I no longer work at Google, but whether I want to go into the office is probably heavily influenced by the fact that I have a ~15 minute door to door bike commute through a nice town (Ann Arbor) to my nice coworking space.
I think that the scary part to me about the idea of all jobs going remote is that "going remote" seems an antidote to:
- Bad office designs (no privacy, poor light, etc.) - Bad urban planning (long commutes, poor transportation options) - Bad coworkers
Of those three, only the "bad coworkers" one seems inevitable that some people will have to deal with. (After all, those people need to work somewhere.)
If I had to commute two hours a day to work in an office with no privacy, my opinion on this would surely be different. One of the people on my team at Google lived in Oakland and commuted to Mountain View every day: that sounded awful. But we also don't have to design offices to offer no privacy and we know how to design better cities that don't offer horrific commutes.