But for workplaces that presume WFH is cost-free and all benefits, someone there is suffering on behalf of the people who WFH.
The work in office crowd also forcibly shifts costs onto their coworkers by forcing them into the office under threat of firing, but the inverse never happens. I have a disability and had a legal entitlement to WFH for years which was routinely denied as a result of fraud where HR departments would claim undue hardship regardless of legitimacy. Since COVID this no longer flies as there is abundant proof that employers can in fact perform such accommodations trivially in many cases.
Work in office cost shifting was enforced through force and crime, so I have little sympathy for complaints of the costs of the work from home crowd voluntarily doing what they prefer to do.
This is a location where I have expended great effort in creating a productive and specialized workspace engineered to deal with personal medical issues largely using money out of my own pocket. I went to this expense, not just to benefit myself, but out of a sincere desire to be as productive as possible at my job.
My point is that in situations like yours, there's always a loser, and they often don't get a choice. You're benefitting, but the people you have an agreement with have passed the cost of keeping you in the loop and productive onto someone else, and that someone else can't decide to end remote work for you if the burden it too high.
I'm sorry your job sucks, but I suggest again: get another job. Wasting time telling other people in a completely different work environment how much your job sucks isn't going to persuade them that they're in the wrong.
My observation is in general, not about any specific situation. Remote work has costs, and your leaders have decided those costs are better than the in-person costs. That's fine, and in a fully-remote environment it can work, but pretending like it's strictly "better" is unjustified.
We have NO IDEA how we’re going to maintain our current levels of energy usage even 100 years from now. We’ll run out of gas, run facefirst into global warming, and electrification with renewables will require a monumental amount of scarce resources and work.
We have a great solution to part of this problem. Move electrons, not people. Even if office culture really was all that and you’re right about everything, at the end of the day it doesn’t even matter because it’s unsustainable. We can’t move to solutions like electric self-driving cars fast enough, the electric co-worker MUST be part of the solution.
So I argue it doesn’t matter if remote is better. The costs of offices are increasing more and more and more and something had to give. It’s not if in office be remote work is better, the question is what benefits most form our limited abilities to work out of an office? Right now office culture is STILL running on borrowed time by having the commuters not pay for the externalities of their emissions. Of course on-site is important but that 5 day in the office culture was ALWAYS going to die.
You can sure bet I worked my ass off to reduce that companies need for an on-site presence. It was also because one of my backups was disabled and I didn’t want to push that cost onto them. Another went for into a car accident and went on disability and it was bad enough that their personality changed when they came back. Shit fucking enraged me, I just did math in my head about how many employees my employer killed or maimed on the highways yearly with its forced office attendance policy and it was a decent number.
Of course, I respect the sacrifices of anybody doing such work and staying in the office so people can stay home.
Yet what we saw with on-premise work wasn’t that. What we saw was managers misappropriating company resources to have employees keep them company and make them feel important and follow them around to flex on their contemporaries. Who threw tantrums and threatened peoples livelihoods and broke disability accommodation laws to get their way. There are people who need to “come in to work” but it’s a LOT less than who was actually coming into work.
And there's zero reason to believe that driving to work killed anyone. That's like saying being born killed people. The causes of people's car accidents are what killed them, not the reason they were driving.
There are also a significant number of companies that are remote only and successful and totally reject the need for this at all but of course - this won’t work for all workplaces or all workers. Just saying.
Maybe the tech will catch up to that, but it currently doesn't.
Let's say your employee works 9-5, but really they start their commute at 8:30 and get home at 5:30 so it takes 9 hours. Imagine how much better some employees would perform with an extra hour of rest a day instead of essentially forcing them to drive because face to face interaction is awesome.
Some employees are literally not going to go to one meeting the entire day. They will drive. Sit at a desk. Talk to nobody. Then go home. It's a strange thing.
Also, just as there are people on tech who really thrive off the face to face interaction, there's a whole lot of people who got into technology BECAUSE they aren't good at face to face interactions.
For roles that require little/no team coordination, it's acceptable to not work in the office most days. That isn't what a software developer job is, however, nor is it the vast majority of white-collar jobs generally.
Yes, you must commute. Yes, it takes time. But that's what the money is for. You wouldn't do this for free, so they compensate you for the inconvenience. The hour lost in a commute is infinitely made up for in the human interfacing that happens in person.
Specialization predates dedicated work spaces by millennia—the ancient Egyptians didn't "do literally everything themselves", they had quite sophisticated division of labor, with craftsmen regularly operating out of their homes. Even after people started receiving wages, work continued to be routinely done at home. It was less efficient to maintain a second space large enough for all your laborers than it was to just send them home with the materials they needed to get the job done, then have them come back with the finished product.
The industrial revolution changed that because now there were very expensive machines that were doing mostly actual work, and the people needed to be where those machines were. Once people were primarily interacting with ideas centralization still continued to be preferable because communication technology was limited.
COVID proved that the centralization is no longer necessary—our communication tech is sufficient to run an effective team distributed across the world, and very few jobs have the kind of large, expensive shared machinery that started the centralization process. There may still be preferences towards shared spaces, but those are personal preferences, they're no longer just the reality of work.
There was a 200 year window where centralization was a necessary feature of industrialization and knowledge work, but that era has come to an end, and it certainly wasn't long enough to become some sort of evolutionary fact of life!
Further, this doesn't even disagree with my claim; what you've said here doesn't in any way support the claim that the "default" way of working was at home, and only "recently" did work centralize. Quite the opposite; work has always been "remote" in some sense. Even just practically, few people literally had the luxury to live exactly in the place where they worked, down to the room, as a great deal of work actually took place outside of any "room".
Additionally, COVID did not prove anything except that we can temporarily mitigate losses by working apart. Since, it's become very clear that such work styles create undue burdens on the folks who don't work remotely in order to support those who do, unless a company is entirely dedicated to remote work, which nearly none are.
If your company landed somewhere on that spectrum that you're unhappy with, that sucks, but that suggests it's time to get a new job, not bitterly caricature your co-workers as only wanting to work remotely in order to avoid interacting with you.