what industry?

The last paragraph 😂

Omg. I misread my bad.

Financial services

I was fully remote before covid, but it was seen as taboo and we weren’t supposed to tell anyone that we worked remotely. My whole team had offices on-site, but we were never there.

I kept my job in NYC and went remote in 2018 to move up here. My company started allowing that and we’d opened a satellite office earlier that year. I think it’s more of what’s possible with technology now than anything else. Slack and Zoom make it effortless to stay connected when needed and carry on as usual without having to commute and be in person. Sharepoint allows collaboration on documents in real time. I think it’s more tech advances sped up by covid than anything else.

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Prior to COVID my office had already forced 50% of our staff into full time WFH. And the other 50% had at least 1 day work from home a week.

You’re commenting to people how insane it is as if they have any control. Your question was if it is common then you reply like everyone telling you obviously that it was common “omg crazy!!”

sorry. I think over text it comes across as weirder. I think when I'm on reddit I feel like I need to reply to comments on post, just as you would reply to a person speaking to your IRL.

Pre-Covid I used to have one WFH day per week, rest in-office

But don’t pretend to ask a question, then when you get a reply, start arguing with employers in the past pre-COVID. You ask what was common, you were told the answer to your question, and you start arguing. Be honest. You weren’t actually asking a question, you wanted to make a statement.

We were at the office full-time before the pandemic, with a few exceptions, and if you really needed to work remotely once in a great while, you could, but it was frowned upon if it happened with any frequency.

When the pandemic hit, we pretty much went full remote. We don’t really have a policy for it now, and kind of handle it department by department, because some of us physically need to be on site to handle paperwork or product, and some of us don’t. We definitely streamlined some procedures and went online instead of on paper for a few things, which really were all things we could/should have been doing that way in the first place.

For education jobs, both teaching and university staff, absolutely not. Nobody worked from home. We just weren't set up to do much online. (There was a reason there are separate universities that advertise as purely online). We had to get courses available online very quickly, using ancient systems, and I don't think people fully appreciate how quickly we did this!

I guess Im surprised at how it was less common than I thought? I was actually asking. It's just hard to wrap my head around it. Sorry if it seems weird. I think without in person tone of voice/body language it's difficult to decipher tone from text.

It was common but not as common as nowadays. I could be wrong but looks like a lot of companies are trying to get employees back in.

I work in a bioinformatics related field and we were hybrid and remote pre-pandemic, mostly because we had offices and colleagues in multiple states. They struggled to enforce a hybrid 3 days in the office for folks near an office because we were already set up to meet virtually and senior management didn’t want to commute and weren’t in the office regularly. Periodic initiatives to hire near office locations failed because of the additional salaries and time required to find talent (especially Boston compared to elsewhere). That said, just 4 or 5 years ago we were doing telephone only conferencing without shared screens. So the tech has evolved quickly, to the point where I would say today for technical content virtual meetings are more productive and efficient than in person meetings. These days, rarely do I hear clients who tend to be more on-site companies say ‘sorry I’m late, I’m coming from another building’ or ‘I’m being kicked out of my conference room, gotta go NOW’ which was a daily or weekly occurrence pre-pandemic. Zoom first is here to stay.

We were like this too. Software company selling to banks. Office in the financial district, most people WFH 2-3 days a week.

During COVID my employer cancelled our lease and closed the office (about 50 people there), everybody permanent WFH. Most of the people I talk to were disappointed, the office was awesome and it was nice to have lunch together. I ended up moving out of the city and live out in the suburbs now. Since we no longer have an office I rarely speak to some of the folks I used to have lunch with. We work in different departments. Sad.

Yes, I was hybrid before covid and my employer had entire remote offices.

What made remote work more common at my last job was the blizzards of 2015.

Biotech data people have been remote for a while

Exec assistant and before COVID I worked from home one day a week. Continued that job fully remote and left recently for a job that’s hybrid and seriously questioning my sanity lol

Very common in some professions not in others. The bad weather, staggered school and daycare start times and unreliable public transit meant a lot of people in the professions worked from home 1-3 days a week.

It’s one of the reasons so many people went fully remote so fast- the tech and logistics were in place at least partially in a lot of places.

In my industry pre-covid, it was non existent unless you were a part time contract/freelancer. Everyone was expected to be in the office 100% of the time. Post pandemic, after we were forced to be remote and saw no dip in productivity, it's a mandatory 3 days in office, 2 days optional remote, as well as a pool of "remote hours" you can use over the year.

Some people like me negotiated a full-time remote situation moving forward, but that would have been unheard of pre pandemic.

Love going to the office everyday.

I would also like to add that fully remote is fantastic for work life balance, but it comes with its cost as well in that it's very hard to build personal connections. In my industry where you need a very long education and training, and once you start working still many decisions in the work place rely on experience, some regular face to face times with more senior colleagues could be critical for your career growth. People who stayed in the company long enough don't need it; people with a ton of experience don't need it. It's the junior ones that're affected most.

You call the shots if what you offer is valuable and can be done from home.

I graduated from college in 2012 and never worked in an office full time once I started my career.

Motion graphics/animation

I get that you're joking, but if commutes weren't so awful, I actually like the social aspect of the office. I just hate commuting.

Right. That's why I anticipate no more than 1WFH day for the 6mo-1 yr of my career at the least. I know it limits new employees.

Solutions Engineer/Sales Engineer.

Had to be in office on all days except our team got an “exception” for twice a quarter (every three months) to wfh if it was really needed. The excuse was the Account folks need us to be there to come by and ask questions and we can’t wfh due to that “collaboration” (total bs bc it bordered on annoying with them doing drive-bys). And it accounted dr appt days so we didnt need to use a full sick day.

It sucked and once covid happened it proved we didn’t need to be in-office. I left that job for a new one and it’s fully remote. Wish I could meet my team in person since we’re spread across the US but I do not miss the awful red line commute.

Have been full time WFH since 2015 (tech sales). Prior to Covid I went into office about once a week for a team meeting and tried to book client meetings on the same day. Moved jobs in 2021 and now it’s more like once every 6 weeks or so, almost everything online.

Wait is the red line worse than green or orange? Im asking bc my commute to school ( I live w my parents and only have to be on campus 1-2 times a week) involves the commuter and orange line. I don't mind it.

If a internship/ Job is in Cambridge, I'd need to take the commuter to North station, take green/orange, and then red. Is there something wrong w red?

I was the opposite. Hated the social aspect of the office but loved commuting. I used public transportation, so I had lots of time to read. Now I work from home. Or live at work. It was so easy to pick up groceries on the way home.

I mean the entire MBTA system is broken but I live near Quincy so taking the red line to Park St took well over an hour when I did it every day. Now on the rare occasions I go into the city and don’t drive in, its def almost an hr and a half now or longer. The subreddit has a ton of mbta stories going on right now.

You’re fairly close to the city so you shouldn’t have too many issues since you can take either Braintree or Ashmont without worrying about it.

I get that the commuter is basically " you" time, since you're not driving, and it's way better than driving. And you can do what you want. But I feel like reading on the train hurts my eyes? I'm trying to get into podcasts.

Work in tech consulting. I asked my boss if I could work remote a few days a week in 2016, as my commute was 1.5hrs each way.

He said yes and I pretty much never came back. Been 100% remote, except on-site client work, since then.

Once Covid hit, 95% of the client work has also stayed remote. No client wants to pay for flights, hotel, food expenses anymore.

Sorry. Lawyer.

My friends are in tech and consulting.

I actually got my WfH job in 2019. Although my company is out of Wellesley. We just opened an office in Cambridge but I have yet to hear anything about it. I feel like no one works in there either and is more for business managing when we have audits and meetings and the like.

Once I got my job, covid didn't effect me at all. Was WfH before. Still WfH today.

That's why I was surprised by the people in the Bioinformatics sub that said work was almost always on site pre COVID. Because it's sort of in line with tech work, the kind of work that can be done from home.

But like we've established, it may not be as common where commutes aren't as bad.

Not a common practice, it was always available for instances like being on call or if you take a personal day you’re not behind on work (more like they refused to let you off the hook)

I work for a service company that takes care of dozens of different office buildings. When I was an apprentice taking the train into the city between 5:15-6 am the train was always packed with various commuters, ie office personal, security guards, construction workers, etc. From what I hear now, it’s mostly blue collar workers on the train. What I see in the field is offices that were normally packed, now will have maybe 10% of the personnel on site. Usually it’ll be a secretary, IT personnel working in an IDF room, and whoever HAS to be there for a meeting. My mom has worked remotely for 3 years straight. I think a lot of companies used to say for years that their computer systems could not handle the strain of everyone working from home but that clearly was a lie.

Well, yeah, now in a post COVID world white collars workers working from home is super common. I was more curious about pre.

Traffic isn’t AS bad as it was BC, but it’s still very stupid.

Hate to break this to you but a 1hr commute is generally pretty standard

Shit sucks but that would be considered pretty normal in most major US cities

Mine is over an hr. More like 80 mins.

Also in a lot of parts of the US ( non urban, I never said Boston is the worst as a city, it's just worse than the overall average) an hr is considered long. Like, I'm not just comparing cities. The USA as a whole, including jobs in suburban areas.

Yeah 80 does not sound fun

Just basing it off the cities im familiar with, mostly NYC and Boston, and a 60 minute door to door one way commute would be seen as completely standard, albeit shitty.

Something like a 10 min drive to the local train station, 40 minute train ride, 5 minute walk to a subway, 10 minute subway ride, 5 minute walk to the office is like the norm for any suburb of NYC

NYC and Boston are the worst. And I'd imagine WFH is a tad more common in Ny for this reason as well. ( or what was described up here, fully hybrid not really a thing pre COVID, but one WFH day or whatever.)

I've been in software development and technology consulting for about 15 years. This closely matches what I've experienced.

I work for a big tech company. Not too far back they were pretty chill with folks remote. Now there’s a big push to have everyone back in 3 days a week. Non of the reasons really seem that solid. You even need to go into an office if you are the only person in your team there. They just want bodies in. Almost like the city wants people spending money down there for the revenue or something 🤷🏻‍♂️

I'm in a similar field (biostats, but the team has some bioinformatics folks) and pre-pandemic it was 1 day a week wfh before covid after a year employed there. Now most of the team comes in maybe 1-2 days.

By "not too far back" do you mean before COVID, or during? Because someone on here said since COVID some places are actually going TOO FAR in the opposite direction with wfh policy

I’ve been remote or hybrid worker for over 20 years. It’s very, very common.

I mean a few months back post Covid

I lived w my parents in Boston suburbs for awhile while working in the city, it was about 80 minutes door to door either by driving or commuter rail. Then I moved to Somerville, just 6 miles from my job downtown. Believe it or not, my commute using the T was about 50-60 minutes. Later I moved to Melrose, a town much closer to Boston than my parents town, and considered highly desirable by commuters, but further away than Somerville, and the commute was about 60 or 70 minutes (via bus and subway). After that I bought a house one town over from where my parents live, due to cost reasons, and bc fuck it, my commutes never felt super different even when I was theoretically living considerably closer to work as the crow flies, for me it didn't radically improve my quality of life to live considerably closer.

I worked from home before COVID, but no one else I knew worked from home. My industry (reg affairs, med devices) has been remote-friendly for a long time.

I just realized I would be in the same position as you, had I not taken a full remote role.

Wow. :|

Snow days plus the occasional sick kid or plumber coming to your house. Maybe 3-4 a year max. Really infrequent and it was basically a ‘favor.’

The biggest shift has been the location diverse workforce. We have some combination of employees at home, in offices and spread across several states. All of our meetings are zoom meetings regardless of where folks are located.

It’s super annoying because in the old cubicle farms you hear so much background noise it’s impossible to get work done or hold effective meetings.

Ah. I guess this is specific workplace culture specific , too. My dad basically gave the same answer ( he works tech and his office is super into everyone coming in, even for those with 1.5 hr commutes).

But he said overall it was 50/50 pre COVID.

Also in bioinformatics, I think it depends on your company tbh. Pre-demic at my old company, we expected to be on-site and seldom WFH. Some of my coworkers were commuting 4 hours a day. My current gig is hybrid, with coworkers on-site as often as they choose to. Most of us are in 2-3 days a week. Another place I interviewed at recently is requiring minimum 3 days on-site. No harm in asking in your interview about the culture. Some companies are really stodgy about requiring on-site time for silly reasons (team cohesion, insurance/liability etc...), while others are cool.

I feel like , besides interview, this is something you can just look up company policy on.( like look up WFH policy). Is that correct? Or would you need to ask?

Sure, but I like asking at the interview to know beforehand to clarify whatever rules they have around it, and mostly to gauge how stringent/enforced it is, and to see if there's room to negotiate it.

Even for an internship interview? The assumption at my program is hopefully being hired after, but it still feels "green."

I was a government recruiter for IT specialists and intelligence analysts, as well as UX designers for the last couple years. I began before the pandemic and worked In office about half the time I was employed until I left late last year for personal reasons. There are several reasons it makes sense you’re not given the option to work from home like others. Who knows, maybe you’re better at your job than anyone else and your boss just really wants you around more, or the opposite; maybe you suck at your job, idk (I definitely don’t assume that of you). Some people it’s because they need a government clearance or certification and that kind of clearance cannot be used outside of a government building. Maybe the CEO simply paid for the space already and would rather see it being used rather than breaking the contract. Could be a lot of things.

I am surprised your work made such exceptions pre Covid. Regardless of industry, I’ve never worked anywhere that gave much of a shit if you had kids or a long commute. I’ve had some good bosses that worked with people but policies in general can be quite unforgiving.

I was mostly hybrid in my software career before Covid since my teams were often distributed, so it wasn’t really necessary for me to be there. Most managers I’ve had wanted us in three days a week, but it was mostly just for culture, since everyone would just sit at their desks on calls with the folks that they actually worked directly with.

Also UX here, and I’d echo that. I’ve been lucky in the sense that my dev and product folks have typically been located elsewhere, so coming into the office was usually more of a culture thing a couple days a week.

That said, there was and still is a “butts-in-seats” culture around here too. I live in the city and once worked for a company outside Worcester who only let me have one remote day, despite a commute of about two hours each way, traffic permitting. Ironically, it was an IC role with all overseas teammates and stakeholders. 🤷🏻‍♂️

They were genuinely confused and surprised when I left for a hybrid role in the city.