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Comment by PragmaticPulp | Hacker News Reader

> I maybe in the minority in this comments section but I genuinely enjoy working from office.

In my experience, plenty of people enjoy working from the office. Many of us enjoy a mix of in-office and WFH.

The comments sections on these articles tend to receive a lot of projection from people who simply hate their jobs and view WFH as a partial antidote to that.

That, and a lot of comments from people who have absurdly long commute times. In the past I've had good success with mixed WFH/in-office schedules and very flexible schedules to allow people to reduce their overall commute burden. For those who can't or won't relocate closer to the office, full remote companies are always an option. For everyone else, I suspect we'll see a trend toward returning to office for the sheer efficiency and communication improvements.

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> The comments sections on these articles tend to receive a lot of projection from people who simply hate their jobs and view WFH as a partial antidote to that.

I resent the implication that I like WFH because I hate my job. I love my job, I'm good at it and I'm a bit of a workaholic by most standards (but wouldn't if I didn't genuinely love it). However, over my career, I found that I'm much more productive when working from home and this is not only for solo work but also for team work.

I believe that remote work works better for a certain type of people, I am good at making friends both in and out of work but I find too many extended social interactions from being in the same place to be draining and that they sap my productivity so I'm pretty much the text book definition of an introvert. That doesn't stop me as a manager from doing one on ones, interacting with my employees and calling or using slack but it does mean that sometimes when I have work where I need to concentrate, it's helpful to be at home. I have noticed in the past though that it takes a certain type of person to work well from home especially for long periods of time.

For context, I work in a remote first company, we were remote before the pandemic and before that I worked as a consultant so I've been remote for the last 10 years.

If a person says "a lot of people like X because they hate Y" they are not saying that if someone likes X it implies Y. When I catch myself inverting conditional probabilities into a frame that makes me feel attacked it usually means that I've got some other thing going on that has nothing to do with what the person said.

You are right, if one reads it very charitably but in my experience "a lot of people like X because they hate Y" is very often used as a writing device to make a point and denigrate X. In this case, no, it doesn't say that all people who work from home hate their jobs but it says that the probably of people working from home hating their jobs is higher without proof to further their argument. I've seen a lot of that on both sides of the fence in the WFH.

So, when Wework's CEO says that people who work from home are the least engaged, when I read in this thread that people who don't want to work from home must not like their family (paraphrasing), I take it to mean for what it is, an insult in order to push one's favoured view and I dislike this.

> The comments sections on these articles tend to receive a lot of projection from people who simply hate their jobs and view WFH as a partial antidote to that.

I would actually argue that this is backwards; I really like what I do for work, but I've found that the worst part of my job is dealing with office politics, constantly being interrupted, and (like you said) the commute/time commitment associated with being in the office.

At this point, it's an affront to be told that I can no longer do laundry during the day, finish chores in 10 minute periods between work, or spend the day with my family and/or in my private office in pajamas. Especially when it's just because a C-level somewhere in the branches of my company is feeling lonely and/or bored.

To say my love for remote work is a reflection of my job satisfaction is outright unfair; Life is simply better when I'm not subjected daily to the dreadful routine of going into the office.

That's a pretty unfair characterization of people who prefer to work remotely.

However, your last point about letting remote employees stay remote and letting people who prefer office-work to come into the office, I optimistically agree with. It works when everyone knows how to work with remote employees, and that the option is exactly that: an option. This last year and a half I hope has been helpful in getting everyone up to speed on that. It requires a cultural dedication, and assuming people have learned something from this remote experience, they'll carry that knowledge and flexibility with them going forward.

Mixed WFH/office should be 100% voluntary or it isn't truly mixed.

If I can't decide, with zero notice to my employer, to spend a month living and working on the other side of the country, it's not mixed. Anything that requires I live in driving distance of my company's office is not mixed.

Mixed means the office is there if anyone wants to come in and work from the office, but if someone wants to spend every month living in a different state (or even a different country, but I understand there are tax issues with that) they can do that too.

Alternately, I would accept something like the way oil rigs work, where instead of "you work X days a week at the office", it's "you work X months of the year at the office". I might be able to tolerate working from the office 3 months out of every year in the office if I can spend the other 9 months as a digital nomad.

(one thing this pandemic made me want to do is to not take travel for granted... I want to see, if not the world, at least the rest of this country before I die, and I'll be damned if my employer gets in the way of that)

If you have a job where you have to deal with physical things (servers, printers, etc) then you have to be in the office at least some of the time. Somebody working on software may never need to be in the office. The person who works in software may be able to voluntarily choose to work from home or in the office but the other person may not be able to choose. This is still a mixed office in my view.

I bet there's also more than a few people who work at places where work surges up to or beyond a full day but other days there's not much to do. If they're not empowered to actually treat their salaried job as a salaried job working from home is a great way to side step that issue.

People who love to work in the office often lack social skills to find friends outside of work and it is their substitute. What I mean that everyone is different.

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