I do think expecting every employee to sit in an office for 8 hours a day every day is almost certainly unnecessary. That said, I also think it's unfair and disingenuous to suggest that there's absolutely no value whatsoever to colocation. It's possible that we can replicate much of the physical interaction's value through fully remote work, but my experience is that we're not there yet.

It really depends on the work you're doing. And even for a single employee, it can change from one month to the next. But highly collaborative work can benefit from spontaneous interactions, more ambiguous work can benefit from live whiteboarding sessions, and more generally, teams can develop greater cohesion and stronger relationships through shared experience. Not every person needs this, and certainly not all the time, but to suggest that it's unimaginable that anyone could ever derive greater value (or that a collective organization could ever derive greater value) from in-person work is disappointing.

Remote work has its place. In-person work has its place. Neither is the solution 100% of the time.

The more I read these conversations it becomes clear your position depends on where you are in the introvert / extrovert scale.

Some people get a lot of energy from interacting one on one with others. These tend to be the loudest voices in any office.

But so many people who are more introvered have just forced themselves to adapt.

I guess what I'm trying to say, for everyone that wants to get back to the office, many of us had wanted to get out for a very long time.

I’m definitely an introvert. Having an office with a door caused my productivity to skyrocket.

When working from the office, I close the door in the morning and open it when I leave.

The 3 or 4 conference room meetings I had per month had half of the attendees on zoom. Being in the same conference room didn’t do much for me.

I still have no idea what socialization people speak of. Office small talk? Happy hours?

Are they worth spending 10 hours a week driving and losing all the benefits of working from home? Certainly not to me.

Totally, and I think that's ok! I'm not intending to suggest that there is one true way. In fact, I think the very point I'm getting at is that there is not one true way. Different situations work better for different people in different roles, and even for the same person in the same role, the ideal situation may change from one quarter to the next.

Where I take issue is with people suggesting that it would be insane to ever ask anyone to come to an office again, for the same reason I think it would be insane to tell people that working from home is a waste of time/not productive/etc. To this end, a hybrid work environment may not be any better, since it forces an individual person to balance both (I.e. your extroverts are still expected to be home 2x/week, and your introverts are still expected to be at the office 3x/week)

The challenge for leaders of companies that are trying to navigate this (and one of the reasons that people will probably always be dissatisfied with the outcome) is that there is no perfect solution. You go full remote, you'll have people who miss the office (and almost certainly some intangibles will be lost). You go full in-office, and you'll have some less productive people who spend way too much time commuting and pay too much in rent. You go hybrid, and you still have people paying too much in rent, and now they also have to commute sometimes, and the people who want to be in the office aren't for 2 days/week, etc. Adding insult to injury, if you allow individual people to make their own decisions (some remote, some in-office) you'll have imbalances in career progressions, where people who have more facetime will be more likely to receive promotions and raises than their less visible, fully-remote counterparts.

It's a challenging topic, and it's not clear to me there is a solution that is "fair," insofar as fairness is even a thing we can measure here.

> The more I read these conversations it becomes clear your position depends on where you are in the introvert / extrovert scale.

In which direction?

As a strongly introverted person myself, I would expect that working from home would be easier for extroverts than introverts during normal times. Extroverts make friends more easily wherever they go, while introverts rely more on structured interactions such as work in their social life. Take the office away, and the introvert who has recently relocated may not know anyone in the area.

> Because of the already sunk cost into office space?

Surely this must be a big part of it, but I haven't seen any good discussions about the topic. Workers are being massively inconvenienced and the environment is being put under unnecessary stress to prop up the value of now-redundant real estate.

Recently I read an essay pointing out that what we call “environment” is our de facto biosphere. It is not surrounding us, it literally keeps us alive, permeating is with every breath and every bite of food.

Destroying the biosphere is the end of life.

> Because of the already sunk cost into office space?

Yeah, Apple Park did cost ~5 billion dollars, and its still less than five years old so they haven't gotten a great return on investment yet.

Apple Park houses a small fraction of Apple's Bay Area employee workspaces.

So executives can lord over their kingdom. Why else?

More like, so middle managers can lord of their kingdom. Executives will keep in their upper offices, or on their yachts

Essentially working remote at their choice on a frequent basis.

Seeing yourself produce more doesn't imply the net impact is positive. Because working from home (using 2020-era tools) greatly reduces social presence [1], which may be undermining team work, creative thinking, etc.

I'm a 100% remote work maximalist, I think in the long run physical offices for creative work will be non-existent. However, the fact is that the tools we have today are about 5-10 years behind where they need to be to be able to replace the social presence benefits of physical co-presence.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_presence_theory

When working from the office I would not really speak face to face with teammembers - many of my colleagues are in different cities.

Not everyone's an engineer. Lots of roles work better in person.

Could you provide some examples?

I am speaking of roles who successfully performed 100% of their work from home in the last year.

Also, why are engineers being forced to come back to the office?

I am an engineer who successfully performed my work from home.

But I definitely prefer to work in an office.

> Why does an employer want me to suffer more, even if it will cost them?

In this question, there is an embedded assumption that your employer wants you to suffer more.

Even some engineers prefer to work in-person, although I'm now coming to understand it appears to be a minority. At least in this comment thread.

I think we don't really know the breakdown of people who prefer in person vs not, but the remote people are REALLY passionate about their position

More like sunk in cost of a HR department/Property management department

The people making these decisions wouldn't have jobs if the "company culture" was all remote.

Agreed. Pretty lame the logic is “imagine the hallway conversations that spur innovation.”

Didn’t Einstein work on relatively writing papers and mailing letters to his peers?

He didn’t keep doing that once he got into academia.

Imagine what he could have achieved if he'd carried on writing letters then!

There is a lot of stuff you can do better in person especially with the secrecy behind everything like in apples case. For Grunt work you are totally right.

In the case of Apple, that sunk cost is rather substantial.

A wild guess: execs supplement their income by having stakes in food/rent businesses around the HQ offices. If employees don't come, those businesses will lose customers and the execs will suffer. I mean, if you were such an exec and knew the corp is about to build a large office somewhere, wouldn't you buy 40-60% stakes in key businesses there while they are cheap? And wouldn't you cry wolf if the new office never opened beyond 10% capacity? I've seen a few strange apartment complexes built in odd places and charging brazen rent that doesn't make sense unless the owners knew something years ahead.

Bold of you to claim that Cupertino would ever let someone build rental housing near the Apple HQ.

(The current city planning commissioner has actually said that Apple employees shouldn’t be allowed to live there because they are all single men and will hire prostitutes.)

Definitely not difficult to vote a new member into a board as a passive member with that logic. I never thought of that before honestly but it makes perfect sense.

Classic vending machine contracts!

Ah yes those. Le Cruix here I come.