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Comment by owenwil | Hacker News Reader

Genuine question: do people really expect to be back in the office at all this year, given how high the risk is and that those jobs can almost certainly be done from home? Why?

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Not all jobs can be done from home, and it's not all or nothing. I work with hardware, just having one person be able to work alone in our lab would be a massive improvement as there's test equipment we couldn't move. I don't see much risk there. Others might face similar challenges accessing materials (physical or virtual) that need to be kept somewhere secure.

EDIT: Also need to remember the challenges for parents. It can be incredibly hard to be productive at home with kids around, and ability to trade off the responsibility of watching them and working would be huge.

Yes, it's almost certain that people will be back in the office this year. Not everyone agrees that office jobs can be done remotely; even if they can in principle, many people don't in practice have a good enough home office setup to be truly productive.

I'd love to (I'm not in the USA, but I've been working from home since March 3rd). My job is stressful enough as it is, and I want a complete separation of my work life from everything else (after a burnout which wrecked me in 2004, that has been my policy).

I thought my commute (short: 40 mins maximum) was tedious, but then I realized how much it was helping me disconnecting from work mode.

There are 1001 active cases left in Australia so I hope that locked borders will mean that internally we will be back to somewhat normal by July top. Somewhat normal is that something like festivals and concerts will be still banned.

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