That "individual preference" has a massive effect on the team just one remote person is a massive drain on efficiency. You can't frame it as "individual" when work is an inherently collaborative process.

Implying companies that embrace remote work are less collaborative?

Yes, I feel confident saying by and large they are. I've noticed a massive drop of collaboration with our switch to remote during this time. Sure there will be exceptions, mostly from in person companies being very bad about it, but there are fundamental limits with remote that don't exist in person for collaboration.

Then the problem will solve itself won't it? The in-person companies should clearly out-compete the remote ones.

"Natural selection" in companies is so noisy I don't think we will ever see a clear trend in this case.

Covid showed that as a lower limit remote wont wreck companies atleast. I am convinced remote is a little bit better for the company (unless hardware/machine/industry centric) and alot better for many employees, especially in hard commute places.

Depending on how the rest of the team prefers to work, they can be, in the same way that two in-person workers at a predominantly remote company could be less collaborative if they do most of their conversing/deciding in person instead of on Slack/Chat/Email/etc

Remote and in-office are both pretty inherently social decisions.

If you're remote, you don't want to be left out if other team members are in person.

If you're in-office, most of the benefits depend on other people also being in-office.

I'll be frank. I don't want to be forced to socialize with coworkers. They need to make friends outside of work if they need socialization time. I may socialize with people from work, but will do it on my own terms. The collaboration thing is almost never really about collaborating or efficiency, it's just the polite way of saying they want to force others to fulfill their social needs.

> I don't want to be forced to socialize with coworkers.

Okay, sounds like you prefer remote work then? I don't see what's wrong with someone else preferring in-person work.

> The collaboration thing is almost never really about collaborating or efficiency,

Disagree, there's definitely conversations that are much easier to have in-person. Both just "locally" for individual conversations, but also in terms team bonding and trust that allow other kinds of conversations to happen at all.

That said, I think it is _also_ about socializing.

> they want to force others to fulfill their social needs.

You cannot get around needing others to fulfill social needs, that's what social means.

In what way is this "forcing" in a way that's different than how other social interactions work?

If the decision to colocated or remote is made at the team/org level, then enough teams should choose to be remote that there will be many options for you, just as there will be many options for people that want a colocated team. These days there's no shortage of remote roles so it's already happening. What's wrong with that model?

Just like you don't want to be forced to socialize, others may not want to be forced to work on a remote team, and a team that has a free-for-all remote policy is effectively a remote team (as others have noted). If the decision is made at a group level, most everyone can get what they want.

If a free-for-all remote policy effectively means remote team, then maybe that tells you something about the value being provided by the "in office" people. If physical presence was providing good value to coworkers, more of them would want to be co-located.

No, that doesn't really follow. Just because something happened doesn't mean it's optimal. There are many examples in game theory, like the prisoner's dilemma, that showcase this effect. As others have explained in this thread, even a minority of the team choosing to be remote requires others to work in a remote fashion.

You can address this with some level of coordination, hence why making this a team or org decision is win-win for everyone IMO. You will never have to take a job that doesn't align with what you want, nor will most anybody else. Seems like a great outcome to me.

Ultimately, the market will come to a conclusion at some point, and perhaps that will show what the comparative value of in-office vs remote is :)

> a team that has a free-for-all remote policy is effectively a remote team (as others have noted)

I don't think this is true in the sense that you (or possibly the original commenter) mean. I think what happens is that if, e.g., 1/3 of a team is remote, the rest of the team has to choose between either excluding them by doing most interactions in-person, or leaning heavily on remote even though 2/3 of the team is in-office.

I don't get why in person types camt just use a co-working facility. Obviously not an option during the pandemic and that was rough gor them but so was going to the office for years for everyone else.

I think a coworking facility addresses like 10-20% of what a lot of people are looking for from an office. It’s not about being around random people, it’s about being around the people you’re working with.

This obvious libertarian slant is drawing a really really really long bow. Silicon Valley big tech employees are furthest away from being “forced” to do anything. There are people at Google who are tasked with making calls relating to worker productivity, and evidently this is one of those calls. Where does this ideology end? What if they tell you what language or tooling to use? If you don’t like your employer telling you what to do, employment probably isn’t for you?