> Warning: Hot Take. I genuinely believe many people who prefer working in an office versus at home have unfulfilling social lives or bad home lives. The social dynamics, competition, in physical offices fills the void in their lives.

Warning: Hot Take.

I have similar logic, but reach an almost opposite conclusion. I genuinely believe many people who prefer working at home rather than an office have unfulfilling work lives and struggle to form meaningful friendships/relationships with colleagues.

I genuinely enjoy interactions with my colleagues during a work day, and wouldn't want to replace that with staring at a screen for 7.5 hours of my day or only talking to them via Slack. I have a great social group outside of work, but that doesn't diminish the value of enjoying the company of people I work with too.

Sure, it might technically be more productive if I just locked myself in a room and worked intensely on my own for my whole career and only communicated through a webcam, but that doesn't seem particularly enjoyable to me personally.

> I genuinely believe many people who prefer working at home rather than an office have unfulfilling work lives and struggle to form meaningful friendships/relationships with colleagues.

Absolutely not true.

I've been WFH since 2008. Many followed overtime and the company went full WFH in 2015 closing our office. We have a video call 3x a week and shoot the shit learn about each others lives just the same before we talk about work. I don't feel any less connected to my coworkers than my physical friends.

I also am part of a telegram group with ~10 old college buddies who live all over the country where we chat everyday and hop on voice to play video games or a monthly poker. This obviously isn't the same since we started out as physical friends and went to chat groups after going out separate ways, but again I haven't lost touch with any of them or felt less connected/meaningful because we are now remote only.

Not only that but with all the various video games we have added random people we connected with to that group, I don't even know what their face looks like but I know just as much about them as my physical friends. They are just part of the daily discussions about sports, politics, movies/tv, whatever.

I think if you are not connecting with someone you maybe aren't trying enough because it is totally possible. What exactly can't you talk about remotely that you can in person? I've yet to find a topic myself

I said many, not all.

> I also am part of a telegram group with ~10 old college buddies who live all over the country where we chat everyday and hop on voice to play video games or a monthly poker. I haven't lost touch with any of them or felt less connected/meaningful because we are now remote only.

If you all lived next door to each other, would you still do it over telegram voice? If not, why not if you can connect the same over voice chat?

My view is that something is lost on voice chat compared to being in the same room. I am part of a 10-year WhatsApp group with my university buddies too - but we were bonded with real-life interactions and experiences while being together at university. If those in-person, real-life interactions were replaced by a slack group with other people on my course, we wouldn't have built the same relationship.

It is different. Yes, there are some colleagues with whom I have regular online contact, some of them I really only got into contact with during the pandemic. We have regular calls and exchanges. But I also have a lot of colleagues, which I don't have close contact with and contact to those has mostly evaporated during the pandemic. That are those people, I might talk to when meeting them in the coffee room, but really no reason to call outside of that or vice versa.

Speaking of coffee rooms, they have another important property: it is very nice, even healthy, to leave your desk from time to time and both take a break for your mind and your body from work. In the office you walk to the coffee room in that time and there you meet people in the same phase. They are taking a break and you don't interrupt each others work when having a chat. In a sense, online social contact can be very disruptive, as when you start an online interaction, you don't know whether your recipient is willing for an interrupition or not. Of course, there are ways to arrange that too, but things aren't just black and white and interactions are complex.

> In the office you walk to the coffee room in that time and there you meet people in the same phase. They are taking a break and you don't interrupt each others work when having a chat.

Except those whose assigned desks happen to be close to the coffee room/kitchen. That's the problem with the way offices have been designed - there is always going to be some subset that has less than ideal conditions.

The worst open office setup I saw a year before the pandemic had a conference room with no door, just a big pane of glass and a gap in the glass to enter. There were desks outside this conference room (like everywhere else on the floor) which meant whoever had to sit there was subjected to meetings and speakerphone all day long.

Where I work, the coffee room is pretty isolated. My office is actually the closest one, but I can close the door. When I am talking about the advantages of offices, I am thinking of good offices. No doubt that bad offices are almost always worse than working from home. Unfortunately, many companies have no idea (at least their upper management), about what makes a "good office". Otherwise the nonsense of "open space" would have stopped long ago.

> Unfortunately, many companies have no idea (at least their upper management), about what makes a "good office".

Lol. Of course they know what makes a good office. The execs all have nice offices.

Our minds and bodies are made for "real-reality" and not for "virtual-reality". That is one of the reasons why you cannot turn a webcam on a beach and say you are on holidays on the Caribe. Even if you heard all the sounds and try to relax, is not the same.

Work and leisure are very different. When relaxing between work sessions I'd usually rather read IRL with my 4yo than chat IRL with same coworkers I've already spent the morning with.

While working I prefer control over interruptions and means of communication. And there are no emergencies in my line of work that require physical interruption.

Here's an even more radical thought. Hear me out: different people have different preferences. Forcing either way-of-working will be received with discontent by people who have different preferences.

I agree with both of these hot takes…

I love a hybrid approach because I really enjoy the random conversations that crop up in the office… but my social life is so much improved outside of work in the last year or so that everything about physically being present feels tedious.

I have a coworker I call to talk shop for a few minutes and then bullshit for another 15-20 minutes almost daily when I’m wfh.

I’m very strongly considering asking my boss if my in-office/wfh ratio can switch from 3/2 to “whatever I want”

Better social life makes work feel like work. My drive to get stuff done has gone up, because I’ve gotta get out at a good time.

The problem with the hybrid approach is that I’d still have to live in the area. However I want to be geographically independent from my employer and prefer a quiet, low cost of living area as my home.

Yeah, in that case solely remote works best for sure. Maybe you fly to the office (if there is one) a couple times a year… though still nice for that to be optional

I agree. I think the hybrid approach is the best. It lets both sides (for the most part) have their cake and eat it too.

"(...) struggle to form meaningful friendships/relationships with colleagues."

Whenever you're forced to do something, yes you will struggle. My colleagues are my colleagues. And if I like someone, I will bond with them and it might become a friendship regardless of whether i see them in person or not.

Still, I'm at work to work, not to make meaningful bonds. Using the word 'meaningful' in a work context makes the word almost lose its meaning and make it seem banal. Meaningful bonds happen by chance, and most people we come across with, we don't make meaningful bonds with anyway. And whether we want it or not, work environment is not the same as hobby or home or relaxation.

I have good friends, who i have meaningful bonds with, and I'm happy with that. At work, i'm getting paid to do a job, not to form meaningful bonds with people. I don't need those, because I have those already.

Maybe you enjoy interactions with colleagues, who don't enjoy interactions with you because they'd rather be home where they don't have to talk with someone they don't have or want a meaningful bond with.

And for the last point of "Sure, it might be technically more productive (...)". Companies try to make us believe it is less productive to WFH all the time. Remove that point, and there's nothing more on the table to want people at the office, than the fact that some need social interaction and to form meaningful bonds at work.

A few days/week of working at the office for people who want meaningful bond making could be arranged, and you all could connect with each other, sing kumbaya together, and make life long friendships then. Just don't force others to do the same.

Warning: Hot Take.

Not all jobs require you to form meaningful relationships with colleagues and those relationships can be kept at a distance.

I'd hate to have "friends" on the workplace.

Humans are complex.

I have met people who seem to have terrible marriages and seem to spend as much time away from home as possible due to that situation. I have also met people that enjoy working on group projects and enjoy building relationships through that process.

I've worked from home for most of the past 17 years and would never go back to 100%, but I also miss making friendships at times.

The best friendships I've made in adulthood are mostly ex-coworkers.

Why? You'll spend a huge time of your life working, why is it not worth it to build relationships? You don't have to meet them in your free time to consider them friends.

In the US you may have to change jobs frequently or accept pitiful raises. If your healthcare and social circle become too tied to one employer then leaving or being fired could be a huge change.

Building a professional network is important, and some bonding is natural, so I don't mean to discourage them. Though I do prefer seeking most social fulfillment through other means.

I agree, but I'm not saying anyone should only have friends where they work, but rather that you can have both.

I don't live in the US, and almost all of my friends I meet on my free time are not through work, but I do have colleagues who I consider friends and it makes work a lot more enjoyable. That being said, there's only very few of them who I would be likely to keep in touch with if they or I quit.

This is unquestionably false for everyone I know including myself.

1. Many people already have built good relationships with their colleagues prior to WFH and talking to them over GVC helps the relationship. You are allowed to open up more when you know no one else is around except you and the person you're talking to 1:1. You don't have to be afraid that someone outside the meeting room or cubicle is going to hear you. A lot of the day-to-day frictions are also removed from the equation. Being completely honest, things like appearance, odor, height differences, physical presence, status symbols (watches, car keys, wallet, phones) all cause insecurities in a competitive office space. I find that in a remote work setting, you can focus more on the person as an individual.

2. Working remotely offers the flexibility to work from a location that better suits your social preferences. A LOT of my friends and myself were completely and utterly miserable socially working in the Bay Area. As soon as we had the option, we moved out and have built thriving social circles. It is not always the person's fault if they struggle to form meaningful friendships. It can also be the environment and whether it is a good fit. This eases social insecurity and allows colleagues to connect more authentically.

3. Working remotely offers the flexibility to detach from work and go do other things (if you don't have meetings etc.). This allows you to interact with people outside the office more and develop more meaningful relationships over time.

Remote work isn't about being locked up in a room and only communicating through a webcam. It is primarily about removing the unnecessary overhead that we previously thought was a prerequisite of work (e.g. commuting, "fake work", watercooler conversations, stressful and contrived socializing events at work, open office plans, can't work on other things during unnecessary meetings, running into people you don't like or who distract you, sexual tension with workers of the opposite sex, being exposed to people's bad moods, dirty public restrooms, walking to meeting rooms across the building, working from a cramped cubicle with smelly people, who can type louder and faster competitions, etc. etc. etc.)

I think your post paints a false dichotomy. It's not always a choice between working from home and commuting huge distances to an office in a city you hate.

I live 10 minutes from the office and live in a town I love. This isn't luck - it's a choice I have made.

Also, please don't take this the wrong way, but some of your comments make it sound like you might be in the category of people who don't find it as easy as others to form relationships with colleagues in real life (Comments such as finding socialising events at work stressful, and about experiencing sexual tension if there is a worker of the opposite sex).

It's naive and a function of serious privilege to posit that your home and job location are generally just a choice you can simply make. If you want a nice environment and a short commute, that substantially limits your opportunities. If you have a family or other ties with their own geographic restrictions, vastly more so. You absolutely were lucky to find something you liked. Saying otherwise is a textbook example of being born on third base and thinking you hit a triple.

> You absolutely were lucky to find something you liked. Saying otherwise is a textbook example of being born on third base and thinking you hit a triple.

Well I don't think I was lucky actually - I sacrificed for it. I could be based in London and have a better salary and different opportunities.

I'm privileged in that I have skills that are in demand in several cities/towns and no dependents, but I suspect lots of people are in that place on this website, and these things are choices. Not everyone has to choose to take the biggest salary with the biggest companies somewhere they hate.

If you are a programmer in the UK for instance, the best programming jobs with the highest salaries are in London, but there are plenty of opportunities in Leeds, Manchester, Sutton Colefield, Edinburgh, Bristol, Brighton, York, Oxford, Bath... All places which are lovely to live in and will give you jobs within 10 minutes if you choose to have that life.

Maybe not simply. But a hard choice is still a choice.

> I live 10 minutes from the office and live in a town I love. This isn't luck - it's a choice I have made.

95% of people don't get that choice.

What junior engineer is going to turn down an offer from Google because the Mountain View area is a wildly expensive dump?

> 95% of people don't get that choice.

> What junior engineer is going to turn down an offer from Google because the Mountain View area is a wildly expensive dump?

Well in my view that actually is a choice.

They are making a choice between commuting lots and living somewhere they don’t want to in exchange for career advancement / to work for Google.

That’s not to say that they might not be happier with alternative decisions. Or maybe they decide to suck it up for a while and move where they want later down the line? But these are all choices.

Perhaps 95% of people truly don't get that choice, but your hypothetical junior engineer certainly does, at least given the current market for developers. Unless you consider "taking the highest paying job above anything else" to be an irrepressible force.

> I think your post paints a false dichotomy

Nope. Never said it is "always a choice between working from home and commuting huge distances to an office in a city you hate".

It is a counterpoint to the original comment that hypothesizes that most people who enjoy working from home do so due to some social deficit.

> people who don't find it as easy as others to form relationships with colleagues in real life

If you read my comment carefully you would notice that I mentioned I already have great relationships with my colleagues that have persisted through remote work. So not sure where that inference is coming from.

Second, I am not going to take it the wrong way, but your comment makes it seem like you have some insight into a complete stranger's life without any information to go off of. I would probably not be so overconfident in making such statements about someone else's life.

Putting that aside, your reasoning seems incomplete. Why does finding socializing events at work stressful imply someone doesn't find it easy to form relationships with colleagues in real life? Surely it depends on how the colleagues behave in those settings and the nature of those events does it not?

For example, grabbing lunch with a coworker is very different from contrived board game events where everyone is trying to compete for who the smartest person is and people make awkward comments linking their board game talents to their work competence.

> experiencing sexual tension if there is a worker of the opposite sex

I don't feel the need to debate this point at all. If you are a human with a healthy mental and hormonal profile and are around someone you find attractive, you will inevitably find yourself in a situation where you need to suppress certain feelings that may be sexual in nature in order to work with them. It can be done and is usually done without a second thought, but it takes effort and is a lot easier to do over video conferencing. It is human to have certain impulses, be it sexual, status oriented or fight/flight related when you're physically surrounded by people. They need to be dealt with effectively in order to be productive and even keeled.

> Second, I am not going to take it the wrong way, but your comment makes it seem like you have some insight into a complete stranger's life without any information to go off of.

I mean it was just a hunch, but looking at your comment history definitely implies it too.

For instance, while your response states that you are comfortable getting lunch your post history says this:

> Feel like a social failure during lunch and forced to sit passively as a couple douchebag workers on adderall dominate the conversation? [I] Feel like a bitch for a few hours.

Which implies the opposite.

> Attractive coworker or someone I want to impress within sight? I can’t concentrate on actual productivity and try to overcompensate by typing more and acting zoned in.

> I find that I get more emotionally jerked around working in person and can insulate myself from it working from home.

I mean all this seems to follow the same idea. It’s totally cool, each to their own and it’s fine, but to me this matches the trend that some people working from home don’t seem to have the same ease at forming relationships in work in real life.

> Which implies the opposite.

You have no way of determining that unless you're in the same environment. For someone who's usually successful socially, it is an utter shame to have to sit through the lunch and be forced to listen to a couple of idiots hopped who can't shut up. Would you want to be in that situation?

The other two comments have no bearing whatsoever on your point. The first one describes what it is like to be distracted. Replace attractive coworker with anything else.

The second one is a natural response to the frictions present in real life.

Sounds like you're desperately trying to cast someone into a role so that you can feel better about yourself. You sound like you might have social deficits you're trying to overcome yourself based on your comments that show a lack of understanding of what socializing at work feels like for a lot of people.

> [...] based on your comments you show a lack of understanding of what socializing at work feels like for a lot of people.

So you agree that socialising at work is more difficult for some people than others...

And you agree that it's one of the reasons you work from home...

And the part of my premise that you were disagreeing with was that I said some people work from home because they struggle to create relationships while at work...

But you have stated is true for you when working in an office environment...

So... It sounds like you at least partially agree? Or is there something I am missing?

> So you agree that socialising at work is more difficult for some people than others...

That statement paints an incomplete picture of my views. It is the combination of the person and environment. I'm sure there is variance among peoples' inherent ability to socialize at work, but in certain work environments, people who are otherwise good at socializing don't have the desire to socialize or don't find it meaningful.

> And you agree that it's one of the reasons you work from home...

Nope, I have no problem socializing at my current job. Most of my comments are about prior workplaces. I mention them because I can empathize with a lot of people who might be working in such environments. Like I mentioned, I can and do socialize with my current colleagues well remotely, which I consider to be "socializing at work" too.

> And the part of my premise that you were disagreeing with was that I said some people work from home because they struggle to create relationships while at work...

Nope, I never disagreed with that. I disagree with your characterization that that is the reason I work from home.

I would summarize your comment as “just give me the money and don’t bother me.” Easy to say that when stronger people than you have put up just with the things that your delicate character is unwilling to put up with, to build great thriving businesses and afford people like you the luxury of WFH. I say ‘grow up’! Face those aspect of the office work that brother you. Became a stronger person. Be more courageous. Our society does not need more incels working from home because ‘they don’t like the person sitting next to them’. Don’t be a leech on society. Get out and contribute.

This is me. Doesn’t help that I’ve been the youngest person on every team I’ve worked on, usually by at least a decade. I’m polite and friendly with my coworkers, but I’ve never felt enough of a connection with any of them to want to continue the relationship outside of work.

I prefer working from home for other reasons as well, but certainly avoiding the annoyance of coworkers I don’t like all that much is part of it.

> This is me. Doesn’t help that I’ve been the youngest person on every team I’ve worked on, usually by at least a decade.

This tends to be me both at work and basically in every social setting. I’ve also never really formed more than a highly casual acquaintanceship at work with usually doesn’t follow a job hop.

I prefer remote now. It lets me squeeze in a little more sleep that would otherwise be used to get ready and go to an office where I’d have to sit in the morning and listen to people around me ramble on and I just gets tiring.

At home I control everything about comfort the setting and I’m not losing much I’d gain in-office.

I still go in to my office occasionally. Every time I do I get very little actual work done. I chat for hours with my colleagues, we play board games over lunch, and we generally just show each other our side projects and discuss pain-points about our work

This is great one day every couple of weeks, but I get way more done at home and in far less time. So that I have more than enough left over to exercise and appreciate my day

My experience with programming is that if it's not happening, staring at a screen in an office won't make it happen faster. Stepping outside to go for a run, enjoying nature for a bit, picking up my kids up early so I can spend time with them (and then working at night when they're back to sleep) feels far less wasteful of the time I have on this Earth than commuting to a building where I am essentially stuck for eight hours before I can do anything else

> I genuinely believe many people who prefer working at home rather than an office have unfulfilling work lives and struggle to form meaningful friendships/relationships with colleagues.

I infinitely prefer working at home because I hate commuting, I particularly hate open-plan offices which is all they offer us, and I like quiet when I write code.

Right now my two coworkers - both remote, one in Indonesia, I have never met either of them in person - are amongst my closest friends, but often this is not the case. I nearly always like my coworkers, but outside the work, what do we necessarily have in common? Are they going to go to noise music concerts or vegan restaurants with me?

You can learn to maintain friendships without being in the same room, and mitigate some considerable portion of your footprint on this Earth by giving up commuting.

We have a mandatory in office policy. We communicate through slack while inside the office.

Huh?

Saw this at a hybrid company. Chat wasn't required over Slack. Though if it was a work topic requiring a remote coworker (like myself) then sometimes they'd use a conference room and call to bring in remote folks, or everyone would go back to desks for the call.

Occasional all hands conferences provided some IRL a few times a year. IME these weren't strictly necessary yet did provide a chance to bond with the people on the other side of the glass.

Career wise I do think that fully remote can be a boon to shorter and less attractive coworkers, since it reduces or eliminates some of the tall+beautiful biases.

>I have similar logic, but reach an almost opposite conclusion. I genuinely believe many people who prefer working at home rather than an office have unfulfilling work lives and struggle to form meaningful friendships/relationships with colleagues.

People who fill a void through work are the unhappy ones. Even when I was in the office I made meaningful connections with Indian coworkers who I never met but spoke to almost daily for years.

Instead of talking to coworkers I get to see my 2 young kids grow up.

> I have similar logic, but reach an almost opposite conclusion. I genuinely believe many people who prefer working at home rather than an office have unfulfilling work lives and struggle to form meaningful friendships/relationships with colleagues.

This take makes no sense at all.

If people had unfulfilling work lives they would not be threatening resignation to preserve the work life they loathe, and they would definitely not wait out for diktats to return to the office to switch jobs, specially in a supply-driven market which is today's job market.

More importantly, if people had a hard time forming meaningful friendships at the office then they would not stay remote, where it's easier to get ignored, nor would they stick around a toxic corporate environment that makes it difficult to be integrated and feel welcomed.

> I genuinely enjoy interactions with my colleagues during a work day, and wouldn't want to replace that with staring at a screen for 7.5 hours of my day or only talking to them via Slack. I have a great social group outside of work, but that doesn't diminish the value of enjoying the company of people I work with too.

Your personal anecdote is great, but ignores the fact that even in the office the majority of us are paid to stare at screens for over 7.5 hours a day, and are criticized if you spend even 0.5 of that time doing anything other than staring at the screen.

The foosball table recruiters are always boasting about is just for show, and is always unused.

> Sure, it might technically be more productive if I just locked myself in a room and worked intensely on my own for my whole career and only communicated through a webcam, but that doesn't seem particularly enjoyable to me personally.

That's precisely the point that the OP stated: people who prefer working in an office tend to have unfulfilling social lives or bad home lives.

They need the office because it's their way to fill the void in their lives and escape their personal problems.

In the office they surround themselves with people who, for the sake of keeping things professional, have no alternative to exchange pleasantries and treat them cordially, something they don't get anywhere else. Thus they waste hours per day commuting just to have a shot at those irrelevant social interactions they fail to get anywhere else.

In contrast, those who prefer to work from home do have far better and more fulfilling things to do at home. They don't need to waste precious personal time commuting, and instead spend it in more meaningful ways.

More importantly, let's not forget the age old trope of retirees finding themselves in the pit of despair because by losing their job they lost their life and reason to live.

Why does having a fulfilling social life mean I can’t have a fulfilling work life too?

Everything is predicated on it being an either/or, but I feel lucky enough to have great relationships both in and out of work.

> Why does having a fulfilling social life mean I can’t have a fulfilling work life too?

Those who already have fulfilling social lives don't point out their shot at having a fulfilling work life as their justification to return to the office.

Also, that chance of using work as a way to fill in the void in their personal life comes at a steep expense: hours of their personal life wasted in long commutes, and constraining their choice of places to live as a tradeoff between how far they live from the office and how much they are willing to spend for a home.

> Everything is predicated on it being an either/or, but I feel lucky enough to have great relationships both in and out of work.

It is an either/or. The time, money, and energy you're forced to waste every single day just to commute to work is ripped out of your personal time.

The two hours you spend in traffic every single day are two hours you don't get to spend with your family/friends. Either you spend those hours playing with your son/daughter, or driving from the office.

How exactly is this not an either/or scenario?

Found the climber

From your response I would guess that you don’t have kids or dogs, would I be correct?

Alternatively, some of us (well, me at least) view "in the office" work as a way to help achieve work/personal-life separation.

Saying this after many, many years of remote working, where the boundaries between work and personal life blurred so far they became practically indistinguishable. (yay 24/7 "DevOps" culture :/)

I close my work laptop and that’s it for the day. Simple.

Exactly. I even use the same monitor and everything, but when I'm done for the day, the laptop goes in the drawer and whoever wants something from me will have to wait for the next business day.

I find the same kind of creep can happen at the office, too. Many colleagues end up leaving at 8 PM or later [0] because they have to do this one more thing or someone shows up with just a quick question to ask.

However, I realize that for some people, who have a harder time saying no for whatever reason, it's easier to have a hard, external excuse. "Sorry, I need to catch my train, so I don't have to sleep here" works less well when you're already home. But I think that in both cases it's very important to set boundaries and stick to them.

---

[0] Our workdays are normally 9 AM to 6 PM.

Seriously! Why do people think that working remotely entitles their boss to 24/7 access? Come on, set some boundaries!

They make the mistake of installing Slack on their phone.

I wonder how many fully grown adult humans are walking around not knowing that they can silence push notifications of any and all types from any and all applications they wish. Their phones must be Hell on earth.

Remote work != Work from home

And you can't achieve that with a co-working place? That's what I do. But I get to live in any city or country I want while earning the salary of any city/country I want.

Sure, co-working places can achieve that too. But if you're living in the same city as a company office, then might as well use that. :)

I've found that co-working even then is beneficial. There's usually a co-working closer to me than the office, so less commute, not to mention I don't like working in a place where a manager oversees everything I do, every break I take, etc. What if I get my required work done in half the time of my peers and then just chill around the office? That might be a problem in the office, not a problem in a co-working. I like some autonomy.

a co-working is simply an office paid by you instead of the one the company paid for you.

Actually in most cases the company pays for your co-working. At least that's my experience working for fully-remote or mostly-fully-remote companies.

Sorry for being so late to answer.

That's still an office paid by your company, with all the benefits that go to the company.

The company I work for before opening a new office for their employer has to provide:

- security

- daily cleanings

- insurances for all the people working there

- reception

- authentication and authorization (badge readers etc.)

- secure connectivity and storage

- water, beverages, sometimes a cantine if the office is big enough.

That's by contract (at least my contract).

If they are really going through the route of paying for your coworking they should sign a contract, which means a lot of bureaucracy and most of all it would force the employer to always use the same space for at least a few years.

So the better way is to ask for a pay rise to pay it by yourself.

If you can pull it out.

You've skipped over an important group of people here: in any healthy workplace, new starters, graduates and other junior developers benefit massively from being in the same office as their more senior colleagues. The amount they learn from accumulated small interactions that would not happen in remote working cannot be overstated.

What exactly do you learn from your coworkers? It isn't like you are pair programming constantly with senior devs all the time.

I've learnt way more reading papers and documentation than being in the same physical space as more senior colleagues. People sometimes bring this point up re: onboarding but I don't quite understand what people learn that they can't do otherwise remotely.

Different people absorb knowledge in different ways. Just because you learned the most by reading articles doesn't mean that is true for everyone.

I believe there is value in newcomers/junior devs begin in close proximity with their more experienced coworkers because this greatly improves the chance to talk about important work-related topics. Many times in my live I have started a casual conversation with someone at work and this lead to discussion about current work-related software topics and I was able to share some opinions with someone.

These things happen much more rarely when they are scheduled slack calls, and people seldomly just slack to talk about random things.

> Different people absorb knowledge in different ways. Just because you learned the most by reading articles doesn't mean that is true for everyone.

...and that's precisely the reason I asked the question

> Many times in my live I have started a casual conversation with someone at work and this lead to discussion about current work-related software topics and I was able to share some opinions with someone.

This sounds like general information sharing amongst coworkers. The way you phrased the comment made it seem like there was something specific you were referring to pertaining to newcomers/junior devs.

I agree with your point that you have less airtime to share your general thoughts about interesting things in a remote setting. I do agree with your general point and have experienced that too. Just observing more certain people equivocate about a topic is inspiring and that helps to learn more.

For me, it's lunch breaks and coffee machine chit-chat. Just by talking to your colleagues daily and meeting people you'd usually never work with you get a lot of knowledge transfer - they talk about problems they need to solve, interesting challenges or just hobbies. You can also do after hour events on Zoom, but it's just not the same relaxed atmosphere as in the office and it nearly never happens randomly.

Agreed, it is great when it works. I don't miss it though, many times in the past, it has been some "senior" dev high on his own stimulant supply dominating the conversation for the entire lunch, not letting anyone else get a word in edgewise. Either that, or it is the same 3 people talking about things that interest them, completely ignoring the rest of the people while the others just eat their lunch and observe.

More chance to chat about random things or casually ask work-related questions.

> I've learnt way more reading papers and documentation than being in the same physical space as more senior colleagues. People sometimes bring this point up re: onboarding but I don't quite understand what people learn that they can't do otherwise remotely

It is much harder to gain tacit knowledge (The important stuff) when you're remote. I read a lot, and it's no match for picking a skilled person's brain for even just 30min-1hr.

I've found I generally have to explicitly ask if I want someone to explain what they're doing and why. There is very little 1:1 teaching/mentoring. In an office I think there is more informal mentoring.

> I've found I generally have to explicitly ask if I want someone to explain what they're doing and why. There is very little 1:1 teaching/mentoring. In an office I think there is more informal mentoring.

Asking people questions and engaging in 1-1 conversations is no more difficult over Slack + voice + screen share than in person. In fact it gives you more options for how to conduct the conversation and remember the results.

It's really not hard, and some people are great at it. The problem is that people sleepwalk through their remote experience and don't spend any time thinking about how to make the small changes needed to fill the needs that in-office used to fill. For some reason, it only occurs to them to seek out information if they can walk to a person in a room rather than type in a box.

I constantly observe people excitedly blabbing in person, seemingly reaching all sorts of epiphanies, but at the end of the day, the conversation lacked specificity and no one really learned anything. It's a perfect medium for feeling like you learned something without actually doing so.

Figuring out how to make remote work produces better results when the team is willing to do it. It enhances all work, including in-person work, and there are lots of resources by now for how to do it well. But if the team is unwilling to do it, no surprise that remote doesn't work for them. They chose to make in-office the only possible way to work.

It's not an inherent thing to the environments, but a choice that particular team made.

There is a massive difference between Slack and in-person. In-person there is often a casualness that doesn't exist over Slack. It's hard to have a serendipitous conversation over Slack vs in-person. This is what I meant by "I think there is more informal mentoring [in an office]".

> I constantly observe people excitedly blabbing in person, seemingly reaching all sorts of epiphanies, but at the end of the day, the conversation lacked specificity and no one really learned anything. It's a perfect medium for feeling like you learned something without actually doing so

Generally I would much prefer feeling like I've intuited something rather than coming away with specific knowledge because specific knowledge is usually easy to find elsewhere.

> It's not an inherent thing to the environments, but a choice that particular team made

I believe it is inherent to a remote environment. I also believe it can be overcome, but it's not the path of least resistance.

> It is much harder to gain tacit knowledge (The important stuff) when you're remote. I read a lot, and it's no match for picking a skilled person's brain for even just 30min-1hr.

I have the exact opposite experience. During discussions, people are less informed with facts and speak conceptually. In a book or documentation, there's both. Thus is easier to get more reliable information. It is easier to follow logical chains constructed people but the constituents of said chain could potentially be fraught with approximations, thus obfuscating the entire story.

I've discussed topics with really smart people (experts in their field) for hours with many potential ideas but no conclusion. But I only had to read documentation/code for 30min to understand exactly what the real gist of the field was about.

By definition, tacit knowledge is hard to codify. If you're reading facts or documentation it's definitely not tacit knowledge.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tacit_knowledge

> It is easier to follow logical chains constructed people but the constituents of said chain could potentially be fraught with approximations, thus obfuscating the entire story.

It's not possible to logically explain everything. Intuition is very important. Hence, the value of tacit knowledge.

I would generally much rather hear an expert talk conceptually and about their intuition than them give me a lecture on logic and facts. It's impossible to glean some things through pure logic.

For example, what is clean code?

It's not about the office, it's about the commuting, which can often increase the length of the working day by 25% or more, and can add a thoroughly miserable start and end to that day (stuck in traffic, or on delayed/overcrowded trains), and make life seem much worse even if you're doing enjoyable work with great people in a really nice office.

Offices have their pros and cons (WFH can be a horribly lonely experience for anyone who lives alone, for example). But it's removing the commuting that makes WFH such a massive win for most people. And a big win for the environment (which should be reason enough to try and keep it going)

I just went back to the office and commute is one of the reason. The walk or bike ride is what I have been missing the last months. Of course that means you need to work and life in some city that doesn't force you to have a long train ride or even worse take a car.

Commuting is not the only part of work life that has an impact on the environment. It is dramatically less efficient to heat/cool thousands of separate homes throughout the day as opposed to one large office building. Remote work could actually be much worse for the environment.

Exactly this for me. I actually think an office environment is much better for many (if not most) aspects, but it’s difficult to argue with eliminating 1-2 hours of daily commute.

For me it’s both. I love having control over my work environment and equipment.

> I genuinely believe many people who prefer working in an office versus at home have unfulfilling social lives or bad home lives. The social dynamics, competition, in physical offices fills the void in their lives.

You're implying that this is a bad thing and I don't get why it should be.

No. I do not think he's implying it is a bad thing by itself. Instead he explicitly says that those are the people who try to solve their problems at expense of others.

The expense of others is a point that works both ways. You could equally say that someone who insists on being remote because it's better for their family life is preventing/slowing down the return to office, and that's at the expense of people who prefer to be in the office.

But I wouldn't put it that way because I don't think it makes for a productive conversation - office or remote, people like what they like and they have their reasons for it.

These are not morally equivalent. The office-worker wants others to modify everyone's behaviour to support them, whereas the remote worker just wants to control their own behaviour. The remote worker is completely ambivalent to where others want to work.

I'm not buying this.

- In a big team if everyone is in-office and 1 person is remote, that person certainly cares about being the only remote person. Maybe some people would be okay with it, but being the only remote person has been known to be a not-so-great working arrangement even before the pandemic. So you can't say that remote people don't care where others work.

- If enough people choose remote, they're forcing everyone else to be remote too (whether they attend the office or not) because the communication model for the whole team has to be different now. <<< This is remote people modifying everyone else's behaviour to support them.

It's entirely possible that at least some of those who prefer to work at the office are equally ambivalent about what others what to do.

disclaimer: I have worked from home most of my life, so I'm not against it, BUT, people like what they like and they have their reasons for it is a very immature thing to say when talking about work: work means taking full responsibility to respect a contract in return of an economic compensation.

If you signed to work in an office and don't like it, resign.

Nobody will cry over it, just know that you signed for something you did not like. Your fault.

Also: people working from remote do that at the expenses of others too. When I am at the office to talk with my colleagues, the one person refusing to come over forces all of us (10 or so) to turn on the video conference in some meeting room, while we could have had the same chat in the garden of the bar down the office.

It doesn’t really work both ways though. Remote fans don’t force everyone to be remote.

They do. They might be able to say that they don't care where their coworkers are (and I believe them), but when enough people are remote, their colleagues are forced into a remote working model too because the team needs to communicate in a different way now.

How people work is a mutual agreement, not something that's being done to one group by another.

Remote fans force everyone to use tools to accommodate their remoteness.

We used to have a stand-up meeting each morning at a time "when everyopne's arrived" and we used to have a whiteboard on the wall with the most current tasks. None of this can work with even one remote worker, so it's gone to scheduled Zooms, online task managers, and endless Slack messages.

In exchange, now you have proper record of everything said and done.

I love the fact that I can always go back to Slack and say “See? This is what we agreed upon”, instead of having to recall the specifics of a meeting where notes weren’t taken in detail.

I don’t find any difference in the record-keeping of remote vs. in person meetings. The record button is available to both, but the resulting video files just as unwieldy, and Zoom’s transcripts are garbage.

Nor do I see any increased willingness to hash out complex issues in writing. The moment things get even slightly complex in a thread, it’s “let’s hop on a call.”

So you like the written “proof” so you can face off your colleagues in case of disagreement? You seem to have negative feelings about your work environment. You should consider changing jobs.

No, I want processes, agreements, and ideas, documented. Slack, Zoom and other tools make this easier.

As someone who had to train many junior employees, having a record trail is the best answer to the question “why the hell did we do this in the first place?”.

Much is still being said in person or calls, because talking is much more efficient than writing, so ... no, we don't "have proper record of everything said and done."

Yet we should.

Whether we should have that record or not is completely orthogonal to the conversation about how remote workers force (or not) the others to behave in a certain way to accommodate the remoteness of these workers.

Office fans aren't a homogeneous whole.

Perhaps it's likely at least some managers want more people to come to the office.

It's also likely that some people who aren't managers, regular employees, just prefer the office.

it forces others to "follow their dream" for the sole satisfaction of remote workers.

> You're implying that this is a bad thing and I don't get why it should be.

The quote points at “social dynamics” and “competition” in offices, not personal relationships or even friendships. Meaning that the mere fact of being surrounded by people with relatively the same professional goals, is good enough for some craving for social interaction. There isn’t necessarily any more depth to it, and it doesn’t really solve any other pending socialising issues.

How is that not a bad thing?

I think his point is that the solution to the problem is not to go back to the office, but to try develop a better social life outside of work.

It's the "root cause" fix.

That argument only works if you make the value judgment that socializing outside the office is better or of higher quality somehow.

Come on of course it is.

Offices have hierarchy, promotions, payscales, politics. Socializing in the office is a PC minefield.

My current direct manager is about my age, with kids about my kids age, he is an overall great guy. If we weren't working together I am sure we would have beers together, but in the current context I would hate to blur the work/leisure line.

I have to agree with you. It's not necessarily a bad thing. Where people get their fulfillment from is their own business, and if their needs are met -- all the better. Everyone deserves contentment and fulfillment.

But, don't force me to make my life worse for that reason. You like the office? Go to the office.

My life is much worse for having 30+ Zoom meetings per week instead of the 1-2 it was before. Design discussions and collaborative problem solving are activities I used to find satisfying & be pretty efficient at. On Zoom I find them excruciating, draining, and very slow - requiring more hours for the same output, compounding the pain of sitting on Zoom, and sapping my own focus time.

Part of the job is to knock out tickets but part of the job (particularly when senior) is to help coworkers. If we lived in a fully transactional gig-worker kind of model then I would bill you 10x as much to get involved in your problem over Zoom. We don't, so that's impossible. And I realize this is silly on the grand scale of labor exploitation but I feel like by expecting me to treat remote workers the same as in-office workers, management is extracting a lot more value from me than was our deal pre-pandemic.

I get very little utility from the "flexibility" (always prioritized living close to the office, prefer the change of scenery) but a lot of disutility from remote collaboration.

I was much better off when I was among a small group of people free to go or not go to the office.

Now that everyone wants to do that, without the knowledge or the experience to do it, but only because they want to work in their pajamas (let's be honest!) I am forced to go through endless meetings where the first half is about "can you hear me?" "can you see me?" "where is X?" "coming, is in another meeting" "OK let's wait another 5 minutes then" and then half of them has an horrible voice quality, worse video, you have to repeat the same things over and over for the benefit of those not listening (let's be honest!) etc etc

it's exhausting and the fact that we aren't physically in the same room make people think two hours meetings are something normal

It's making me frankly think that all of this "freedom to work everywhere" trope has gone too far.

For devs, it's hard to debate this point. It's even hard to explain to others what the value of the flow state is, where you're just one with the code and you feel like you're making progress. You really need to not be interrupted, and you need comforts like your own chair, food, and clothes. I'm mostly coding these days so 100% WFH suits me just fine.

Yesterday I talked to some people I used to face, ie they were taking the phone at another business years ago when I was trading with them. They are all against working from home, having continued to go to the office during the lockdowns.

The point they made was that some things really benefit from being interruptible. Some things even benefit from not being recorded. Immediacy really matters for certain things like gauging who you should approach with some deal.

What also matters is being able to weigh the mood. A lot of what we call political decisions depend on this kind of weighing of what the team wants to do, and is hard through zoom.

Finally there's the problem of juniors. In finance you'd learn stuff when there was a quiet moment and someone more experienced seemed like they had a second to explain something to you. Unscheduled but valuable training.

These folks basically took the opposite view of what you seem to have, and decided that people who like WFH are basically not productive and are just phoning it in, knowing that it has gotten harder to hire people willing to be in the office all day. It's kinda interesting the take that people on opposite ends of the spectrum have of each others motivations.

I’m not sure what you’re trying to imply with the first paragraph, but let me tell you how it sounds to me:

“Hot take: people who have a different work style preference than me are inferior and damaged, and/or have motives which I despise or work a job I think is useless.”

Rethink this. These are your colleagues. Compassion for people who are different from you improves your own humanity and makes working with you more enjoyable.

> I genuinely believe many people who prefer working in an office versus at home have unfulfilling social lives or bad home lives.

Feels like you are mixing a lot of stuff together. My desire to interact with my collegues about our field of work has nothing to do with my social live outside of work.

It's not like I'm going to talk about new C# 11 features during our Sunday barbecue or at soccer practise. Of course I can go to a meetup or invite friends from tech to a pub, but that's not gonna replace 40 hours a week of "random interaction" with my colleagues. Maybe I'm just lucky and have great colleagues that are fun to interact with? Hard to say ...

I definitely fall into this camp. I’m introverted, so the forced social interaction at work was perfect for me and sufficient to keep me socially gratified. I’ve tried to make up for it in the pandemic by being more socially active but it hasn’t been working. I’ll definitely be looking for an in-office position soon since some companies are returning. I think my mental health will greatly recover.

have you tried looking for a co-working space? i've known freelancers who pooled together for a shared studio space for similar reasons.

I’ve tried it out, it’s not the same but it helps a bit. I appreciate the suggestion!

Forcing yourself to get your social interaction requirements met at work isn't ideal.

It is like trying to get your protein requirements met from potatoes. Yes, you can if you force yourself and try really hard. However, it is much more efficient and pain-free to get it from a protein shake.

In this context, it means using the time you save with working from home and using it to meet people interested in the things you care about.

I don’t see what’s so bad about it. Half of my waking hours are spent working, a lot of the other half are spent eating, working out, and relaxing. Am I supposed to spend an hour a day hanging out with people after work? Not only does that sound exhausting, it doesn’t seem like enough if that’s my main social interaction. At work, there is a shared goal and a community that I can be a part of, and it’s there for me for most of my waking hours during the week.

Find hobbies other than working. You can use the weekend to do that.

The reason socializing at work sucks is because it is not a very natural environment to make friends. Alliances, yes but friends are harder. Even if you make genuine friends with someone there, if you're working with them directly, their career will take precedence over you. Most people are skeptical of their coworkers and it is a constant power dynamic to prove one's competence and status.

Much easier to find true friends outside of work.

> I’m introverted, so the forced social interaction at work was perfect for me

That's not healthy and it shouldn't be the basis for company policies in general.

I never understand this or any hot take related to WFH. Why is it necessary to assume something negative about another person simply because you’re different? It’s nonsense.

It truly doesn’t matter. WFH can be great, working from the office can be great. Find a company where the social and work culture fit with what you prefer.

You really don't understand the incentive people have here?

It is the same as politics. The more polarized you can make things and the more you point out the flaws of the opposing perspective, the easier it is to influence public opinion.

In situations where policy needs to be determined, the decision made will benefit one side and harm the other side. In an ideal world, companies will allow employees to do whatever they want and pay them the same as long as they are productive.

However, companies want to actively reduce chaos and this means making consistent rules for everyone and measuring how this affects productivity in aggregate. So the rules become "fully remote" or "hybrid work" instead of allowing people to do what makes them optimally productive.

> Find a company where the social and work culture fit with what you prefer.

You say this presuming that people don't care about what they are working on or the prestige of the company they are working at. A lot of people have a fairly good setup and would rather influence their own company (or by proxy the industry at large) than simply move to a different potentially suboptimal company that allows remote work.

Yeah people seem to be incapable of understanding that people have different preferences! It's like everyone is arguing that red is the best colour, no blue is clearly the best...

My friend joined Coinbase who he recommended to me. They are highly remote or very remote friendly. The CEO has a great vision too, I enjoyed some of the talks he gave eg with Gary Tan, etc.

Despite the horrendous tone and attitude, you're 100% right. I prefer working from the office because I get to be less lonely for a third of my waking life, probably in part because I can rarely get that kind of social fullfillment from my private life. I'm just not quite sure what's so bad about not wanting to be unconditionally alone 8 hours a day, 5 days a week.

I kind of fall into this category, but it's a little more nuanced. I have a very fulfilling social life / hobbies outside of work, and have taken sabbaticals before to great success. WFH was great because I could exercise a lot more, hangout with friends, etc.

But I am excited to be back in office on some hybrid schedule, because there was a social component to work that I very much missed. I enjoyed the work part of the work the same, but missed the occasional coffee with a coworker, full-fledged in person brainstorming session, off hand conversations about zany ideas, lunch at the cafe, etc.

It's not that my social fulfillment declined at all overall with WFH -- other social activities filled the time -- but the specific social activity of bonding in person with folks I worked with definitely decreased, and it's nice to have that come back. That's not a reason to force folks back in the office (this is at no-one's expense, as I've seen it suggested), but it's a nice benefit.

It doesn't take being socially unfulfilled to prefer working in an office. It just takes not having adequate work space at home; e.g. if you have kids and not a mansion.

I am a very social person. I want to be around people. My home is good. But too noisy, too many kids :) I love meeting people in my work field and I love to have a real conversation in which I can read body and speech. Not just speech. For me the whole working from home thing sucks. I don't like it.

You are categorizing it way to one sided in an offensive way. "Bad home lives" can be as simple as having too much social interaction e.g. by having children at home, which can be quite distracting. And of course, a lot of people don't have a separate room set aside at home for work. Real estate in many places is prohibitively expensive. And even if there is one, with full home office, both partners might compete for that working space and on many days even need 2 office rooms.

Also, the "social interactions" at the office are usually not about replacing private social life, but well, interacting with your colleagues about work related topics which go beyond the range of scheduled meetings. There is a lot of value in meeting random people over a coffee without a set agenda. No surprise, that during the pandemic there were a lot of meetings schedule with no agenda set, just to keep conversation between people alive, the more so as they don't work directly together.

On the one side I certainly appreciated the ability to work undisturbed at home for certain tasks, on the other side, I am working in a large organization (and I don't mean by large just a large headcount but a lot of people on joint or related projects), which mostly are not software engineers (but engineers of other disciplines). A lot of that goes online too - and as our organization is spread across large distances, always has been online - but I am aware of the benefits of direct interaction. At minimum, I like to have had some direct interactions with people I am working online with.

But of course, one cannot (and should not) just turn back the clock. The pandemic happened, and a lot of people had a taste of the advantages of work from home and a lot of companies had to work hard at facilitating that, so for a huge amount of jobs this is technically possible now. Working from an office isn't the only option any more and employers should understand that. Forcing people to come back into the office is a huge warning sign. It means that there are actually no convincing reasons, or the employees wouldn't have to be pressured.

Which of course raises the questions, why did spend Apple 5 billion on that fancy new headquarter and didn't put emphasis onto making this a place people want to go to? In the contrary, it was designed with open office spaces, which especially software engineers just hate. It was unpopular even before the pandemic. Instead, they should have asked groups and single employees how an office attractive for their line of work should look. It couldn't possibly have been a problem of the budget :).

Understandable. Some of us actually want team cohesion and collaboration instead of working on Jira tickets in isolation. Others want a purely asynchronous communication style that keeps the chit-chat to an absolute minimum.

I personally want to know what's going on in far-flung corners of the company, because I'm fundamentally a generalist who wants to understand the big picture. I don't just want to put in my 8 hours and clock out, although I can see why people just trying to put their kids through school might want to do that.

Personality types and home situations matter a great deal in these situations.

In my experience, young man at the start of their carrier are willing to go to great lengths to work from home.

After they marry and get kids, they become willing to go great lengths to work from the office.

Exactly the opposite from my experience.

Other way round for me. Having more time for family/kids because I don’t have to commute is great. Also, starting out in a completely remote setting sounds a bit daunting to me.

This sounds entirely backwards based on talking to many different people about it in the past couple of years.

> I genuinely believe many people who prefer working in an office versus at home have unfulfilling social lives or bad home lives. The social dynamics, competition, in physical offices fills the void in their lives. Also seems like most of the people clamoring for a return to the office are also climbers & middle managers.

This.

I've recently switched officially to a de-facto full remote position after years of full remote due to COVID, as did most of my team, and I also see this pattern among the coworkers who decided to go to the office. The return-to-office cases boiled down to:

* Rented a tiny apartment to maximize disposable income but it's very unpleasant to live in, let alone work,

* Share a 3-bedroom flat with 3 or 4 newly-graduated and yet-to-graduate buddies,

* A young upwardly-mobile professional who wants to maximize his presence around the senior manager to fulfill his career-growth plans.

I dare say that in two dozen team members, only 5 or 6 want to return to the office, and about half of them need it because they can't afford a decent apartment.

Maybe not paint people with such broad strokes? Humans are complicated, and the reasons we have for wanting to go to the office vs WFH are varied.

For example - some people don't like work bleeding into their home life, which is a lot harder when you WFH.

I can't say that's true for me personally, and I greatly prefer working in the office. In my case I mostly like the office because it allows me to keep work physically compartmentalised from real life - I don't have work things invading my personal space (and using it for free, I might add).

> fills the void in their lives

Why is that a bad thing? We have a problem and this is a solution.

I think I would prefer to work in an office over remote solely because it's harder to meet new people in the company and make good connections remotely.

I'd like to have some professional connections that carry over from my current company.

Some of us just have kids and finding a flat with enough rooms for everyone plus an office room is almost impossible. So it's good to have the option to also go to the office in addition to WFH.

My personal hot take:

I genuinely believe many people who prefer working at home are very young and have not developed social awareness and/or don't feel the need to separate life and work, because their life is their work and vice versa.

Most people that do not want to return to office are still in that phase of their life where they need to rebel to authority to feel alive and will end up being those "middle managers" that they critique today.

Also: WFH as the only possible option is not different from office as the only option.

I don't like going to the office when it rains, but I enjoy going out of my house when the Sun shines or meet my colleagues to have an informal chat on how to progress with some project, it makes everything smoother and a lot of the underground tensions generated by only communicating through video and voice disappear.

The truth is the majority of the workplaces are not "for coders only" and trying to find a balance with other people's needs, for example those people that have to work in presence, it's sign of and good willing and maturity.

You can decide to quit to WFH, IMO that doesn't mean you're standing up for yourself, it only means you're not willing to change your habits.

So, spending hours in a car instead of with my own kids is "mature".

Spending the family income on cars and gas and paying an extra million for a house in order to make commuting even feasible is "mature".

Destroying the environment, wasting precious resources and spewing out poisonous particles that enter the lungs and bloodstream of other human beings is "mature".

And engaging in office maneuvering and chit-chatting instead of producing great value for my employer is "mature".

I'd rather be immature then.

> So, spending hours in a car instead of with my own kids is "mature".

I spend 15 minutes walking in a park.

Yes, spending hours in a car is not the best choice.

One should ask themselves why they chose to sign a contract with a company hours away by car in the first place.

If that isn't ok, why did you accept?

> instead of producing great value

I think you're giving yourself too much importance and too little to your co-workers who took a break.

That's immature, yes.

And not spending time in the same place will only reinforce the idea that someone is working to " create great value" while others are slacking at coffee machines stealing a salary and being unproductive, only that in the case of WFH it has become "they are home all day doing nothing. it's basically like being on holiday for them."

Which shouldn't be any employer concern, since they're not the ones paying their salaries (and it's probably very false)

In other words: why should WFH be considered more important than chit-chatting at work?

Aren't they two ways for people to enjoy their job more and maybe be more productive or more satisfied?

Why one should be better than the other?

Only because you personally benefit from it?

> I spend 15 minutes walking in a park.

> Yes, spending hours in a car is not the best choice.

> One should ask themselves why they chose to sign a contract with a company hours away by car in the first place.

Good for you, realisticly not many people are that fortunate to find a nearby opportunity.

15 mins walk takes me nowhere, but remote work opens endless opportunities for me.

> Good for you, realisticly not many people are that fortunate to find a nearby opportunity

If that's true, then you can't really complain about it.

But in my opinion if people are willing to resign or accept a (rather big) paycut to work from home, they could have found a lower paid job closer to home.

In my case it wasn't luck, I moved to another city to get the job, but I chose to live at 15 minutes walking distance from the office, because commuting for hours it's not what I want.

It's all about compromises, I believe anglophones say "you can't have your cake and eat it too"

> but remote work opens endless opportunities for me.

that's true also for companies.

Why should they hire someone from US and not someone somewhere else where the pay is lower?

> Why should they hire someone from US and not someone somewhere else where the pay is lower?

Good point, so far so good but we'll see as time goes.

But if you want to separate life from work, you can work in whatever place you'd like. Coworking space, cafe, personal office etc. Then you don't need to live near your company's office, and can choose the best possible place to live and work for you and your family.

> Coworking space, cafe, personal office etc.

or you can chose to work for a company whose offices are not two hours away.

coworking, cafes, etc are not really suited to actually work, especially of your work requires some kind of concentration or secrecy (an NDA for example)

Personal office in house is the worst combination of them all IMO.

Not that I do not work from home, I did it for good part of my life, it's just not for everybody.

You have also to consider that having their parents around all day could be the worst possible way to live for teenagers, it makes more sense only when they are small kids, but in my country we have parental leaves and specific holidays to take care of that.

I think the best option is to have possibility to work in any company, and live in any place. You don't want to limit your job opportunities just because they are far away.

Easy to say with an American passport.

Now tell people from Mexico that they can't go to work in US because immigration laws, but Americans can go work there because they just need an internet connection and you can serve them drinks while they sit on the beach.

Any company is 1% thinking, many companies hire only local workers because it's their market.

Take into account timezones and you can't possibly work for Australians or New Zealanders while living in Europe, unless there's an office in Europe that coordinates the efforts with HQ.

I've worked for long time with US based companies from GMT+2 and it's been exhausting at times. Wouldn't do it again if I can avoid it.

Some things look better on the surface than they really are.