Yes, although I say it a different way. Working in offices has always been fairly terrible, and had been growing increasingly terrible over the last decade or two. People put up with it in part because they had no option.

But once they worked outside of those spaces and realized what hell they were, of course they resist returning.

So it's not just about discovering new "freedom", it's about discovering that a major thing that makes life suck doesn't have to be a thing at all.

Offices don't have to be terrible. IBM, GE, Bell, etc. knew how to put together offices that didn't suck. Occasionally the architects got out of hand and produced some monstrosity, but the offices were mostly fine.

It's only the whole dumbass "open office plan" bullshit that made everything suck. Given that's the "standard", is it any wonder everybody wants to work from home?

But that is often the case; attempts to increase "shareholder value" come at an outsized and detrimental cost of productivity and ultimate profit. But such is life. You cannot know the outcome of two paths as you can only test one of them.

Certainly that's at least part of the GP's "growing increasingly terrible over the last decade or two."

I can't stand them either, just point out that they were the norm except for a 35-year period.

I remember visiting the workplaces of both of my parents in the 1970's and neither were anything like open plan. I know you said "1960s" but the buildings my parents were working in were well established at the time and had been there since, at least the 1960's.

I do a lot of technical drawings. It feels way different to be in an open workspace with a horizontal drafting board (which is what I would have had prior to the 1990s) than with a brightly-lit, vertical screen. You have more privacy, even in an open space.

35 year is almost entirety of the working age if you started working after uni

I did not know this.

However, pre-1980+ (or later), most workers were probably head-down looking at paper on their physical desktop. And surely more of them had actual offices compared to the cubical 80s-2000s or open offices 2000+.

Also, I would assume that pre-voip technology meant that salespeople were not yelling into their phones for the "joy" of their open-office-mates as they were 2000+.

Not really. If you go back to the 50's you will find armies of people looking down at paper, reading and writing, but not most. By the 80's all of those people had machines on their desks, while most didn't do paper work.

I believe the majority of people only started doing information (since the paper isn't there anymore) work this century on the rich countries. On many countries they didn't yet.

Also, sales people were always loud.

    By the 80's all of those people had machines on their desks

Ironic that it became its own oppression.

They're a good rejoinder to Musk's recent farcical argument that since most blue-collar workers cannot work remotely, it's immoral for white-collar workers to resist Return-To-Office mandates [1]. Some jobs still require neckties, but that does not mean we should all be obliged to wear them too.

I personally enjoy commuting — a 35-minute journey in a big city via public transport. It gets me to an office full of friendly faces who also enjoy the commute. The people who prefer remote stay home. It's a happy medium.

RTO mandates in US cities with poor/non-existent public transport options are bad ideas all around.

[1] https://www.mediaite.com/tv/elon-musk-calls-remote-work-bull...

One of the dumbest things he’s ever said (and that’s saying something). Most people can’t fly private either but it doesn’t seem to stop him.

Whereas a humanist might consider how to make blue-collar work less terrile.

[0] https://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2015/09/poverty-no-inequali...

Lather, rinse, repeat.

Yawn.

And those things can change, suddenly having a huge tower in downtown NY becomes a sign of a out-of-date "old" company; perhaps the new hotness will be something like a small company "town" in the outskirts somewhere.

So the "new hotness" will be kind of like the old days where you worked for Pullman, and with those wages you earned, you: paid rent to Pullman, bought your goods at the Pullman general store, and so on in effect giving much of your earnings back to the company.

https://www.npr.org/2023/05/02/1172301798/workers-affordable...

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-09-16/amazon...

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2023/apr/18/is-elon-musk...

Cities too. My city government offices are located on some of the best real-estate in the city and in elegantly refurbished turn of the century buildings.

Government offices should be pre-fab cheap as possible in brownfields or on other low-value land. High value land should be used for at minimum something that will generate property tax revenue.

You should realize that the real estate around the government offices in your city are high value because they were located near the government offices?

Unlike neckties (which are entirely about appearance and perceived norms) -- there are very considerable intrinsic benefits to having people onsite. They just don't outweigh the very considerable negatives, many are coming to find. So it's fundamentally an argument about tangible tradeoffs -- not social norms.

An entirely different argument, in fact.

I think "hollow" is a bit heavy for the judgment, but I agree they are not the same in terms of tangibility (although I'll bet if I dig enough I could find some practical use for neckties (in the office, at least)).

However, like neckties, many companies do the office thing because that's what you're supposed to do. "Everybody knows this." Some (many?) offices exist without a tangible benefit.

Neckties however -- are 100 percent in that category.

My home is a place of rest and family, not work. Work happens at a dedicated location five minutes from home, on foot.

I think we'll see more of this in the future--mixed neighborhoods with a lot of residential space next to offices. What I think we won't see as much of, are huge office blocks very far from residential areas, where the majority of the workforce commutes an hour+ every day, each way, to work.

So if you don't even need the suburban office parks anymore, do things sprawl out even more in places like Austin or Dallas that are surrounded by empty land (vs somewhere like the Bay Area which is hitting geographical barriers)?

That said, I'm not sure why the neighborhood around San Jose's City Hall is so dead, it's very odd experience to go there

I like trains, but an alternative could be electric buses, with Uber Pool-like dynamic routing. I'm not sure how the speed would compare, but, it gets pretty wild when you consider what's possible with mobile phones, AVs, and electric vehicles.

I for one, am excited by this.

But that kind of office park and lifestyle pretty much sucks. So I don't think city centres are in any danger. Turns out they're a useful way of organising socially even if they're not where the offices are.

It simple 2D geometry - if you live 1x from the office your commute is 20 minutes, if you live 2x from the office, your commute is 50 minutes, 3x from the office - 90 minutes commute, and so on. If you move the main cluster of the offices outside of the city border, then the commute time would change for people, for some it will decrease, for some it will increase. There would be exactly the same percentage of people living 1x, 2x, 3x etc. from the office, just the people would be shuffled between the quartiles.

I rather have the option to going to work and I think companies should still offer a solution for that if they are able to. I do like traveling into the city so maybe I just like neckties.

I am definitely against all of this rhetoric about how remote work is horrible and the laptop crowd isn’t doing good work when we don’t really give people enough time for childcare or elder care which I think is a much bigger problem that motivates people to work remotely. Also real estate markets are way overvalued.

I think a lot of people ran into these problems, but there are solutions. Work doesn't have to be your only source of community, and in fact, it can be problematic when it is, because then your community only lasts as long as your job. On the one hand you might lose your job, and on the other hand you might not quit when you should. Having connections outside work is pretty key to having work/life balance IMO.

I feel the same as OP. I have a very healthy social life outside of work but full time remote work at home feels isolating and repetitive. My mind does not like the lack of separation between home and work and I've tried every trick in the book. This is also true for most other activities in my life (e.g. I don't like exercising at home vs. a gym).

I don't want to force people to the office, but it gets tiring hearing other people assuming I haven't tried their "solutions"

> I have a very healthy social life outside of work but full time remote work at home feels isolating and repetitive. My mind does not like the lack of separation between home and work and I've tried every trick in the book.

If OP had said any of that, I wouldn't have responded in the way I did.

One can't easily switch from a skyscraper to a park or apartment building. Office work culture affects how entire cities are designed.

You're right to be concerned about this, but I think it stems from a combination of "false dichotomy" and "learned helplessness":

The socializing we do at work is ultimately a side effect of the work environment, not part of the primary goal. We can learn from how non-car-oriented societies structure their settlements. Returning to the previous (and terrible) iteration of the American status quo is not the only alternative.

We don't have to settle for terrible choices simply because they have mildly beneficial side effects.

Literally all of my adult friends are former coworkers, with some of them not even becoming friends until after we quit jobs.

You spend majority of your waking hours at work, where else do you make friends? Please don't say the gym.

Ehh, some of my friends are that way too, but a lot of my work friendships have withered when there wasn't work keeping us in contact on a regular basis.

> You spend majority of your waking hours at work, where else do you make friends? Please don't say the gym.

It doesn't have to be the gym either. I personally have met a lot of my friends out rock climbing, but that's going to vary from person to person because you have to find things you enjoy doing. Going to the gym to meet people if you don't enjoy working out at the gym doesn't make sense.

Are there other things you enjoy doing besides work?

(Incidentally, I don't spend the majority of my waking hours at work).

Can you really say they were your friends tho? do you think your rock climbing buddies will be your buddies after you stop?

I think going to the gym is not a social activity and I am very tired of bro's giving me "feedback" on my deadlifts.

Let's examine your I don't spend majority of hours claim, So there are 24 hours in the day, you work for 8, 2 hours for commuting, 1 hour for showering, taking a shits, getting dressed and all that, 1 hour for various chores, like buying groceries, laundry, cooking, etc, 1 hour for exercise, 7 hours for sleep. You have about 6 hours a day left for "fun". Last time I checked 6<8

Let's examine what you know about my life: last time I checked, nothing. It certainly does not look like what you describe (hint: I don't work 8 hours a day, even on most weekdays).

Given the claim was "Incidentally, I don't spend the majority of my waking hours at work", it's a bit strange that you've included "1 hour for showering, taking a shits, getting dressed and all that, 1 hour for various chores, like buying groceries, laundry, cooking, etc, 1 hour for exercise" in there. And I agree that you should include commute in calculating your hourly pay, which is why I would not take a job which required 2 hours of commuting per day.

And do you work weekends, or are you ignoring a solid (24 x 2) - (7 x 2) = 34 hours of the week here?

I'd respond to the part of your post before that, but this math is too absurd.

And i’m not here to argue with you how many hours you work or do not work, that’s absurd. I’m arguing from a general point of what schedule is roughly true for majority of employed people. Of course you as an individual can work 3 hours a day or 17, that’s besides the point.

The 34 hours of the weekend is only true for people that have absolutely 0 other obligations, such as children, parents, chores, etc.

I’m not here to say that people absolutely must make friends at work, but implying that it’s somehow unhealthy or bad is just incredibly out of touch with how majority of adults live

> I’m not here to say that people absolutely must make friends at work, but implying that it’s somehow unhealthy or bad is just incredibly out of touch with how majority of adults live

And I'm not here to say it's somehow unhealthy or bad. That's a hallucination that you had.

Still irrelevant and you were rightly called out on it. It doesn't matter if you spend an hour taking a dump and a shower, climbing rocks, or doing housework (just a single hour? You're a guy, right, with a wife?). It's still not an hour spent at your job.

The week has 168 hours. Normal people spend about 40 of them at work and 56 sleeping. That leaves 72 waking hours not at work; almost twice as many as at work.

You would have looked so much better if you'd just manned up and admitted you were wrong.

Also I didn't mean to come off as rude, it was more of a joke answer, not trying to come at you for suggesting it

my comment answered that question (and did not mention the gym)

neither the question nor the answer were about you specifically

Sorry if this sounds blunt, I’m moments away from sleep, but this comment of yours really frustrated me. You are assuming that someone who enjoys the social aspects of working in person does so because they lack social outlets outside the workplace. That is just your assumption, and a distortion of the discussion. I see this all the time. What gives?

I love being in the office. I hate the hour commute. And I hate doubling or tripling my housing price. I prefer showering at 745 and connecting and being productive at 8 over showering at 645 and driving into work to be productive at 8 (while being in zoom meetings all day anyway).

I like records too. They are so cool with nice artwork. And I like record stores. But I listen to music 99% of the time digitally.

The office is the same way. It’s not that it isn’t nice. It’s that the cost of using it over better alternatives is madness, especially at scale.

Imagine all the pollution saved from people driving to work.

As another comment said, a lot of the consternation about whether or not to go to the office is based on personal circumstances.

My office had a funny interaction where when we were discussing remote work, one person remarked that they liked coming into the office on their bike and it was so pleasant. This was one of the highest paid people who lived in a $1.5M house 5 minutes away from the office. And they said this to a zoom of 100 people of which maybe half commuted from $200k houses and made $75k.

Yes, that’s nice, but not useful for productive decision making.

Of course the consternation is based on personal circumstances. I don’t think workers have ideological stances on remote vs office work. I think it’s based on cost and productivity and quality of life.

That’s nice you’ve resolved that, but it’s not useful to many people. It’s like saying “personally, I’ve resolved to wake up at 4am and run 14 miles. The health benefits are amazing. Yadda yadda yadda.”

Or even better “personally, I’ve resolved to inherit family wealth and not work.”

This advice is not very applicable to the return to work discussion.

Most people have families and community ties that limit them from living close to work and from moving every time they change jobs.

For me, the schools are very bad near my work and private schools cost $30k/year. So I’m not going to move close to work as my income doesn’t allow it.

If wishes were fishes, I would definitely like to live close to work and walk and be able to pop home for lunch and whatnot.

But even if schools were great and house was cheap near my work, I’ve changed work locations in the same metro area 7 times in the past 20 years so I’m not going to uproot my family each time I change positions.

So I, and I think many others, chose commute to give family opportunities. And now I choose remote to save that expense while still giving family opportunity.

I feel like these in person get togethers are far more interactive and productive than a day of calls where most people go camera off and fall asleep 30 mins in. Actually doing work remote works mostly fine, but god I hate group calls, the latency, the bad audio, etc.

If I want social time with food and drinks I want to be with family and friends. If I'm at the office I want to be working. Otherwise I don't want to be there.

And Zoom anything can suck it. Full Stop.

You probably mean sedentary. Sedimentary would be quite extreme. :)

I would argue that the prices reflect at least an incredibly persistent demand to live in those cities.

Just for different reasons than before. For instance, since the pandemic many cities have invested heavily in bike infrastructure and pedestrianization. E-bikes have become extremely popular. And as the post-COVID reopening has progressed, people have been organizing local hobbyist meetups, many of them having acquired those hobbies during the depths of the pandemic.

There is a huge lifestyle appeal to living in cities, and it will not go away anytime soon. Cities need to recognize that both the massive increase in residential demand and the massive plunge in commercial demand are incredible opportunities to differentiate themselves by converting their dead-after-6pm business districts into thriving, walkable mixed-use hubs.

Yes, lot of people would not reject idea of having it, but at the same time actual demand (i.e. actual number of people who would think price is worth it, is quite lower compared to spagetti which is much cheaper but has many more buyers)

All in all. high price does not necessarily mean huge demand.

And billions of redevelopment investment? GDP and employment!

But it's less obvious what tradeoffs people make in general to the degree that employment isn't part of the equation. I certainly never lived in a city when my company was located well outside.

But the whole reason we’re even having the discussion is because of the evidence that more people are remote working. So I’m assuming we’re talking about people who might have to go to their office at max two or three days a week in the extreme cases? Not sure how that will create enough of a market drain to make NYC, Boston, or San Fran living affordable?

I think the suggestion to reclaim business districts is the only rational way forward with any kind of chance of lowering prices. There just don’t seem to be enough people willing to live outside the city to bring down prices. If anything, everything points to market demand increasing pricewise.

These are fairly car centric definitions. But considering the car enabled the suburb in the first place, I don't think it's necessarily wrong to use it as the metric.

The first suburbs were a result of trains.

    Suburban is where it’s _reasonable_ to walk to school, the doctor or a convenience store.

Or are you scoffing at US suburbs?

Some people like crowds. Crowds are fun. Parties are fun. Food is fun. Community is fun. Or not. It’s great we have freedom to choose.

Decreasing demand for an asset that has a fixed cost to the supplier (mortgage payments) pushes up prices just as much as increasing demand.

Is an American city for you? Are you a( indigent; b( a literal aristocrat or rich enough to be one; or c( a "financial domination" enjoyer who desires to give everything they earn to some combination of landlords and governments when you are not giving all your time to your boss? If you answered yes to any of the above, an American city is for you. If you are a working stiff, the city doesn't want you anyway.

The workers may have rejected the onsite companies such that it is difficult to fill the expensive offices. But also, it is likely that the COVID forced out-of-office situation has caused companies to re-evaluate the value of prime office locations.

Fashion is a self-reinforcing feedback loop. If the scenario is visible and hyped, others will believe they must follow it to be relevant. And then it becomes stronger, and effectively relevant. Soon every real US finance company needs a prime Manhattan office... unless it's a commodities company, in which it must have a prime Chicago location.

Aside from inflating finance company performance via tax laws, I don't think politics really has so much to do with this. Actually, the global upward wealth redistribution policies do mean that a smaller group has a more difficult time finding places to park money, so that indeed does inflate propertly values.

I assume some many continue to exist but employees will also have to get used to large pay cuts if that's a hard requirement for them.

> As prices for city apartments increase dramatically, people lose interest in living in those cities. Better to live someplace pleasant and less expensive

No one wants to live there too many people live there......

I also have Gbps internet and a job at a startup as a principal. This literally is the best of both worlds for me. I'm not particularly wealthy and not particularly clever - I'm sure everyone is doing this and the best part is, there's _room_ out here, at least in the USA.

I make more now in a remote position than when I commuted? I'm in California, not in a LCOL location.

Then these companies are going to have to get used to lower profit margins as time catches up and kicks them out with competitors.

How does that follow from anything? I am working remotely from the start of 2011 and never once took a pay cut compared to an on-site job, as far as I am aware at least.

Relative to what is an open question, because the jobs that require that also don't currently pay a lot.

Some companies are losing their more experienced employees when they force RTO. If they want to compete for this portion of the talent pool, they'll need to offer more than the other remote first companies.

In my experience, the employees that have to go into the office are generally the ones that get paid less than the ones who can work from home. I'm not really sure how you came to that conclusion.

But back to residential: I understand that many wealthy people buy real estate for the prestige of having a certain address or as a way to "lock up" wealth in an asset. See Billionaires Row [0] [1]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billionaires%27_Row_(Manhattan...

[1] https://nypost.com/2021/08/05/nearly-half-of-luxury-units-em...

* Note: residential property taxation in NYC is in dire need of reform but the point still stands

Also, if you have true "FU" money, then owning a piece of prime NYC real estate is just another mark on your bedpost, like your superyacht.

Ofc the benefits of this have to be weighed against real estate costs. Let's just stop pretending anybody knows exactly what the office situation will be in the coming years.

Is it? I don't believe it is. At this point, people just plug right in - once you're used to remote work, it's a matter of learning which chat platform they use, getting access to email, and away you go. It's literally the exact same thing as in office these days, precisely due to needing to accommodate remote onboarding.

I'm sure you can come up with the perfect counterpoint to my anecdote. We'll just have to wait a few more years for more robust, large scale comparisons before we really understand how much an office is worth.

>which otherwise in face-to-face meetings can be skipped since we can chit-chat outside of meetings.

So in terms of time there is little difference? I find myself to spend much more time chitchatting in person - which is nice but also not the job.

Even if your interlocutor can, and even if the large scale studies run counter to your argument, that doesn't mean your experience is invalid.

Life isn't a double-blind randomised placebo-controlled study. There is no control group consisting of you and your cohort to measure against.

The scientific method is, I argue, on the whole, the wrong instrument to bear in these scenarios, at least because measuring the metrics affects the study group and publishing the resulted affects the society in which the study occurred.

I'm interested in hearing other people's experiences especially because I've been remote since 2011 so I have a clearly biased perspective.

I can see ways it might be worse, obviously, and I've experienced good in-office onboarding. But I've also experienced absolutely crap in-office onboarding (a month of no working development environment!) - so I question whether that experience was because of the office/remote dynamic, or because companies that do a good job onboarding because they value it, regardless.

So it's interesting to hear stories and experiences from other people's perspective, both onboard-ee and onboard-er, since I'm just one dude with my own Unique Perspective™ and limited total experience based on that viewpoint.

It's just not. In the office you're sitting next to a person you can lean over to and ask a question. Yeah, it interrupts their workflow, but that's ok when they're supposed to be helping you onboard. Remotely you've got to send a message, wait for somebody to reply, schedule a zoom call, whatever. It's async communication and it's slower, which is OK when you're not blocked, but when you're onboarding and blocked you need to be unblocked quickly because you don't have the experience to know where else to go while you're waiting.

If there's some thought put into the onboarding process, I believe remote can be effective however I would argue remote onboarding requires far more effort and planning for the same result.

Therefore, if it's a year old and it smells bad:

- either it's still like that

- or somebody has since harvested its improvement into at least one standup update, which you can search for

At the very least, you're likely to be able to find who to ask.

How would you demonstrate this?

I’m with a funded SV startup that’s been remote-only since its founding, a few years before covid. We have staff in at least five countries, and in the US, in at least five states (just based on the people I can think of offhand.)

The company is the leader in its field, which involves significant real innovation, and has many major enterprise customers.

I’ve helped onboard many employees, and I’ve managed one of the key product teams.

When I hear people talk about all the disadvantages of remote work, I just internally roll my eyes. As you say, they’re plugging their own personal preference. But that seems to be exactly what you’re doing with the quote above.

It only seems ridiculous now because it turns out neckties weren’t really required. But we could look back with the same incredulity on spending $80k/mo for an office that the entire workforce commuted 30 mins to and from every day.

Although I am a huge proponent of WFH, I had found it very hard to build relationships during the beginning years of the pandemic, and it wasn't until travel has opened up and I met in-person many of the people who I've only ever met over Zoom that I was able to start building relationships, which noticeably accelerated a lot of the work that I do that relied on other people. It's just so much easier to break the ice with someone when meeting face to face. Also, people will tell you things when meeting 1-on-1 in person over a beer that they will never tell you in Zoom, and this applies to customers and vendors as well as co-workers, and is extremely useful to understanding the hidden forces which is sometimes crucial in doing your job well.

As they should. Zoom is monitored. Beer is not.

- A remote-only job, with no requirement to ever come in to "the office" to work (particularly not to do regular work, as opposed to a meeting), and

- The situation we had during the pandemic, when all jobs that could be had to be as remote as possible for safety, most socialization was severely curtailed, and travel was dangerous at best

I don't think it's at all out of the question for a "remote-only" WFH job to include travel, provided it's a) disclosed up front, and b) paid for in full by the company. This can even include occasional mandatory meetings with colleagues, either at some company-owned property or elsewhere.

Personally, I find that the best way to get those kinds of less-formal getting-to-know-you interactions with people you don't see physically face-to-face is by having an open text chat system—something like Slack, Discord, IRC, etc. I've got friends I met online a decade or more ago who I only know through such chats, but would feel very comfortable working "side by side" with digitally (if it were ever to come up) because of the rapport we've built over the years.

We parted ways about 9 months into the job when we both realised this wasn’t working.

My impression is that remote work for new employees needs a lot of explicit relationship and trust building that we get for free when we interact with people in an office.

Remote requires personal responsibility as well. From everybody

Remote first is a spectrum and dismissing lived experiences as “oh, you just haven’t experienced the right kind of remote first” helps no one.

What makes you think documenting everything exhaustively is a panacea? What if the quality of documentation sucks? Will your argument change to “you have to document everything to a certain level of quality otherwise you aren’t remote first enough”?

Please don’t feel I’m attacking you. I was a big remote first proponent before experiencing the difficulties of integrating with teams who didn’t know me except as a voice on a call.

After this, I’m more sympathetic to execs demanding RTO for culture reasons.

Companies that have gone fully remote, also quickly discover how much of their company knowledge is in one person's head, or whether it's well documented, which helps with the onboarding too.

Some companies have definitely moved to remote working better than others.

Not sure about that. Working without a necktie can feel like working naked. It takes some effort to change your feelings on that.

Also, ghmm, that nice long shit I used to take while browsing reddit... Go ahead and send me a meeting invite for timeslot.

More difficult, doesn't mean it's impossible or shouldn't be done.

Do not confuse one's inability to do something with a general impossibility.

Now yes, it does take a different mindset and we probably need to try different strategies for 'breaking the ice' over remote

I think it is only the case in companies where there is no proper onboarding process or it is an afterthought.

I was hired as a remote worker in a company in late 2021 and it was the most seamless onboarding process I ever had. I remember in a lot of companies having to chase people, trying to find them or waiting for them to get back from a meeting. Or the unpleasant experience of spending hours with a new hire and literally feeling his breath behind your neck while I would show him something and not being able to multitask at the same time on other things, especially those that had a private matter or were too confidential for that person at this stage. I am currently doing a lot of knowledge transfer for a new member of the team while I am moving to another one and I spend hours in video call with that guy. I am sharing one screen, while I can still do other tasks, reply to emails/instant messages in a separate screen. It is more walkie-talkie approach than a real videocall. But I can work on something and I don't have to tell him "look I have to do something urgent and confidential, let's discusss in a bit again" and then get dragged by millions things and not being able to get back to him.

I think this is what it comes down to. Most companies have nonexistent onboarding, so new hires can be unproductive for quite a while.

It's documented ad-nauseum that developers (or any other job that requires concentration and reasoning) are far more productive in quiet surroundings.

I've worked in my own office, with a door, for a couple of years out of a 30 year career, and those two years were by far the most productive. Apart from the last 3 where WFH has been even better.

Open plan offices are awful for most, and commuting 90 minutes each way, standing for the full 90 minutes on a rush hour train into London is also a waste of time.

I'm sure it's the same in the US, but substitute car and traffic jams for trains.

The tl;dr here is, if there's so much office space available and going cheaply now, isn't about time employers add proper offices for those that want them, and entice a large number of developers back to the office?

This industry is rich, pays $$$, pays $$$ bonuses, employs smart people, will supply you with $3k, $4k, $5k laptops, desktops, $1-2k monitors, peripherals, free lunch, standing desks, send you on 1-2k conferences and travel, and so on and so on.

But not personal offices. WTF.

But due to covid forcing remote work I was able to go from renting a basement, to buying a home (and renting out MY basement).

House cost me the same as a city apartment, but I only qualified for the mortgage due to the added rental suite income. So if I'd stayed, I'd be unable to buy and have to continue renting.

Compared to staying in town, since I made the move in 2020, the difference in my net worth is now more than the entirety of my untaxed salary over that time.

tldr: I prefer office work, but working remotely has been the equivalent of earning 2.5X my salary the whole time.

I'm just having a hard time believing that we're at this moment in time where life suddenly got better for workers.

1: Indian wages are going up. The difference gets smaller every year.* Note that many of the best Indian developers are paid in USD, and even for the developers that get paid in Rupees, the company they are hired by locally often does get paid in USD by the American company that buys their services, so the fact that the Rupee goes down doesn't necessarily offset their wage increase for the American company that hires them.

2: American workers can still meet in every Tuesday. It's hard from Hyderabad.

3: Time difference can be a real issue (but of course it can also be an advantage).

4: It's often easier for Americans to understand American English than Indian English.

5: American developers might understand the American market and competing products better.

* https://www.statista.com/chart/25729/india-annual-average-sa...

Now the other half of that is what remote-first, "all I need is more time to code" developers really don't want to hear, is that in resolving conflict, in-person communication is much higher bandwidth than even zoom communication, both for the whiteboard, and for the fact being in-person de-escalates emotion. This is particularly true for early career developers, where some pushback (i.e. conflict) in their naive assumptions is actually how they are going to learn better from senior developers.

So while 5 days a week in the office is dead, its way too early to say what the eventual outcome will be. But I do agree less days a week will force some amount of square-foot downsizing, so I am glad I don't own any office buildings.

Some companies do outsource everything but it’s HARD.

Besides if it's cheap enough to hire someone overseas (who by definition would be remote), how would it not be cheaper to just pay their current workforce to work remotely?

Neckties are still widely worn.

Have a look at the demise of hats throughout the 20th century for another example.

I think we have gained and lost things in the remote shift. I feel bad for young people starting their careers who will never know what it's like to make acquaintance with their coworkers and feel at ease with them, to work on problems together.

It used to be that companies had to have lots of people around organized in hierarchical processes working to certain uniform processes to produce value at scale. These days, you can outsource a lot of these things, automate a lot away, to the point that many businesses are scaling down to human level.

Many companies exist that are only a handful of people working together. They do business with other companies or sell to consumers directly via the internet. Instead of doing things in house, they partner with other companies for things that used to be done in house. HR, accounting, marketing, manufacturing, logistics, etc.

And in so far people still need to be internal, they no longer have to be in the same place or even on the same continent. Remote work is here and still somewhat controversial. But it works and has liberated a lot of people from going to an office on a daily basis. These people are often acting more like independent companies rather than employees. Often that's exactly what they are: independent contractors, freelancers, etc. And of course, a large and growing part of the workforce is no longer permanently employed by anyone.

So, having all these people come to some huge sky scraper in New York isn't that logical or productive anymore. You could do it. But it doesn't really add that much value. And it actually costs a lot of money and time to do it.

Most of the people want less work and more pay, that’s a reality.

On the other hand, staying competitive is most company’s reality too.

So it is really not about you as a employee or employer’s will but rather than the market supply and demand that determines the work location flexibility. If I am employer and I have 2 candidates with similar skill level, of course I will prefer the one who can come to office everyday. And if I am an employee with two job offers with similar pay and working items of course I will choose the one with remote flexibility, because having choice is always better.