Welcome once again to Fandango’s Provocative Question. Each week I will pose what I think is a provocative question for your consideration.
By provocative, I don’t mean a question that will cause annoyance or anger. Nor do I mean a question intended to arouse sexual desire or interest.
What I do mean is a question that is likely to get you to think, to be creative, and to provoke a response. Hopefully a positive response.
I first started working from home in 2005. I loved working from home. Not having to get up every day and commute to an office in order to get my job done was a wonderful thing. I considered myself fortunate that my role afforded me the opportunity to work out of my house.
When the pandemic hit in 2020, many more employees got to (or had to) work from home. Were you one who was asked to work from home? If so, are you still working remotely, or has your company required you to return to the office?
I recently read that Elon Musk has described working from home as “morally wrong,” likening it to a privileged indulgence of the “laptop class.” He went on to say that, “You’re going to work from home, and you’re going to make everyone else who made your car come work in the factory? People who make your food that gets delivered can’t work from home. Does that seem morally right?”
Musk continued, “People should get off their goddam moral high horse with the work-from-home bullshit. Because they’re asking everyone else to not work from home while they do.”
And that leads me to today’s provocative question (or questions).
If you are not yet retired, do you regularly work from home? If not currently, have you ever telecommuted on a regular basis? If so, did (or do) you prefer working from home? Why or why not? And finally, how do you feel about Musk calling working from home “morally wrong”? Do you agree or disagree? And why do you feel that way?
If you choose to participate in Fandango’s Provocative Question, you may respond with a comment or write your own post in response to the question. Once you are done, tag your post with #FPQ and create a pingback to this post if you are on WordPress. Or you can simply include a link to your post in the comments. But remember to check to confirm that your pingback or your link shows up in the comments.
This, That, and the Other 
My husband has been going to work once a week and hopefully to a hybrid model. With mich happiness I am packing him lunch and evem got him a new lunch box 😀. He was occupying too much of my space 😂. So I agree with Musk🤪!
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Ha!
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I go into the office every workday because I enjoy having a routine and leaving the house. Several of my coworkers WFH and prefer that. We are all productive professionals, and Musk is an asshole.
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I’m not working so this doesn’t applies to me.
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Oh, please! I’ve been away from “the office” for 45 years raising my family. Being a stay-at-home mom and grandmother is the most demanding (and rewarding) “work from home” job anyone can have. Elon Musk can fuck off!
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I agree with both of your points.
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Funnily enough I work from home now, It’s different. Plus for the company is I spend less time socialising with colleagues, I tend to work longer, plus for me is that it is less rigid. /big minus is that you arte remote and information spreads more slowly. But in my current job, I like it. In previous jobs, where I’ve been more senior and a lot of the work has been co-ordination, I’ve not liked it.
A funny effect that I never realised – wfh now, I have no emotional ties to any of my colleagues. By that I mean just the social interaction around the water fountain, say. Some jobs, I stayed for the pleasant environment where the job itself was pretty humdrum. There’ll be none of that, now. I’ll get out when I have a better offer.
Musk’s comments show a guy who fundamentally doesn’t trust his staff. I bet he has motivational problems in his companies.
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That’s a bit long, sorry. Feel free to delete it and I’ll put it into my own post later.
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It’s okay. I’ll leave it, but I’m looking forward to reading your post. And you’re right about the loss of social interaction with your peers, but at my last company we had bi-monthly, on-site gatherings with our remote team members so that we could get to know them as more than just a voice on the phone or a face on a web meeting.
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No amount of motivation from Musk could persuade me to work for that guy. And even though I have an electric car, I would never buy a Tesla.
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There are weird people who are actually attracted (almost like a cult mind) to the idea of working for him. An example is his space activities (but it can be for any of the panoply). I’d guess most of the people just want jobs, who have jobs at the set of his companies. I’d avoid him. I wonder whether some people wanted to work for Dorsey and then found themselves stuck in Musk’s hell (or enhanced purgatory).
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I don’t know what the score is with Tesla. They’re mega-expensive, aren’t they? Why is that?Are they super=performers?
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They probably are quality products, and they are expensive, but they’ve recently reduced prices significantly on some of their models to generate more sales.
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oooh, that’s nasty. Smacks of profiteering.
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I sat in a Tesla on display at a city fair once. There was nothing luxurious, in fact to the contrary, about the interior or attractive really in any way (except for the status of the thing if one were driving it down the road at that price and is into the thrill of being able to blow money that most can’t). I got out with the summation that I’d like a sun roof that large; that’s all (which I basically have in a different vehicle). He got the price because he could. That’s about it. And there are people who like the idea of a self-driving car, so they can take a chance on crashing while trusting it or him… I guess.
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I have worked from home full time since 2021 and I absolutely love it. When I sometimes miss the companionship of office friends, I quickly remember the many advantages I now enjoy. I plan on working from home until retirement. I seriously couldn’t care less what a privileged fuck like Elon Musk has to say about anything.
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Good for you. I, too, loved working from home.
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First of all, it’s RIDICULOUS that Elon musk has said working from home is “morally wrong” — he, meanwhile, exhibits signs that he doesn’t know what morals are (with some mitigating factors, however, which I won’t get into right now). On a separate note, if I think of looking for a job… it would involve going somewhere to work. It would be half the point, but for me (not because I’d be seeking out a place where the employer is hung up on himself). Elon should hire back a bunch of the previous workers at Twitter (not that I use or am personally invested in it) because the function of the service requires more workers, whether working from home or from wherever he wants to put them (but not in a slavery camp such as is done in China for manufacturing).
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Clarification: … for at least some American companies who manufacture in China.
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I don’t work, but I have to agree with everyone who says Musk is so freakin’ privileged that he really shouldn’t speak for anyone who does work from home. Yes, I realize in some ways having the choice to work from home or not is a privilege, but in that sense being forced to work from home is as much a problem as being forced to come to the office.
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First, Elon is a toddler saying “caca” just to have the adults shush him. What he says is irrelevant as far as anyone else is concerned. Per the question, I started telecommuting once a week in 1995, so I got used to lower social interaction, which was great when my company moved to Charlotte and left me a lone person in an office in SF for 20 more years. Zoom/video interaction now has changed the rules, period, and I still work remotely part-time for a national remotely based company as an online course mentor (assignment grader). Telecommuting works for some jobs and some people and not for others.
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I agree. If you have the kind of job that can be done remotely, and choose to take advantage of that, then why not? It’s not as if you’re personally being unfair to someone whose job requires them to physically show up. There’s certainly nothing morally wrong with working from home.
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I retired in 2007, but none of my jobs could have been done by working at home anyway. There was too much interaction with other departments and the general public, so my phone bill alone would have been horrendous.
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I work from home, with my writing, but I am still working.
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Since computers and easy wi-fi access, there’s no reason to force people to exhaustion, wear out their cars AND pollute the climate by driving thousands of extra miles. The only serious problem I had working from home was convincing people that working at home is really working, They couldn’t call me to chat just because happened to be home.
The BAD part of working at home, especially if you are freelancing, is that you never get a sick day because your boss knows if you are too sick to work and you have to be REALLY sick to be unable to commute from the bedroom to your office across the hall. If I woke up in the middle of the night, I figured I might as well work. I think I worked many more hours for myself than I ever worked for anyone else.
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Once I moved from the east coast to the west coast and had clients and colleagues all across the country, I often had to be up and working at 5:00 am PT to participate in 8 am ET conference calls or video meetings. And I often was working with clients and colleagues on the west coast until 6 or 7 pm PT. Long days!
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Long days and sometimes, middle of the night too. And I never got a day off, though I took time when I could to do stuff. It was a great balance, even if you spent possibly more hours working than you might have in an office setting.
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I’ve been working from home since 2010. We just started business and we had two small kids. This was very convenient and best thing for my girls, but I did miss the social aspect of meeting people at work, going out for lunch together. We hired someone and she worked from our home too. Ten tears later, she is still here, the big part of the company. Now we do hybrid, two days in the office – when clients come, three from home.
Elon Musk has no standing to talk about morals. Spending that much time on social media means he dies not do much himself, besides being a face of his companies.
Just because some jobs can not be done remotely, doesn’t mean nobody should.
My plans include changing job and I sure hope to have at least some days in the office. I really thing that isolation of the last ten tears or more hasn’t been that great for my mental health. Although that might be due to dysfunctional marriage I left couple years ago.
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