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Comment by chadash | Hacker News Reader

It seems like there are many engineers who want to work remotely full time going forward. I'm in the opposite boat. If a company doesn't have an office, I don't want to work there. I like having a place to go to that isn't my home. I like meeting and talking to employees in different parts of the business without having to setup zoom calls for that. I enjoy the social and collaborative aspects of in-person work. I do enjoy the ability to work remotely on occasion, but I want to be in the office most of the time.

People who don't like remote work are not out there making noise, because we're still living in a world where most jobs at least have the option of in-person work. But there's plenty of us who want to leave home on weekday mornings.

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A big disconnect I see is that some offices and teams are much more pleasant to be around in person. There are companies that feel like prisons -- windowless open office setups with oppressive noise and distractions. There are others with a bunch of cool people who are respectfully quiet when others are working.

It can feel like an "pro-office" person is threatening to consign you to half your waking life in jail if you work in the former.

My hope for the WFH movement is that actual thought is put into office floor plans and setup. Open space offices are hopefully the first casualty of the next few years.

I'm a bit worried that things will accidentally go the other direction: if employees are partially remote it will be hard to justify giving them their own piece of the office. You'll have to lug everything with you every day and won't feel any ownership of anything there. It will feel like working out of a hotel room instead of your own domain.

This is a really good point.

Even within Apple I am sure there is huge variation in "quality-of-office". It's not like every Apple employee gets to work in the Starship, even in Cupertino. But for those that do, they probably are looking forward to returning.

> If a company doesn't have an office, I don't want to work there. I like having a place to go to that isn't my home. I like meeting and talking to employees in different parts of the business without having to setup zoom calls for that. I enjoy the social and collaborative aspects of in-person work. I do enjoy the ability to work remotely on occasion, but I want to be in the office most of the time.

I'm 100% the opposite of you. If I never stepped foot in an office, never saw a coworker in person, never had in-person social interactions for work again, for the rest of my life, I'd be one step closer to my dream life. Thankfully people like you have the vast majority of jobs available. Hopefully the rest of us will have more options moving forward.

Thanks for saying how I feel, though I respect an employee’s ability to choose whether they want remote work or not, and then to make that choice known by advocating for it or leaving for a position that offers it. There will be many more now, and many more will have flexibility.

But just as I wouldn’t impose on someone to force them to be in the office, I think some people definitely value the separation.

Same, and I think this is the majority view. The noise about WFH is a turn-off as well and I’d rather steer clear of those making it—-if it’s that big a deal to you, there’s plenty of remote work out there.

The vast, vast majority of jobs are in-office jobs. It's extremely unlikely that supply of WFH jobs exceeds demand considering it only just became a mainstream thing ~18 months ago. Perhaps in certain locations WFH is still the temporary default but in any place with eased/lifted pandemic restrictions the default is returning to in office.

Yeah, some people just love the micro-managing, busy-work, ass kissing, dragging others into pointless meetings, office politics, shows of autority, water cooler "friends", back-stabbing, etc, and those aren't as easy with WFH.

> I like meeting and talking to employees in different parts of the business without having to setup zoom calls for that. I enjoy the social and collaborative aspects of in-person work.

Whether you see these as a distraction or an asset (and more generally, whether you see work as a place to do work or a holistic pile of things) seems to be the dividing line for people.

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