I, at worst, restated the parent poster's rude comment and stated I found it regrettable.
Additionally there are many other unbelievably rude replies to a small, positive anecdote I chose to share.
However, out of respect for your judgement I'll bow out of this discussion entirely.
Your original comment was great! And it got mostly positive responses, IIRC.
The problem is that negative responses hit harder than positive responses. If three people give you flowers and one explodes a bomb, the bomb makes the impact [1]. Unfortunately, the dynamics of internet discussion guarantee "bombs" on any divisive topic.
If you're not used to it, this has a dysregulating effect [2]. One gets sucked into a feedback loop where one can't help but respond to the outrage of being treated unfairly, but that just fuels the feedback loop. From my perspective, this is what happened here.
The important thing to understand is why your comment attracted negative responses in the first place. It had nothing to do with you, or your comment, or the community. It was just a mechanical consequence of it being the top-voted comment in a thread on a divisive topic—that's how the mechanics work. And it was the top-voted comment because it was interesting and thoughtful discussion (up to the point where it got derailed). Good things lead to bad things, so here's a cap on how good things can ever get [3], and all we can do is try to encourage the good and mitigate the bad.
[1] Lots of past explanation on that: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
[2] And getting used to it sucks—it's like being bitten by mosquitoes and wasps all over your body until you finally develop some sort of partial immunity to them, partial immunity being the best one can hope for. Most sane people wish to avoid that experience.
[3] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
* If everyone works in the office, and the work from home people are still remote, they get passed over for promotions and basically have a good chance of tanking their career. If everyone works from home, the work in office people lose a lot of human interaction that they need on a human level.
People who favor that style of working viewed COVID as a transformational event, and are going to push back hard on anything/anyone suggesting a return to the previous status quo, where WFH was something you had to be a relatively special snowflake to be afforded by many/most companies.
I feel like this was covered in the "tanking their career" part of my statement, but fair. It's rather important, I guess it deserves an explicit call out.
It seems very clear to me that there is room for a variety of workplace types. Strictly in-office, hybrid, and strictly remote.
I said I enjoyed getting together with my coworkers; I also said my ideal situation would involve spending a majority of time remote.
Someone who wants to be completely untethered from the office is threatened by someone who wants to work in the office a couple days a week. It means they will have to choose between moving and having job prospects within a much smaller area.
I'm not advocating for folks to stop working remotely. I'm not advocating anything.
I'll certainly never share another personal experience on HN, that's for sure.
I also don't interrupt others in the office, thanks very much. I've worked with those sorts of people (who hasn't?) and I resent them as well.
You enjoy being remote 100% of the time? Cool. I think there is clearly room for a variety of employment arrangements: fully remote, hybrid, fully in-office (yuck). I think you should do what's best for you.
There are a lot of people currently enjoying remote work who are rightfully worried about being forced back to the office for what they perceive as zero benefit. I’m not one of them, but I get where they’re coming from.
but not how the world works at all.
I think the future in many large firms will be to pair full-time remote folks with others who enjoy full time remote. There are sure to be many hybrid and full in office teams as well.
A similar transition occurred a decade ago when companies moved* offices to cities and away from suburban campuses.
* for some definition of “move”