I agree there was a good head of steam where people were able to quietly and independently work through their "list" of stuff they wanted to do for ages but never had the chance to etc, or whatever had previously been planned out.

Now months later I feel like things are starting to grind a bit and productivity is starting to wane because the "pipe" is starting to dry up. Those ad hoc conversations that lead to a new feature, bumping into someone in the corridor who mentions some big issue they're having, meeting and talking to end users, the offsites to work out the strategy for next quarter, day-long workshops with UX and management and users and post-it notes galore where we thrash out ideas and concepts are a distant memory. Instead we have stilted video calls where people sit on mute 95% of the time and there simply is not as much collaboration as there was before.

Sure stuff still happens, but it feels like to me that the "spark" from people who usually generate ideas and set the agenda/work items is reduced significantly - if not entirely gone - and people are just going through the motions somewhat mechanically and "doing the best they can given the circumstances" etc.

At the very least, for the most part, businesses won't forget that possibility, even if they don't rely on it heavily post-pandemic. We've removed a significant blocker, that doesn't necessarily mean that we've reinvented the office dynamic or anything like that, but we've at least opened up a new channel for some businesses that didn't have it before, which IMO is objective improvement.

My employer mandated a return to the office about 2 weeks ago. Productivity has declined compared to when we were all WFH for 6 months and I have the stats - pull requests, builds pushed to prod, tickets opened, all are down.

I'm trying to understand how much negotiating power software developers have with their employers these days; in general and on this topic in particular.

Similarly distance education sucks. It's sucked forever buuuuut, with whole countries attempting to manage distance education at the same time across all educational institutions, I am very optimistic that we will find some new techniques that will have huge returns but it will take a while for those techniques to gain dominance.

I could be totally wrong about this, but we'll find out for sure in the next few years.

But what are those gains you get from working from home? The only "real" one I can think of is no commute ... but that removes productivity from the businesses now failing and going bankrupt because they have no/reduced customers.

Plus the commute is not just dead time, at least for me I usually triage my inbox before I arrive at the office. Now I just waste time and have an extra bowl of cereal it read the internet for half an hour instead of doing anything useful.

Those businesses may fail, but the money will go somewhere else, somewhere else that doesn't involve me wasting four hours a day.

I occasionaly worked on my commute, but most of the time was wasted, and now I'm free to use the time how I want.

There may be GDP effects that counterbalance this. Less money spent on gas or at small businesses near the employer. However, as suburbs have more at-home workers, more lunch spots will pop up nearby so I doubt the GDP effects are big. Sure, some might spend their productivity gains enjoying an extra bowl of cereal, but there's nothing wrong with that.

I see it in abundance in every single discussion here and elsewhere - people who hate commute but for whatever bad/stupid reason ended up far far away and were wasting hours every day on it suddenly have extra time and its great. These people keep praising current state as the best invention since fire. Most companies aren't organized around that last time I checked.

Maybe its a very US thing and true there on really massive scale. But here in Europe its not like that, not that much at least. Most folks commute 20-50 minutes. That is for 2nd biggest city in the country, smaller are more effective.

There are massive issues right now. Physical fitness is rapidly declining. People are going less out, less sun exposure. Amount of mental issues is understandably shooting through the roof (saw some firures about 5x increase in some cases). Economy is going down the toilet, some parts of it will crash very hard, possibly unrecoverably in current generation. These are effects that will be around for very long time even if we have 100% cure for covid tomorrow for 1 cent per dose.

Plus what parent wrote is absolutely, 100% true - I see people tired from constant conf calls and full remote. Mailboxes are exploding, it becomes hard to track emails even few weeks old. Brainstormings are mostly gone, people became more robot-like. Whatever you gain from not commuting from that middle of nowhere you live in means nothing compared to all this. For companies and for economies.

It'll be really hard to discuss remote work productively if you keep conflating it with COVID-induced issues.

If you'll read the thread all the way through, you'll notice that I'm a big fan of offices. I think the issues you and mattlondon raise are real—fitness, mental health, etc.—but those are temporary issues since people will eventually start going back to the office.

We will gain because through this experience, many firms will discover efficiencies from remote work and be able to apply them in a judicious way when things are back to normal.

> Plus the commute is not just dead time, at least for me I usually triage my inbox before I arrive at the office. Now I just waste time and have an extra bowl of cereal it read the internet for half an hour instead of doing anything useful.

this one is kinda on you. you get to decide what to do with the extra time. I wake up a little later now to stay up talking and playing video games with my friends that live further west. not very productive, but I value having a slightly more relaxed work week.

I watched a McKinsey presentation last week which, among other things, went into what ways of doing things forced by the pandemic did they want to carry forwards and what they didn't want to carry forward.

A couple of things that people most plan to carry forward were increased home cooking and online grocery delivery.

You said this, and then wrote the rest of your post about the opposite? Why do you think we'll need offices?

IMHO now is probably a good time to invest in meeting-place providers like Regus.

We don’t need corporate offices full of cubes and butts and chairs.

We need co-working spaces sometimes.

Personally, my employer of 92 is doing fine remote. So, you know, anecdata and all that

There’s that personality though that needs a group to help them decide on the color of a button, and how thick a drop shadow should be.

Let’s hope those folks are able to power through making such difficult decisions alone, without free lattes followed by yoga class to ease the chemically induced anxiety, and over thought fear of making the wrong palette choice.

My goodness, tech millennials might have to move on from college life! For shame.