Lucky you. I live in a top-floor apartment so don't have the luxury of a garden and I'm isolated by myself as I live alone.

It's not the same for everyone.

That’s fine. Don’t make me come back to the office because you have undesirable accommodations.

I'm not sure this "you can't make me X" attitude is particularly helpful. The reality is that lots of people have undesirable accommodations, and whether you do or not a lot of people do and don't want to go back into the office. IMO this has to be a group conversation not an individualistic one.

Full disclosure: I don't really want to return to 100% office requirement either. I'm really excited to see other humans again - though I suspect we'll see a 2-3 day a week in-person expectation and then 2-3 day flex moving forward.

I believe my company is going to end up maintaining a small office with a set of open desks that people can come in an work at. At least for us, this seems like the right balance. We've grown in the pandemic, so keeping a smaller office lets the company save money. Hiring remotely expands our pool of candidates. At the same time, employees who benefit on the whole from remote work get to keep it, while employees who thrive on in-person interaction and a dedicated space outside their home get to keep it. It's a little tricky to set up blended in-person and remote meetings, but once that's in place, the office can be much more fluid.

Surely this works both ways though? Remote workers always bring an implied expectation that their coworkers will do a certain amount of extra work in order to bridge the larger communication boundary. This means more documentation, more aggressive status tracking, more time spent on communication (zoom calls and slack simply aren't as high fidelity as in person communication - body language is important), more independent investigation as the activation energy of a remote call is higher, etc.

Now, many of those things are probably good for the business anyway, but they are nevertheless obligations that remote workers force on their colleagues in order to achieve that cleaner, "API-like" working relationship that remote workers often need to succeed independently.

It's even more stressful if some employees are gelling well and some aren't. Many remote workers feel they should be treated like contractors but given fuzzier expectations like salaried workers - I've seen this misalignment of expectations about culture destroy teams, and in an office culture transitioning from full time in office to partially remote, all of this is fundamentally caused by the "benefits" that the remote workers are receiving at the cost of their colleagues. It's absolutely not a win-win.

This. Plus, I myself am living in a top floor apt, but over the past year I learnt the power of just taking walks, having quality weekend times, taking trips, and exercising. Just because I'm supposed to work at home does not mean that I should stay home all the time. If anything, this has taught me what I was doing wrong in my pre-covid life.

Nobody’s making you do anything, if your employer forces a return to the office and you don’t like it you can find a new employer.

If the only option to stay remote is to quit then that's the definition of "My employer is making me return to the office".

They are voicing a very US view on the relationship. From my understanding, in EU there are jurisdictions that any concession extracted from employees by employer is effectively done under duress because the employer controls employees livelihood, even if temporarily. Actual reality depends on how desirable your skills are and how good the existing employment is.

I expect the bigger legal pushback would be the other way around. I definitely heard some grumbling early in the pandemic when some still saw office closures as an over-reaction. The complaint was that companies were making a unilateral change to the working conditions agreed-upon when they were hired.

Don't mistake pandemic conditions for forever. There is no reason you need to stay permanently isolated and can't get social needs filled somewhere other than an office.

Don't mistake the post pandemic conditions for granted. Even after isolation working alone in a small apartment can be miserable, I find myself in the same situation, getting out for a bar or club in non working hours is not the same as working in a office. There are some simple idiotic social needs like small talk, or throw some jokes or even curse out loud in frustration that are difficult to get right outside the office.

Anyways, any argument down playing a situation is futile, let's just agree that every one is in a different situation and the best is to analyze case by case

Isn't analyzing case-by-case exactly what remote work is though? Obviously some people really like working at home in isolation and some people like the social aspects of being in an office. But with a remote-first company you have the option. If you want to work at home you obviously can and if you want a more social work environment then you can rent a co-working space (hopefully your company could even foot the bill with all the money they are saving on office rent) or co-work with a group of friends, etc.

I think a lot of people who have worked remotely for the first time due to COVID have a misleading impression of what remote work is. In normal times you have ample options to be able to work in an environment with other people if that's what you want. You also have the option to spend the time you save on commuting doing other non-work social activities.

I am pretty much in the same boat, i cannot afford a house where i live, and probably will never be able to at least within the next couple of years. Unfortunately between the ongoing construction, and the fact our building is slowly renovating most of the units has hurt my productivity.

While people say "oh just move somewhere else outside the city", unfortunately that means i need to now buy/maintain a car on top of everything else. Then commute into the city to be social with my friends group, or to do physical activities.

Neither of those things appeal to me, and since our work is strongly leaning to switching to be fully remote, it is kind of frustrating. A bunch of coworkers are very much just move to a city where you can buy a house! That is what i did. Or even worse a lot of people who are just "buy a house!", and are completely ignorant of how insane the housing prices have become.

Honestly the end result is probably just going to lead to me finding employment at a company that still has the ability to work onsite. A few of my like mininded coworkers pitched the idea that we could rent a small office area for people like us, and were promptly shot down by management.

Eventually you’ll have the choice to work in the office at most places, but with a permanent remote option you could also move.

But isn't that the point? If your location doesn't matter you could live somewhere with a garden because you wouldn't be forced to live near the arbitrary location of the office.

You had more than a year now to get out of your top floor apartment lease.

Not to mention that a pandemic is not an accurate reflection of what real remote work looks like.

It's a mortgage so it's not that easy.

You have the city though, no? I understand it's pandemic conditions now, but when things open back again, it should become fun again?

We were in this situation and have been lucky enough to move back in with family, in a more rural location.

I've loved it so far, being able to be around family more and take care of them and just be around.

If full-time remote becomes more the norm, I hope people are able to take the opportunity to be closer to family and friends.

Being isolated is most likely related to the pandemic and has nothing to do with working remotely.

I dunno, I worked from home way before pandemic and the isolation was pretty bad as well. Nothing can really compare to meeting a lot of great people daily, face-to-face.

get a co-working membership. It's like adult daycare for working people, they organize little activities and mixers from time to time.

Luck had nothing to do with the choices I made in my career and life.

Oooh BOOOOY is that a self-unaware statement :->

While I will give full marks for your agency and initiative if appropriate, to think ANY of us (myself and all of us included) don't have a large amount of probability/luck/circumstance involved is hilarious.

Heck, I'm a refugee from a civil-war country who came to Canada with literally nothing but a loan for the ticket; I could try to make the claim that I "made it on my own". Yet though I've certainly put in an effort, I'm extremely lucky compared to those who couldn't leave, didn't speak the language, don't have the skillset or capability, don't look or behave in career-enhancing ways, haven't been picked up by mentors and coaches, haven't moved to a country which accepts new people, with educational and business framework that's conducive to advances, haven't found or been given the same opportunities, etc. I've certainly had bad luck and obstacles and negative externalities, but I could spend all day counting things that went well too!

I mean, I agree that I don't want to necessarily go back to the office; but it's with full view of how lucky & privileged I am. Even on very granular level, even with decisions I've made and career I've chosen and skillset I've developed - I have colleagues with same skillset and position and broadly similar projects, which have not switched to remote nearly as much as my project has. That alone is luck/circumstance/beyond my control.

Meh, the network of choices and outcomes you took couldn't have been pre-planned, but the attitude and work ethic that made you work on the skills, capabilities, mindset, etc and made you take action despite major setbacks had nothing to do with luck. To think otherwise is to deny your own agency.

My point/perspective is that it's not a binary proposition. It's not all luck/circumstance, or all agency; it's a combination of the two.

The OP to which I replied implied that ONLY their agency mattered; I disagree with that sentiment vehemently. This is not to say that agency that does not matter - I'm not a fatalist and certainly enjoy my personal freedom and take personal responsibility :)

Luck has something to do with everyone's path, no exceptions.

Intentions and planning matter too, of course.

Where, when and to who you were born, and your health. There is plenty of luck involved.

Really? It made a lot of difference to mine. If I didn't have a mild skeletal problem I'd probably be in the air force right now, rather than a software engineer.

Almost implies you have _bad_ luck, then, if there's nothing at all you can ascribe to fortuitous chance.

My career was made by someone finding my resume in a trash can.

I wish you good luck then!

While I'm sure there's some kernel of truth to the benefits of chit chatting about random stuff and coming up with better ideas through that, until I see some evidence that in-office work provides this to a substantial degree, I have a hard time believing it's as beneficial as it's made out to be. What it actually feels like is a hand wavy attempt for some old people in management to try to justify them holding onto their outdated ways.

For companies like Amazon there must be a huge element of the sunk cost fallacy coming into play. I'm sure they have spent hundreds of millions on office locations around the world. To suddenly decide that these are completely unnecessary would be a bold move, and there is unlikely to be a queue of people rushing to lease or buy unused office space in the immediate future.

>To suddenly decide that these are completely unnecessary

Not a very bold move for the world's largest cloud provider.

If I understand your point, you are saying that Amazon has virtually made the data centre redundant, so the idea that offices are similarly redundant given the right tools shouldn't come as too much of a surprise to them?

I take that point but let me counter that there is presumably a sliding scale here between "traditional office space is redundant" and "when the dust settles everyone will be back at their cubicles". The majority of people, and the companies they work for, are probably somewhere in the middle. However, even if Amazon are 100% convinced their office space is now redundant, it is probably, from a game theory type point of view, not in their best interests to publicly declare that position. Because to do so would only weaken the value of their existing office spaces.

> While I'm sure there's some kernel of truth to the benefits of chit chatting about random stuff and coming up with better ideas through that, until I see some evidence that in-office work provides this to a substantial degree, I have a hard time believing it's as beneficial as it's made out to be. What it actually feels like is a hand wavy attempt for some old people in management to try to justify them holding onto their outdated ways.

Yup. I'm wondering how many people are taking advantage of the tools available to them. I've seen remote workers be online in a video chat room so you could "stop by and pitch an idea." This was well over a decade ago.

Those old school managers you mention are the ones I find most likely to stick with things like audio only teleconference, even when there are things like shared whiteboards/documents available, and then they'll talk to slides they didn't send out over email. Incredibly frustrating.

> not eating less-healthy fast-food rather than home-cooked meals

Anecdotally, the people I know reluctant to go back to the office have some combination of lovely homes into which they've put care, terrible offices reflecting zero care or empathy and/or introversion, sometimes to the point of social anxiety. (Stark minority in the third, but a life changer for them.)

Offices don't have to have terrible meal options. Nice homes can be chosen close to work, thereby negating commute. And co-workers don't have to be inept to the point of constantly interrupting your work flow.

There will always be a section of the population happier and more productive working from principally home. (Though for how long we can command a wage premium remains to be seen.) But I suspect, if offices were a bit more desirable and city center housing a bit more affordable, that slice would narrow quickly.

Do you live in Silicon Valley? Nice homes cannot be chosen close to work. All homes in the South Bay that aren’t literally falling down are multi-million-dollar. I personally know people who bought a $2.5m home with a rat infestation.

> Do you live in Silicon Valley? Nice homes cannot be chosen close to work.

And in large parts of the rest of the country, it's illegal to put homes close to work.

Where I work is on the edge of an office campus on the edge of a suburb of Seattle. By city ordinance, virtually no housing is allowed anywhere near where I work. If you live in the same municipality as this office and work at it, your only choice to get there is a twenty-minute drive (with pre-pandemic traffic levels). There is no local bus service that goes from the rest of the town to the office park. Bus service from Seattle to this office park exists, however, so I live in Seattle.

"Just live close to work" is a physical impossibility for so many people, and not solely because they want the stereotypical standalone house with a picket fence. My family has zero interest in that, yet there's no housing anywhere near where I work. What little exists is largely short-term corporate rentals and AirBnBs.

When we've lived in other places, the dynamic is the same. Office parks in the suburbs or all clumped together in a large downtown, with housing as far as you can get from them.

This is, in my opinion, one of the few things Amazon did right: plopping its office campus in the middle of a very mixed-use area with rental apartments and condominium units for ownership, shops, restaurants, parks, and so on. (Of course, after having run out of land there, now they're building traditional office towers in the suburban downtown with virtually no housing to speak of. And yes, it is sky-high expensive to live near Amazon because that's basically the only mixed-use office park in the whole county.)

> "By city ordinance, virtually no housing is allowed anywhere near where I work."

Must be specific to your suburb. I can look out the window of my downtown Seattle office straight into the windows of the condo complex across the street. As for the suburbs, having passed by innumerable times, the north edge of Microsoft's main campus is directly across the street from apartments and rowhomes.

> Microsoft's main campus

I was wondering if someone would mention Microsoft in a reply.

Yes, there are apartments near there, but Redmond has the same failing as most other suburbs in the area: housing stock woefully inadequate for the number of people working there, and ordinances that artificially restrict building any more. Microsoft's campus is also adjacent to the Bellevue city limits, where residents on the other side of Bel-Red have fought vociferously against new housing for decades.

Meanwhile, SR 520 is a mess all the way back to the 405 interchange (and beyond, some mornings). After the much-vaunted light rail arrives, that station will serve fewer residences than the one in Angle Lake.

My point is that lots of people just throw out "well, live near where you work" as a panacea to life's commuting and office ills. Under our current idea of what counts as zoning and land use, it's not possible for any more than a small sliver of people to do that. So we have a choice: change how we do land use, change how we work with offices, or both.

Contemporary zoning laws really are the worst.

> Do you live in Silicon Valley? Nice homes cannot be chosen close to work.

Nope. Largely for this reason. And when I'm in the Bay Area, I'm strategic about when I travel, to where and for whom.

My point is that the hesitance to go back to the office is not something fundamental. It's rooted in a variety of personal and environmental factors that can and do change. Targeting those factors, directly or indirectly, personally or through policy, has not been a conversation I've heard of.

The south bay has hordes of pretty nice apartment complexes for newly arrived renters, and newish condos and townhouses for entry level buyers. Eventually you trade up to a 3 bedroom house or whatever you need.

I have worked at various tech companies since the 90s, am by no means rich but I've have always lived somewhere decent that's within 15 minutes drive of work.

(Yes I know my bio says "Oakland" right now. I am working out of my partner's house during Covid. I still own a place in the South Bay).

It sounds very nice to be a decamillionaire.

Surely it is those people who demand to work from an office who should be worried about commanding a premium, if the employer start including the cost of providing an office, especially in a premium area.

> it is those people who demand to work from an office who should be worried about commanding a premium

Before the pandemic, certain employers had to pay a premium for real estate and a premium for talent in prime locations. The former no longer looks justified. That doesn't really give employee or employer any leverage. The latter, which was built on scarcity of accessible talent and the concentration of high-paying jobs in prime locations, however, solely reduces employees' leverage.

One of the barriers to this shift was the massive cost of installing remote-working infrastructure. Financially, technically and culturally. That's now done. How this shakes out, whether it results in lower prices for customers or better returns to shareholders or higher take-home pay for employees, remains to be seen.

I work in a company where without a boring meeting you are not going to get absolutely anything from anybody, even if you have a simple question. Working remotely helped a lot as we were forced to use MS Teams then information suddenly started free flowing. Meetings and walkthroughs can be recorded with everyone's permissions and the knowledge builds up. I am not looking forward at going back to the office at all! I'm even considering taking a break and then finding something remote only even with a reduced compensation.

> While the cross-pollination of ideas from different teams and departments is lost, along with interesting and serendipitous discussions

While this always sounds good, in my experience it rarely amounts to anything. A company I used to work for tried to make "hacks" and "hackathons" etc happen. People did make hacks, but they remained as hacks. Products were finished just like any other product is finished: as a result of hard, dedicated work.

> While the cross-pollination of ideas from different teams and departments is lost

I don't think this needs to be lost. It just needs to be done more deliberately now if it is desired.

Remote work basically tosses out anything extra beyond your tasks as nothing happens naturally. You then get to craft what you want.

You're cross polinating ideas right now! My company has been pushing yammer or some such garbage since it became available. There may finally be a use for it.

Also: not contributing nearly as much to global warming by running my gas-burning engine while I sit in traffic.

I wonder how 50-500 individually heated/cooled homes from 8-6 compares to the energy required to heat/cool a single office/office block?