I'm pretty sure no real person has argued that they want to work from the office because they have a slavish devotion to their hours-long commute and they don't want to develop a life outside of work.
It would probably help the discussion if you didn't straw-man the people who don't share your preferences, and dismiss them out of hand.
If you've got a family, home, and you've hit the upper limits of your desired career development, I get it. But, you gotta think about how it would affect the career for someone coming into your workplace as a college grad.
Wasn't doing that at all. People who want to go to the office and don't have an hourslong commute in traffic aren't the people I'm referring to. I'm referring to the people who have hourslong commutes sitting in traffic. People who are close to their jobs and want to go in, great, it's the fact that a huge percentage of the country drives to work. If you don't commute far to get to work, or perhaps don't even own a car, then I'm not talking about you.
I suggest rewriting it as less a critique of other people's values, and more an expression of your opinion for how you see the situation -- without attack others. When you criticize other people's decisions without being empathetic, people aren't going to engage with you. And what is the point in posting in a forum with other people, if not to hear their perspectives and maybe learn something?
I think you're the only one who is thinking that way. I'm a software developer who prefers to work in a office, not because I get less free time, but because me and my colleagues are more productive when we share the same physical space while working. On the other hand, I completely get that some people are more productive working remotely, and I'm perfectly fine with that. Neither ways are 100% perfect for everyone, nor will they never be.
When considering others perspective, try to do it favorably, otherwise you're never gonna understand the other side.
I’d also suspect that young people with no kids is not the dominant work from home demographic - I’d guess that would be middle aged people with kids.
I spend about 1 hour going to work every day, and I do that because I want to work with those people, in that office. I could work remote, but we're (in the team) all more productive and have more fun when we share the same physical space, so we meet up in the office everyday to work together.
Let people do whatever they want! Adjust the system so people can actually choose how they would like to spend their days. This doesn't have to be a binary option - remote vs office! We have actually an opportunity to adjust the established system and build one that will be more versatile for people with families and folks in the middle class.
I'm really curious to know what is your position that you feel so damn empowered to judge people and group them into buckets of idiots? I'm really tired of people like you who feel so smart about the situation that they must push their points of view in every god damn post about remote work.
Agreed. See, the funny thing here is you're pissed because I'm "pushing my views on every god damn post about remote work", when I see the exact opposite. Every post, everyone is against remote work. Those people do the exact same damn thing as you think I'm doing, which is "we should all be in the office 100%!"
First, I never said that everyone should be remote. Never said it once. I think we need flexibility, ie. the option to work from home. But the people who really don't like remote work, seem to despise the people who do. It's never been more apparent than this thread - either people are with me 100%, or want me dead.
The conclusion here is that everyone is totally insane, that's my takeaway.
People who like remote work don't want execs to hear the "teams are more productive in an office" theme so many times they pull people back into the office. Which has happened in a number of cases.
On the flip side, people who really want their team all together in an office either because they think it's more productive or because they just like having their team physically with them, don't like the idea of a new normal in which many of their teammates only come in a day or so per week.
You bike to and from work? That's fantastic, if I could do that I'd be in the office a few days a week too, as I also road bike. But so many people don't do that.
I walk to work, and a lot of my work involves close collaboration in ways that teleconferencing makes really hard (math or other collaborative diagramming over Zoom? Hah!). And the lag makes a lot of communication extremely difficult. Perhaps we will learn to deal with our inadequate technology, or maybe the tech will get better, but my frustration level has gone through the roof with working from home.
So though I despise the hours-in-a-car-per-day requirement that our city planning has forced on people, I also had a bad reaction to your initial comment :)
There's a bias on HN to compare working-from-home with the commuter experience _in the Bay Area_, and conclude working from home is better. For many of us in places like New York, living in the city and going to the office is much more preferable lifestyle than working from home in a random place.
Unfortunately, the US seems unlikely to get high-speed rail projects functional...ever.
Pre-pandemic, I set my life up so that I was walking distance to everything I needed. My apartment is super small, but that's fine when things are open. I'm actually considering buying a car and moving out to the suburbs because I see my inner-city neighborhood rapidly descending into squalor. I think most city-dwellers with financial means are at least considering the same.