It probably won’t be the norm in the future. I’ve been waiting for a “Big 4” company to announce some sort of permanent WFH plan but they haven’t budged, and that’s a bad sign.
- Financial: Companies are saving major cash by reducing office space and the associated perks. It's no longer a fight to serve the best meals, have the best designed space, and the greatest views. Further, eliminating business travel increased margins across the board.
- Logistics: Many companies in the Bay Area (especially SF proper), NYC, Boston, Chicago, DC, and other places are highly dependent on mass transit. How many people will want to use it after this?
- Social: Some % of the population has been convinced that anyone can contract and die of covid quickly and easily. All the restaurants, coffee shops, bars, etc, etc around their offices have withered and many have died in the last year. If companies don't feed their people, will they hope everyone brings a lunch?
- Political: The Biden Admin just announced masks are likely necessary into 2022. Further, we're seeing new covid variants/mutations triggering lockdowns all over again.
Any one of those may not be enough but collectively, it will create major resistance to any sort of "in the office" demands.
Working from home doesn't work for companies who don't know how to do it. It's not the same as working in an office and of course many companies are doing it wrong right now because they leaped into it without any knowledge of how to do it.
But plenty of companies have done very well with working from home, and had all the healthy teamwork anyone could ask for. It's not a matter of opinion, it's proven fact.
You can say exactly the same from the opposite perspective.
I'm a freelancer and while I am _personally_ more than happy with remote work (prefering it for many years), many people are not. It is also a cultural thing, agreed. But the culture based on personal contact isn't a bad thing per se. In many cases it is superior, especially when considering mixed variations. Regarding the argument that companies get remote work wrong, the same is true for the former normal of physical presence. There is simply much more experience with this. It will not need much time, until remote work shows his nasty sides large-scale too. And they are there yet. Control mechanisms as one of the more unsubtle examples become more sophisticated every day.
Forcing people into the office isn’t about producing useful output.
It’s about embedding an expectation, and routine.
Kegerators, snack bars, they’re not about motivation. But embedding buy in.
I think this touches on an important aspect of working remotely: a high percentage of open source developers participate in these collaborations not because of financial reward, but because they are on some technical level passionate about the project(s) they are involved in. In other words, they find relatively strong intrinsic motivation in their endeavors in comparison to strictly external rewards such as remuneration.
Personally, I find that the presence/lack of such intrinsic motivation plays a far greater factor when working remotely than when I made hours at the office. In the office, social interaction and a clear-cut shift would compensate for otherwise intellectually unrewarding tasks, whereas at home the same kind of tasks often seem to turn into solitary mental struggles.
In other words, the freedom and efficiency of working remote can be wonderful, but I find it only tends to work out like when I'm (on some level) genuinely enthusiastic about the work at hand.