WFH West County: Working Couple
Part 3 - Gender and generational differences in working from home - meet Sara and Chris Osborn who work remotely in the tech industry
This is the third of a five-part series that looks at the shift to remote work in Sebastopol and West County, what might be considered a hidden-away-at-home workforce. WFH is changing where and how people work today, offering a good living in a good place to live and work. Catch up on Part 1: Work from where you want to live and Part 2 -Zooming In.
The work-at-home mom was a common stereotype of the teleworker who sought the flexibility to work around her kids’ schedules. Research now shows that both men and women equally work from home and, in some cases, they work from the same household.
With working couples, WFH gives additional flexibility in changing jobs, especially if one of them takes an in-office job in a new city. A Ukrainian man I know had a remote accounting job working with a US company. He started the job when he lived in Kyiv. When he was displaced by the war, he kept working remotely while he moved with his family in Portugal and kept working when they eventually moved to the US, first to Sebastopol and then San Francisco. He gets up early each morning for a staff meeting with the team in the Eastern Time Zone.
WFH seems well-suited to those who have already established themselves in a career or profession and who have developed a relationship of trust with their employer and co-workers. Those who want to work from home are people are in the middle of the career or near the end, rather than the beginning. Several of the people I interviewed were happy that they started their careers working in an office and developed relationships at work. They didn’t think that a young person starting out on a career would be as happy or productive working from home.
Generational Differences
A LinkedIn study of 4000 Gen Z workers (age 18-25) reported that 21% of the respondents said “they value the in-person training, mentorship, and access to more senior colleagues that working in an office brings.” They also preferred it for other reasons well:
offers a separation between work and home (30%),
a better environment to work productively (24%),
the opportunity to build closer relationships with colleagues (23%).
At the start of a career, Gen Z workers saw coming to an office helpful in making friends as well as building their own network. (Source: HR News.) It is a big reason why young professionals flock to big cities.
This 2023 IntelliSurvey looks at generational differences about remote work.
They summarize the differences as:
Intriguingly, it’s the older generations, often considered less tech-savvy, who have embraced remote work with open arms and resounding enthusiasm.
The youngest generation, on the other hand, appears significantly disillusioned with remote work. They have the poorest ratings for work/life balance and mental health, the least desire to continue working remotely, and the lowest (interest in promoting it) of all generations.
We suspect these differences are the result of career stages and choices. Many of the older generations chose the remote lifestyle for themselves. After working remotely for 3+ years, they have continued to embrace that choice and enjoy the freedoms associated with virtual employment. They are further down their career path and know what they want.
Later in life, people want to change their lifestyle. They might have moved to SF for a tech job but later on, they chose a place like Sebastopol to live and work remotely, as did Sara and Chris Osborn.
WFH Profile #4: “Not commuting is amazing, right?”
Sara and Chris Osborn - Product Manager and Software Engineering Manager
Sara and Chris Osborn both work in tech with different jobs in different companies. They also moved to Sebastopol from San Francisco and work happily from home in separate offices. One of the things they like about working from West County, instead of San Francisco, is that they’ve made a lot of friends outside the tech industry.
“My role is a product manager. The company I work for is actually fully remote and distributed,” said Sara. She joined this company in 2014, while it was located in San Francisco. “Over the years the company has gone through many shifts and changes. When the pandemic happened, there was a decision to go fully remote at that time. We now have a very tiny office down in LA, but, for the most part, we have teams across the world.” Her company has about 50 employees.
Chris was reluctant to name the company he worked for but said it was one of the big tech companies, where he has worked for over 10 years. “I’m a software engineering manager. I help build software applications.” When he started, he was based in San Francisco and, like many people, commuted into the office. “Every day, I’d get my coffee, breakfast and work with my team on site. The pandemic changed all that, and I started working remotely from home and I have never stopped.
“I applied to be what we call fully remote within that time frame and that was approved. I still have that privilege to this day.“ He works with people who are spread out across the United States and in all time zones. “Functionally we work as a remote team, although we do have people in the office. We do gather together usually a few times a year all on site so we can collaborate at one point in time.”
While working in SF and living in Oakland, they would come up to Sonoma County often. “We loved it up here,” said Sara. “We love hiking, and wine is a big part of our life. We made wine as a hobby. We have a lot of friends in the wine industry and just really fell in love with West County.” They made the move in May 2023, and found a house with two extra bedrooms that they could turn into separate offices.
Sara said that the move ‘has been amazing, and life-changing for me personally. Just the community of people we’ve been able to surround ourselves with, our amazing neighbors, and the culture of the city. I mean it’s better than anything I could have ever imagined from a personal enrichment standpoint.”
I asked Chris how it changed him. “I grew up in a very small town in Western Massachusetts, which also had a bunch of apple farms. The climate is very different and other things are different, but there’s a kind of a feeling of coming home to what I grew up with in some ways, too. I’m hard pressed to say it’s changed my life, per se, but I've certainly felt a huge relief by leaving the city life. We’d been living in cities since 2012 or so, if you count Santa Cruz as a city. A lot of that time was spent in San Francisco and Oakland, and now it’s this big relief to drive around the country roads. You don't have to worry about traffic. I know all my neighbors and we have a support network. In San Francisco or Oakland, I didn't know whom I lived next to the whole time we lived there.”.
I asked them both if they missed going to an office. “I thrive working remotely,” said Sara. “Just the ability to concentrate, do that deep thinking work that can sometimes be very difficult when you're surrounded by a lot of other people, especially if you are maybe a bit neurodivergent or you have your own way of processing information. Having space to do that without distraction has allowed me to be far more productive than I ever was when I did work in an office.”
Chris said he had “a little bit of a different take. I do actually miss the office a little bit, but the trade-off is very much worth it for me.”
“I’m able to focus more and just get a lot more work done. But on the other hand, I do miss the sense of belonging that you get with a team of people all in the same place,” he added. “In the early part of my career at this company, I had everyone together and you could turn around talk to someone if a problem came up. You could organically go over to a whiteboard and start working on it right away. Then, of course, the social time with lunches, happy hour and stuff like that. So I do miss all that, and I think the longer I've been working remote, the more I've kind of felt sad for that. But on the flip side, not commuting is amazing, right?
Chris and Sara are perhaps mid-career, but I asked them about others just starting out. Would working from home work for them? Chris replied: “I feel strongly that in being a recruiter you really should be in a group of people where you can get tight mentorship. My company by policy will onboard people in person — there’s no way for you to be remote as a junior employee. So that’s really important.”
Chris added: “Once you develop the ability to effectively communicate and you can position yourself as very reliable and trustworthy, you understand what the bigger picture is of the business or your team. That obviously takes time and experience, but you need those foundational pieces in order to effectively work outside of the office.”
Do they worry about their companies changing the remote work policy? Sara said: “We're all still fairly remote and there's been no big pull to come back to an office simply because there is no big office for folks to go back to.” Chris said: “At a companywide level, there’s a direction to return to the office. That's definitely the default. However, people who have arrangements to be remote are able to stay remote.” He said that “it’s definitely something I worry about a little bit long-term living out here. I do trust what the company's told me and that I'm okay and everything's going to be fine. There's been no individual pressure for me to move back, so to speak.”
One aspect of living up in Sonoma County is that most people they know aren’t in tech, unlike San Francisco. That struck a chord with Chris. “It's the best. When the first question out of somebody's mouth is not what do you do? I’m like thank God. I don't want to talk about work. I want to know somebody, get to know people for who they are.
“It's so nice to be in a culture where the person matters, not the person’s job.”