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Comment by wood-porch | Hacker News Reader

It appears I’m one of the very few happy about this change. I miss my colleagues at work and having fun discussions about programming, investing, podcasts. I miss the adhoc discussions about a problem someone was encountering and helping them fix it. I miss talking to new people in the kitchen about what they did that weekend. I miss playing board games with a group of 10 people from different departments and teams. I miss the happy hours, the excitement, the kickoff of a new project. I loved my job, then WFH happened, I switched teams, found that still boring, went to another company, left within 3 months because that was still boring. I’ve lost a lot of joy from remote work. I’m excited that within the next 2 years I’ll be able to find a place to work that doesn’t work remotely, because, frankly I hate it.

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Literally none of what you listed is work. Board games, happy hours, friends: these are all things you can (and should) be doing in your non-work hours.

For some of us, work is where our social circle. Not all of it and definitely not a reliable one. But if I’m spending 8 hours a day with people, I’m likely to develop friendships with them since that’s easy.

Guess what? I’m your coworker and I didn’t miss you. I prefer to spend commute time with my family and loved ones. I prefer to eat healthy food with my wife and not snacks with you. I prefer to work and do only work fully focused during 4h/day instead of procrastinating around the office during 2h and having to spend the remaining 6h with my ass on the chair while using headphones because you are making too much noise.

No, I didn’t miss you at all. I’ll submitting my resignation, don’t worry.

That’s all great to hear, but I think what most of us are frustrated about is the mandate aspect. You are welcome to go to the office every day if you want, and if you want to see coworkers in the office who are friends then go plan that with them.

For the rest of us its been a roller coaster of wfh being forbidden pre-covid, to wfh being what “saved the companies”, to now it being a problem all while we’ve delivered for the company (Ive been with AWS for 7 years). All the while, folks like myself have had to make decisions like where to buy a home given messages of “amazon has fully embraced wfh/remote work, we won’t be forcing a return to office” [1] to now this… its out of touch from reality.

1 - https://www.cnbc.com/2022/09/07/andy-jassy-says-he-wont-forc...

I’m right there with you. Turns out talented people tend to be really interesting people to talk to. My favorite moments over my career were in person, often late at night when we were solving a hard problem. There is something about working on difficult challenges together and the bonds that form from it.

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