Society wise yes, but if you had an office job, you essentially take inbound mail and transfrom it into outbound mail. That has been possible to do from home in the 80s. If you work in a large corporation, you also don't talk to people directly, you call them. That's possible from home too.

Until the industrial revolution, every work was home work.

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rbanffy a day ago | parent [-]

Everyone working in an office (maintenance excepcted) could work from home right now. The fact so few of us do, and that so many companies (read "people who are invested in urban office space") force employees to work from offices.

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1718627440 a day ago | parent [-]

I honestly still see some benefit from working together, quick meetings over lunch and the psychological effects of leaving work. Needing to physically leave your workplace helps your brain leave work at work.

	▲	rbanffy a day ago \| parent [-]
		The downsides of it are well known, however. Higher costs of living near work, less mobility (both home and work need to be mostly in the same place, so you end up missing opportunities), unmet demands for housing (resources invested in office space), more time spent commuting in public transport (or worse, cars), and so on. Even for employers, the cost is limiting where you can hire talent. I live in Ireland and, while a lot of talent is concentrated in the Dublin area, there are other talent pools that are simply out of reach to us. I too love to meet my colleagues in person, but the cost for society, and for myself, are non-trivial. I would love if we had a weekly office day, so we could have meetings, lunch, discuss work, projects, intersections on what we are doing, and so on.