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Comment by nkozyra | Hacker News Reader

Talking with various friends and people among my network I can say that it varies so much.

Some people would prefer to never go in, some people (like myself) would prefer an office presence but no requirement to attend and others would prefer to eliminate remote work.

I find this interesting because we tend to extrapolate our own thoughts and preferences to the general public. And this is kind of why working together is sometimes hard! We all want/expect/prefer different things in a working environment.

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I wish employers would take this opportunity to scrutinize what it is that is valuable about working together in-person versus what it is that actually worked remotely. There are plenty of articles about better documentation protocols and this or that workflow to support remote work, but the reality is employees often feel pain on those fronts because of unspoken power hierarchies that gatekeep changes only from a set of approved clerics as opposed to whatever the organization structure would actually imply on paper.

Not having to commute would save me a couple hundred thousand on buying a house.

If the majority of tech companies had gone fully remote, or even "1 day a week in office" the housing market would look very different right now.

I am kind of sad that didn't come to pass.

> would prefer an office presence but no requirement to attend

What does this really mean in practice, though? I ask this as a person who just applied to a remote position at a company based in the city I live in. In theory, I'd be glad to come in in-person during the early months to facilitate training, but in practice I wouldn't trust the company not to stop viewing me as remote during that time.

The company I work at maintains an office, but coming in is optional. Some people come in every day because they prefer not to work from home, some people come in just for special occasions that require in-person meetings. As long as everyone is clear that it really is optional, then there shouldn't be an issue.

Ideally I'd have days in office to take meetings (maybe 2x a week) with the other days being purely remote but that isn't practical for various reasons. I think having an office with lots of conference rooms and a hot desk available for people to use would be optimal for me and my role.

I've seen a lot of variance too. There are people on both sides of the argument who feel strongly. Whichever direction a company chooses there are going to be a lot of unhappy employees.

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