In-office doesn't mean heading out the door at 8:30 and coming home at 5:30 but something more like leaving at 7:00am, dropping off kids at before-school daycare ($$$), driving back to the train station to make it in by 9 and then coming home at 6 after your 1-hour commute to the closest affordable suburb. An 11-hour day, and you are paying out the nose for childcare if you can even get it, and you'll spend all your PTO on kids doctor appointments and parent-teacher conferences and the like.
That was probably the low point in my, and others, working life that coincides with the age for raising a young family. It sucks.
There's talk about less than 40 and more years old. I'm over 40 and prefer remote. In our space it's younger folks that prefer hanging out in the office.
However, I can be more flexible and drop my toddler off at daycare after my daily stand-up since he mostly is fine watching shows during that. Then I pick him up right before his nap time. This scenario is awesome, but albeit just temporary until my family resumes our previous arrangements that was interrupted by a surgery.
My responsibility hasn't changed and I'll fill in randomly throughout the week as needed but, now I just have extra flexibility that I would never have in an office. Even comparing it to a small city, living in the suburbs easily meant a 15-30 minute commute and wouldn't allow me to have the opportunities I have now.
No, I won't return to the office and I'm not sure anyone will actually convince me to do so. I'm mentoring interns and juniors developers without any concerns remotely.
20-30: Needs mentorship, can live closer to the office
30-40: Has young kids, moved to the burbs
40+ AND Management: Developed management approach pre-pandemic, pre-Slack
40+ but IC: Could go either way
This is still HUGELY simplified, and please do not take offense if you are e.g. 30-40 without wanting kids. But "young kids" is just a huge difference in terms of the morning schedule and flexibility needs, especially as most families near urban areas have both parents working.
You hit the nail on the head. Senior managers who are unwilling to learn to do their jobs slightly differently are a big part of the problem. Imagine forcing an entire work-force to commute so you can physically stop by someone's desk to interrupt them vs sending a message or scheduling a meeting. Senior managers want productive staff, but instead of listening to what they need to be productive, they set up roadblocks to satisfy their own lazy vanity.
If a chat conversation isn't getting a point across after a couple of back and forths (five minutes is too long,) then it's time for a phone call. Discussions in chat are fine. Flat out lack of understanding is best fixed when they can hear and interrupt for clarification.
If I do need to call someone, I simply message them and ask if they're available for a call. There's no need for preamble.
You wouldn't send a letter with just the salutation, you'd include the message! Why treat a Slack message like it's a phone call instead of like a (short, rapidly delivered) letter?
I'm also huge proponent of https://nohello.net/en/ in the workplace and elsewhere.
On async channels it is recommended to get to the point quickly. Sure send pleasantries, but no need to wait until they are answered. You can immediately also get to your point. Instead of sending "hello" and then waiting you would be sending "Hello. I hope you are having a good day. It seems that the turbo encabulator is complaining a vapour lock in the secondary log file. Have you seen that before?"
The https://nohello.net/en/ site describes this communication style better.
If you use chat like it's a conversation then you'll have a bad time.
If you use it like it's business communication like short-form email it's better.
It's bizarre that the same people who will send an email that says "Hey, send me this information asap" will start a text chat with "hey how's it going"
People who say hello and then wait for a reply will wait a long, long time for a reply from me.
The people in that argument were located on 2 different continents 7 hours apart, that would be a non-issue if they were in on the same floor in the same building. This is not an argument for working in the office, just to adjust to the environment.
Maybe you are right and they are just fine having not experienced the in-office environment.
You don't have to go too far back in time to when work from home was also the norm (when everyone stayed at home on the farm). The office age was the aberration.
But I suspect you're right. I learned a huge number of skills being in high velocity office environments, shadowing/observing others, etc. Starting out remote must be much harder.
At work I'm looking out for myself.
Anecdotally, I hear it's more younger employees who like going into an office for the social interaction.
What's going to be interesting is seeing what happens as the current generation of senior management age out and retire. Do companies start to lean more towards remote work? And if so what happens about the younger workers coming into industry at that point, presumably they're still going to prefer being colocated for the same reasons, and that will need balancing with the older folk's preferences.
Anecdotally, I know that on my team, the younger teammates were the most eager about returning to the office. I'm nearly 50 and wouldn't go back in if you held a gun to my head.
This sounds more like a way deeper loneliness and community problem than a workplace problem.
Absent the Covid years, I'd probably agree more. A lot of managers, execs, and other senior people may not have liked commuting but it was just part of the job. But they're people too and many realized they could manage without going into an office all of the time. People do come in, especially for things like customer visits, but it's mostly a sometimes thing.
As a geek, most of my time is spent working alone, even in ill-defined projects that require a lot of coordination and communication. Working from 'home' (more from wherever I want) is better. Also, although I agree that we lose something if we communicate remotely, I don't terribly care. When I communicate, information is more important than emotions. And they want me to work in an open floor office, ugh.
Suits spent most of their time in meetings. They also care much more about the emotions and human touch. They've spent years optimizing for firm handshakes, nice hair, good smiles and that weird clicking noise :).
Basically, suits want the office, geeks don't. Productivity doesn't have much to do with it :)
Old = over 40s (myself included) who are senior, their careers have been in offices and commuting, and still believe that 'managing people' means real-life first person interaction, and are completely invested in offices, and the cost of paying for them, rather than downsizing.
Young = under 40s - have grown up with the internet, github, working/studying remotely and so on.
I've worked in companies where the CEO and senior management are all 50 something, and in a couple of companies where they're all approaching 40. Can you guess which company used PCs and which one used Macbooks?
Going back further, I can remember working on Sun boxes, because management was reluctant to use that 'new fangled NT3.51 or even NT4.0'.
The point being, as the workforce demographic changes, so will the opinions and approaches. And the cycle will repeat.