Folks forced into an office cannot choose to opt out of all work. Changing jobs is a bigger lift than picking up some social hobby or activities after work.

I agree hybrid can be nice, yet executives are too often demanding RTO compliance. That's why there is so much breathless enthusiasm for remote work, and angst against attempts to both-sides the issues.

Personally, I would probably be happiest with a remote office situation.

That's fine, but no one is obligated to spend time with them. They need to be more convincing or charismatic then to get people to spend more time with them. "If you don't endure a commute to spend time with me, I won't be happy" won't cut it.

Some people have convinced themselves that they don’t like social interaction, but this is probably due to a trained negative association caused by repeated past negative experiences. It seems very unlikely that some humans simply lack the social instinct congenitally.

Society is currently set up in a way that social urges are largely satisfied by work. Is that a good setup? No, it definitely isn’t. Is deleting it without a proven replacement a good idea? Also no.

And remote work can also be done from co-working spaces. Or with occasional all-hands IRL.

When there is a good mixture of everyone remote, I've found it not to be an issue.

Sadly, probably yes. This is the "age of outrage" after all.

This weird grandstanding about having a social life every time remote works comes up on HN is sad.

How? If my remote work makes my employer schedule 2 hrs of extra zoom meetings and the workday is now 8-6 instead of 9-5, how can I find fulfillment elsewhere? In that scenario, office seems better because I get to hang out with other people between 9-5. Remote is much worse if one likes to socialize.

I might pick up a hobby and make some friends there - these friends are going to linked to my personal life, not my professional one.

I cannot ask this hobby friend for a referral for a job in the future. I cannot ask this hobby friend for some help if I’m dealing with a difficult boss or a challenging technical problem.

I might ask this friend to come skiing with me or come to the bar with me though. That’s nice, but it’s not a work relationship and I can’t fulfill work relationship needs through it.

Perhaps you can strike up friends at a co-working space or a company where RTO is optional. (I go snowboarding with a former co-worker occasionally. Since we live far away it's usually a big trip, yet still no less an adventure.)

Hopefully losing your job won't also put your social life at risk.

That’s not to say it’s impossible, of course, but just much harder. Your professional social network is much smaller remotely. You have to work with someone remotely for months to form the same relationship you could have in an afternoon in-person.

Hybrid work is a good compromise.

Losing my job wouldn’t put my social life at risk - as work relationships don’t and shouldn’t fill that role for me. Again, you seem to be conflating personal and professional relationships.

You are making the straw man here. People are mostly asking for a right to work remotely if they want to, that's all. And the status quo until very recently was (and still is) the opposite: not allowing remote work for people who want it, without any empathy for their needs. Try not to read it as an attack on the office, but more as millions of people asking for not being forced to commute and go to the office for a miserable experience.

I don't hear the same sentiment in the real world but there you go.

If you advocate for "mostly remote work, with hybrid scheduling and hot desking as needed", some unempathetic execs and clueless middle micromanagers are inevitably going to try to turn that into a privilege to be allowed to work from home once a month. You have to open the negotiation by demanding full remote, so there's room for concessions allowing a few satellite campuses and occasional all-hands meetings.

What about clueless employees who think remote is great for their needs but is actually counterproductive to what the company needs?

LMAO, and you're the one complaining about strawmen? Give me a break.

Your wife is not "forced" to work from home. She is forced to find her own work accommodations. At the extremes of requiring a dedicated IP address and fiber connection, it's still an option to rent an office space individually. At the less extreme: As is an individual membership at a coworking space, likely a public library, or a coffee shop. Similarly, whether at home, at a office, or at a corworking space she is not forced to be socially isolated or miserable.

Workers should have a strong say in how they spend their 40+ hours a week, but we have a society where petty tyrants get to control their workers' lives. It should be easier to form worker-owner cooperatives and to organize strong unions, and generally promote more democracy in the workplace. And we should, as a society, de-emphasize work a bit. With all the automation we have, most people should be able to work a 32-hour work week and society would clip along just fine. Meanwhile, people would have more time to devote to the rest of living a life (pursuing art, socializing with friends/family, volunteering in social projects, studying an interesting subject, etc).

That's all to say, we are all individuals with different wants and needs, and we spend a lot of time at our jobs. We should restructure society to make us all happier and more fulfilled.

To be fair, this is especially egregious in the United States, where urban design is incredibly hostile and workers have long commutes because of distortionary policies to boost car sales and maximize returns on real estate speculation. Likewise, workers have so few protections and paid leave relative to other developed countries.

I probably wouldn’t care about going into the office in a nice, walkable European city, where I didn’t live in constant fear of being fired, be unable to take sick days, or be constantly forced to work over 40 hours, rarely take vacations, etc. But if you’re going to design society around maximizing my misery to make as much money as possible for someone else, I’m sure as hell not going to want to go into work if I can do my job from my couch with my dog beside me.

On the flipside, it's pretty sick that we've normalized getting all of one's social fulfillment from wage slaving rather than genuine social experiences that don't involve exploitation of our labor.