Couldn't one argue that if you think "most" of the people who say they like going to the office are lying, abuse victims, burned out parents, power tripping managers, narcissists, perverts and lonely losers, that it might be *you* that has an unresolved issue? Maybe people really do enjoy being in the office because they enjoy spending time with like minded people engaging in a common activity. If there really was no benefit to gathering in a common space in person with like minded people to engage in a shared activity, conventions wouldn't be nearly as big of a thing as they are, and they certainly wouldn't be big among famously introverted nerd and geek interests and hobbies. And yet when I talk about a "convention" I bet your mind goes first to a nerd event, something like comic-con or a star trek convention, or even CES.

Not everyone works at Initech though. My office is quiet, filed with sound deadening cubical furniture (a conversation at normal speaking volumes 10 feet away is almost inaudible) and ample private meeting rooms. Lunch is rarely above $12 and is on par with or better than most of the quick serve restaurants in the area both in terms of price and quality of food. The lights are at a reasonable level and most of the lighting is natural sunlight coming in from the huge floor to ceiling windows. The commute is bearable depending on where you live and while the housing costs are definitely high closest to the office, you can still easily find large single family homes on good sized pieces of land well within budget and inside a 30 minute commute. I am indeed incredibly lucky that I work for a company that took employee comfort and experience seriously when they built this office.

I wonder how much dislike around working in offices is less because working in an office is such a terrible experience vs working in a specific office for a company that doesn't care about their employee work environment is a terrible experience. I worked at a place for a brief window that made Initech look like a 5 star hotel, and if I had to work there every day, I might hate RTO too even though I found during the pandemic I didn't like WFH nearly as much as I thought I would.

So maybe "Anyone who's in leadership and wanting their employees to RTO should be ashamed of the fact that anyone could produce a list of grievances that long about working in their office"

> Then post-COVID many companies had trouble luring people back when being in-office was purely optional. That's when you started seeing the RTO mandates and the refusal to allow anyone to switch to remote regardless of performance.

This is a bigger thing I think than most people realize. Before the pandemic I worked for a company that had a flexible policy of allowing people to work from home for the sake of work life balance (e.g. contractors, kid's recitals etc), but not an official "hybrid" policy for a fixed number of days remote. When the pandemic first hit, made it very clear when they sent everyone home that they wanted to get us back to the office as soon as it was safe to do so. When things started to open up again, they asked people to start voluntarily coming in to the office 2-3 days a week. And yet, the entire time they had that ask in place, every time I was in the office, I could probably have counted on one hand the number of people in the office on my floor and from everyone else I talked to who came in, it was the same every day. And I fully admit to being a part of that problem. But since people didn't do what was asked of them for a hybrid system, it seems obvious then that the company would insist then that everyone come back to the office full time. I really do believe that we would have ended with a hybrid system had people actually showed up on a fairly regular basis, but without people showing up, it became a negative feedback loop where people would show up less and less because every time they did, it was just remote work, but from the office.

It also probably didn't help that we had so many people all over every social media network (including HN here) bragging about how much they were doing during their work hours that was anything other than the work they were being paid to do. If you start broadcasting to the world how you're only giving your employer 4 hours a day out of the 8 hours they're paying you for when you're working from home, it should be unsurprising that they decide they can't trust people to work from home and insist they come back to the office.

For a programmer, remote work is the worst. Constant endless notifications from emails, slack messages and calendars. Excessive amounts of meetings to replace what used to be 5 minute chats at someone's desk. Expectations of instantaneous and always on availability since everyone works different hours now and since you're remote and have a VPN they know you can get online. Intrusion into your private space with forced cameras, microphones and mandatory spyware that's now running on a machine on your personal network. Wasted minutes in every meeting dealing with microphone failures or latency induced "I was- oh- sorry- no you go first".

All that to say, like everything in life, remote work is a trade off.

On the other hand, I usually find people are generally observant of your desk space, especially if you look really busy with something. But remotely, you're constantly interrupted by incessant notifications from the slack channels you're in, from people directly messaging you to see if you're available for something and from an increase in 30 minute meetings to replace what should have been a 5 minute chat at someone's desk. And that's not counting having to actually stop what you're doing and literally switch tasks and screens to go read through all the slack messages and emails you've missed. And that doesn't account for the extra time you have to spend going and correcting a conversation that went off the rails that you could have helped solve faster if only you'd known it was happening, but since it happened in another window while you were heads down, and not at the desk 5 feet away where you could hear it, you missed everything before the folks in question went way down a rabbit hole.

I can see how this can help get you a change of pace, but as someone who learned during the pandemic they don't like remote working nearly as much as they thought they would, isn't doing this every day just commuting to a worse office with extra steps?

I guess if your office is really awful or your commute is ridiculously long it might be better. But all the talk you see about why working at an office is so bad for people's productivity cite the noise, distractions, unrelated chatter etc. Co-working spaces filled with people who aren't even on your team, coffee shops filled with angry customers and stay at home parents toting their toddlers and parks full of barking dogs and biting insects seem like they would all be their own cacophony of distractions and noises to rival even some of the worst open office plans.

Also at least around where I am, co-working spaces cost between $100-500 / month, and the coffee at the coffee shops while better than what is at the office is also $3-5 a cup. The parks are admittedly free, but the ergonomics of the tree trunk and root system leave a little to be desired. I'm sure it works for some people, but if I'm not spending my day working on my front porch in the sun with my dog, I think I'd rather be in the office instead of in the corner of a local coffee shop.

From a nation standpoint, doesn't "incentivizing and promoting" remote work also incentivize off-shoring jobs out of your economy? If your nation's companies perfect remote work, why would they higher your highly paid citizens living in (relatively) high cost of living areas when they could hire massive remote teams in lower cost of living countries to do the same job for less?

I'm a big fan of flexibility, and certainly think companies should do their best to treat their employees as adults and let them do what works best for them and their teams. But it is really weird to me to watch an industry that has spent years trying to convince companies that hiring off-shore remote workers had all sorts of negative externalities on team cohesion and the development process suddenly fall head over heals in love with the idea of all companies going all in on "off-shore remote workers".

I think the introvert / extrovert thing is oversimplifying things too much. I'm a very introverted person, and my favorite thing to be working on is stuff that's in the background quietly making things better in invisible ways. But that's the whole reason I want to be in an office with other people. Because I'm aware that I need people to know what it is that I do, and it's easier for me to make that happen when I can interact with someone one on one instead of having to blast stuff into a chat with 30 other people reading, or having to carefully pick my words because all the side bands of human communication that I've put so much effort into learning to read and use are gone in the sterile text of the screen.

We all know networking is an important part of your career. As an introvert, networking is a lot easier when I'm in a space where people already are and I can be seen, even if I'm not always being heard. And when I am heard in the office, it's usually among small groups of people, maybe 10 or less. Having to network by being actively visible and speaking in big open channels with 2-3 different teams and a few layers of management all watching, that's terrifying as an introvert but that's also how most companies run their chat systems because otherwise everyone has hundreds of channels that they have to keep track of and remember whose in what places and copy discussions around. Since it's easier just to have massive groups of people in one channel and have everyone use the larger channels most of the time, being remote and on slack is actually far more draining to me as an introvert. I also do best keeping tabs with what's going on when I can keep one ear on the other things going on around me instead of having to stop what I'm doing and intentionally scroll through pages and pages of slack messages.

And yes, because I'm introverted, being in person with a team of people that includes extroverts means I get human social connections that I need and would otherwise not seek out because, again I'm an introvert.

I feel the opposite. Before the pandemic, I would have said I'd 100% want a fully remote job if I could have it. I even looked at applying to Gitlab because of that. And then the pandemic hit and I spent 2 years working from home all the time. One of the surprising things I learned in that was that I need a commute. I need a physical separation of work and the rest of my life that lets me mentally shift gears from thinking about work things to thinking about home things. I needed some time to just listen to music or a podcast or audio book without any other demands on my time.

And I found that going for a walk or something like that to replace the commute didn't have the same effect, for a number of reasons. There was the mental hurdle of forcing myself to try taking the walk instead of going straight from A to B since I was already there. There was the fact that while I could try to flush home concerns from my mind on the walk, coming back to my home where all those home concerns are right there for me to notice when I walk through the door meant that all that mental flushing was for naught.

Now I admit that I am fortunate enough to have a commute where I'm rarely in bumper to bumper traffic, and it's less than a 30 minute drive. But at least for me, a commute is a vital part of my work routine.

As a personal example, Google Meet while not having “camera” in the name has an icon with a camera, a description that talks about “video calling” and is intentionally designed to support and enable video calls. And on my device I have declined to give meet permission to access the camera. On the rare occasions I need to use the app on my phone, I’m probably somewhere where I can’t or don’t want to be using the camera. It is simply safer and easier to deny the application access to the camera than it is to rely on its own internal functionality to disable using the camera. And it’s safer and simpler to require all 3rd party apps that want access to the camera to explicitly ask for permission than it is to evaluate them all for whether or not their use of the camera is both necessary and obvious enough that they don’t need the permission.