Plus everyone needs to still live within commuting distance to the office, and also have a productive work space at home, which is a huge luxury in a place like SF to have an extra room for an office.

This cut office costs in half and increased productivity. It was quite good.

Speaking of remote, I've worked two jobs which were semi full remote, where we'd come in if we wanted to collaborate, on average 2 days a month. Both scenarios would save the company money on office costs.

One company, we had a full dedicated office, where we'd find a space we wanted to work in. It was normally abandoned there, except the CEO, SFO, and CTO was often there every day. We'd find an empty office room and close the door having privacy. It was quite nice. The advantage of this was our office space was tiny, compared to how many people we employed. Likewise, when we wanted to come to the office the environment was always fantastic.

Another company I worked at used those shared office spaces with a pay as you go plan. Eg, if you reserve a meeting room, they charge the company for it. We'd go there and find some desks we'd like and go at it, or reserve a meeting room if we wanted. The company would pay for it, so I'm not sure the price, but the environment was good with a café and great outdoor collab spaces. I'm sure it saved the company a lot of money.

So yah, partial remote and full remote do save companies money. They increase productivity and reduce office space costs. However, both of these are quite different than shelter in place, where those who would benefit from coming into the office can't. Shelter in place is less productive and far more frustrating than proper remote.

Is that actually true? The company isn't paying people to maintain their home offices. Any day where everyone works from home is a day where they don't need to have cleaning staff, food services, etc. come in. It may seem inefficient to have the building sitting there empty, but relative to having people there (and not relative to having no building at all), it's probably a net win.

Think about how many restaurants in prime real estate locations are closed for breakfast or on Mondays.

It might be easiest to simply take turns driving to each other's house.

Private offices for all allow social distancing at the office if needed, ability to tweak your surroundings to suit your needs when doing task work, and easy access to share physical space with a team when needed.

I worry we are losing sight of how disastrous co-working spaces and all open-plan designs are.

Fully remote is better than open plan or coworking for sure, but none of these options come close to just coming to our senses and bringing back private offices with doors for individuals.

I was so much more productive in an office with a door. I could close it for silence, I could close it when on conference calls. I wouldn't be disturbed and I wouldn't disturb anybody else.

If my company let me reduce my salary by $2,000 a year and gave me an office with a door I would do it immediately.

What I like about it: I get a lot of control over where and when collaboration vs. heads down work happens. I know I'll have the space to go heads down for as long as I want tuesday/thursday, and that I'll see my full team at least twice a week, so we tend to plan around that. I can also plan personal activities, appointments, etc. on the days I'm working from home, knowing I don't have meetings or a commute.

I didn't realize how important that face-time was until we lost it at the start of the pandemic. While all of our processes and day-to-day translated to full remote with little to no changes, without the re-centering and catching up and personal side of things we got monday/friday people were more on edge and collaboration/unity suffered. It's been a tricky thing to recoup, but we're finding doing more casual video calls here and there is helping.

Best of both worlds - cost savings from everyone who prefer to be home (which will be a lot of people) with the option to commute when its the better option.

Perhaps this the killer thing for VR.

However, I don't think it would help with the latency itself.