I know it's a meme on HN to say everyone likes WFH, but I (and many but not ICs around me) thrive more in person.

I am 100% more effective in person where I can dev and my desk and bounce ideas off if team mates around me verbally. This can be recreated in a remote environment by having things like a team Discord that folks sit on, but it can feel forced at times (just like communiting to the office I suppose).

My take might be heavily skewed though. I am in games and our environment is highly collaborative.

>"I know it's a meme on HN to say everyone likes WFH"

I work from home for the last 25 years (I am an independent vendor, design and develop business critical products for medium size businesses). I have no desire to socialize with employees of my clients and when I am in a mood I have real fiends to spend time with.

Can't imagine wasting my time in corporate cubicles or open concept offices

I hate WFH, personally. My company is actually closing the office I work out of due to lack of use, so I'm in the opposite scenario from "forced-RTO", I'm being moved to "forced-WFH." It's the right call objectively, the office is genuinely very empty, but I'm a bit annoyed about it. I'm actually going to be paying to rent a desk out of a coworking facility so I don't have to WFH. If this situation sucks, there's a real chance I'll be changing jobs later this year because of this.

I pretty much dislike WFH and for many of the reasons you mention and more, so took a local in-office job last year after being at home since COVID. I was excited to return to a more social environment until I found that "the office" itself was itself entirely problematic. Cheapass flatpack desks all rammed in together. No noise or sound proofing, giant sweatshop room. Sub-par monitors and equipment generally. Grumpy coworkers complaining constantly about the very conversations (both on-topic and off-topic/non-work) that I came in to have a chance to experience again.

And half the staff was just WFH anyways, or remote, so the collaboration opportunities... diminished.

I even saw this happening at Google before I left there, which had formerly been a ... luxury office. Packing people in like sardines, forcing people to "reserve" desks. Bad parking and/or transit situations.

I get it when employers face financial or real estate crunches. But in the last 10-15 years (I've been working for 30) -- even pre-COVID -- I feel like some switch went off in tech industry leadership brains that is just outright disrespectful. Paying high salaries to engineers and then providing them with uncomfortable accommodations. Makes little sense to me.

I'm back to WFH and the isolation that comes with it. In part because the office environment was actually not what I was hoping for. Because the industry ruined it.

If you genuinely "thrive" more in person then go live next to your office. No point sitting in a 30-60 minute commute. America/UK took the brunt of the cost transitioning towards knowledge work, but kept the costs of manufacturing (shipping people around). Even if it's slightly more productive, the cost is externalized on the workers making them poorer and sickly.

>Oh no you don't understand I need a compress decompress cycle I TRIVE when I burn as much gas as possible