Because humans are social animals, and many of us enjoy interacting with IRL coworkers. It also allows much creativity and has various other benefits, both with your work - and with your mental well being.
What I want is not another day sitting in a god forsaken office after sitting in crappy traffic but rather the ability to go have a coffee, grab some lunch or just hang out and "Talk shop" with people regardless of being direct co-workers, friends, peers and whatnot. Those are the kinds of people who called me, messaged me and asked me how I was doing. THe only other former co-workers who keep up with me are ones who quit and found new jobs too - it's like since we're not still suffering we're no longer friends and all too often we see that as fulfilling social interactions without question.
I guess with hindsight I actually see the "office" as anti-social - it creates bad/poor behaviors, people find solace in common suffering and 9 times out of 10 all of my co-workers were actually dicks who only showed up to work to avoid their unhealthy home life and again, with hindsight, I see they tried making me ancillary to their unhealth work life too.
hard to explain it in a small text box, but I guess i just see the office environment as extremely fake, demoralizing and depressing - even though i've had some great memories through it - i'd rather not be captive to sitting in a cubicle chair and actually develop much more rewarding, enriching and valuable experiences that translate to more productivity and creativity in the end.
Often times i don't even get to choose my co-workers and if I did, those teams are often short lived and i think that corporate disruption to things that matter on a human to human level is something we're refusing to challenge/change because "it is the way it is". I get thrown on a new team, and its not new friends, it's now colleagues to suffer with and build empty relationships.
To try and empathize with a lot of the people bemoaning WFH, I believe they are just suffering from quarantines in general. I truly believe many of them would do fine if they could WFH 100%, but be able to go out with friends on weeknights and weekends.
You are absolutely right that the office is a pisspoor substitute for real comraderie, and I wish people would stop conflating the two.
Personally I love working from home. It gives me a lot more flexibility, I have no commute, I have my dog with me, I can cook lunch or prep for dinner, I can do small chores on a break or to clear my head, I can take my dog on a walk, and the list goes on. That said I don't have kids and I have a home office. I was also fortunate to start WFH about 5 months before COVID hit so I was able to go out with friends and what not which totally satisfied my social needs, proving to me that any added stress while working from home now is caused by things other than WFH itself.
When I used to work in an office there were a number of people that were difficult to deal with and/or annoying to put up with. While I didn't go full WFH at that job I did get to the point where I was working 2 days a week from home and those days were glorious. Being able to pick who you are actual friends with (verses being forced in pretending to be nice to some truly toxic people) is so much nicer. I am friends with a handful of people at my new (WFH) company but that's because we both wanted to be friends and went out of our way to build the friendship not because we were forced to work together.
My hope is that people don't "throw the baby out with the bathwater" when this is all over and there is a choice of WFH or going back to the office. That said, it's not be for everyone/every job but one silver lining of this terrible last year has been a number of my staunchly anti-WFH friends talk about how much they have enjoyed it and how they want to continue it at least for part of the week if not fully.
About 11 months a year (~1 month for holidays). Around 160 hours a month. So 1760 hours a year. And about 88k hours over my entire lifetime.
That works out to <<10 full years>> of my lifetime.
If I'm not socializing at work, albeit a bit constrained by the professional environment, something is super wrong. Restricting socialization strictly to weeknights and weekends seems... super radical to me.
I think your math actually suggests our way of life is actually extremely unhealthy with the assumption we should develop social systems at our places of employment that absolutely don't exist for any such activity.
We need those relationships - but the office way of work certainly isn't a healthy way to achieve them. People get fired, laid of, move to new orgs, get moved around, corporate policy is dictated from top down without regard to human experiences but rather bottom dollar value line.
Not saying it can't be done - but again - think back on all your working years - were many of your work relationships meaningful or just convenient? Do they know your family? kids? spouse? significant other? Do they wish you a happy birthday? did they call you during covid to see how your doing?
As with complaints against "working from home", I get the feeling that proponents of work socializing recognize there's a problem, but they have mis-identified the root cause.
Well, we can complain about it, but it's a fact of life. It's almost like complaining that gravity drags us down :-)
Plus, for a lot of people does give them... something to do. A purpose, an activity, a place where they can use their skills and use their intellect.
It's hard to do this alone if everyone else is working. I guess you could try mingling with the rich people and join charities?
But I do try to exercise my empathy and recognize for some endeavors it's is useful to collaborate. I just wish that people wouldn't attribute intrinsic necessity of physically close collaboration where it is not warranted.
My purpose or activity, even after I'm financially independent will be writing software, something I can do without having to be in close contact with people I am working with, and I in fact am much more productive when I'm not.
And honestly, even at 40 hours a week, I still have a lot of time in which I've formed my best social relationships. My coworkers are nice people, I just have shockingly little in common with them outside of work.
I've worked in shared offices for 20+ years and have made a lot of long-term friends through them.
That's an entire mini-lifetime I'd be giving my employer. And I don't think I ever will have to - I can force myself to be remote the rest of my working life. And that mini-lifetime is mine..and that's priceless.
I've had 1 or 2 coworkers out of hundreds I became any level of "friends" with, and the closest of whom I didn't even work directly with. Actually, one of the coworkers I'm friends with, I met in a remote team with us living across the country from each other.
As a business owner, I am not sure you would hire on the same axis. I would personally not hire someone that can only work for 20 hours a week, there is too much to do.
Why would they care if the output was the result of fewer hours? If they wanted to pay me by the hour, they could have negotiated that.
At-will salaried employment cuts both ways :) and in this case, everyone is happy. Anyone wanting more hours out of me is just trying to exploit my labor. I'm already getting paid fair value for what I'm producing.
If you are hiring salaried individuals on the basis on how many hours they put in a week, then you might be focusing on the wrong metrics. There were plenty of people in tech doing 20 hours of work a week, and spending the remaining 20 hours on hacker news.
I bemoan WFH, but not because of work output.
When you're hiring make this known so people can do their own filtering on their end, as well.
I know I get a lot of benefit from not commuting, from being able to make a healthy lunch out of my fridge & from doing laundry when I would have been walking to the coffee shop.
If anything I “work” more remote than I ever did in the office.
Maybe consider contracting instead?
Just because you haven’t made friends doesn’t mean the rest of us haven’t. On top of this, work friendships can just be that. Work friendships. Ones that last as long as you’re at that job, not all of them have to go outside of it. And that’s okay.
Also - it's springtime which means it's review season - the results are in and the entity paying me for my output is very happy with my output!
The option to go as I please (which would probably average one or two days a week) would be excellent, though!
My general thoughts are that there are a few people that got strong armed into returning, but most that are back in the office are happy to be there.
Some people have been really struggling with WFH and just can't make it work well for them, and they understandably want to get back to the office. That's great, and they should do it! But why not also let people who have been thriving under WFH continue to do it?
I have extensive experience managing and working remote and non-remote and I've never seen any benefit to non-remote work. Productivity and creativity are higher with wfh and stress and burnout are way lower.