> Unless you live close to the office, you're probably looking at least an hour on either side of your day commutting

That's a choice though. I just lived where I worked. I can see the argument when you're talking about low-paid work, but if you are a software engineer, you can probably afford to not spend an hour commuting.

> going to the office pretty much sucks.

This is a highly personal thing though. For me, having children home in the afternoon drastically dampens my productivity, and the benefits from being there extend to greater awareness of what other people are working on, and decreased perceived barrier to collaboration. When you see another developer in the kitchen just sipping coffee or waiting for an elevator, you don't feel like you're interrupting to ask him how he got past a certain issue, or in telling him about a new tool that you just tried. You can post those thoughts in a public channel! But the person who "needs" to see it might not see it, and sending a DM is kind of a demand such that many people won't do it unless absolutely necessary.

Text is for many people just not superior to communicating in person. Slack is a simulacrum of in-person communication, not the platonic ideal.

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preg_match 21 hours ago | parent | next [-]

While you can lower your commute by living closer to work, you should understand that what you’re doing is taking a drastic pay cut for the pleasure of in-office work.

In-office work might be worth it, maybe. Is it worth 20,000 dollars a year of your money? Probably not.

At that point, it’s probably still cheaper to rent a wework or something.

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Apocryphon a day ago | parent | prev [-]

What general area did you live and work in? Was it actually Silicon Valley or a tech hub?

With remote work, you don’t have to work at home. Many simply work at a co-working space or similar environment that isn’t the actual office.

The colocated collaboration you’re talking about is also highly variable. It’s possible to be on a team where you’re working on projects that actually primarily involve others from other teams not in the same physical offices, or even the same company. So you’re describing benefits that are also highly personal, not a universal good. Software is an industry that would seem to have outgrown in-person communication.

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xp84 21 hours ago | parent [-]

Worked in San Francisco. Lived a 20-minute walk away from work, in a 1-bedroom apartment. My mortgage + HOA cost about 16% of my gross pay. This is in the mid-2010s.

I have done coworking, most recently for about 2 years of full-time at WeWork. Coworking is, depending on how busy the venue, just a quieter version of the home office, or, like working in a shared workspace at a very large university that you just transferred into: There are dozens of people around, but you don't know any of them, and they're all busy doing their own thing. You have no non-recreational business even talking to anyone. You can make a point of trying to chat people up around lunchtime, but you're starting from scratch, and also, as a 'stranger' subject to people wondering if you're talking to them with a motive to either sell them something or flirt with them. This is no substitute for social contact, except for the most extraverted who truly LOVE talking to new people.

> It’s possible to be on a team where you’re working on projects that actually primarily involve others from other teams not in the same physical offices,

I did this when working in person, a decade ago. Yes, we had zooms often. But also we travelled and met those people periodically. I learned important things from observing them using the software that I wouldn't have otherwise. I would not have scheduled zoom meetings for each of them to share their screen while they worked in the software. That would have felt burdensome. Today, most companies won't approve any travel for engineers, product managers, etc. Maybe for sales guys to take people to steak dinners. But they assume that for us, Zoom is an equal substitute.

> Software is an industry that would seem to have outgrown in-person communication

This is an idea that makes no sense at all to me. Look, I totally respect that some people really dislike all or most of these things: in-person talking, small talk, reading (or being aware of your own) body language and tone, wearing pants and shoes all day, being away from family, commuting... Maybe fully remote work is totally best for you! I'm just saying that it's not best for everyone, it's not an automatic 'most efficient choice,' it's not automatically best for morale, it's not best for all families. And to top it off, while businesses pushing RTO seem like the ones being cynical, it shouldn't be hard to see that the other businesses that are refusing to have a physical office today have their own cynical reasons that aren't for the workers' benefit.

	▲	Apocryphon 20 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> Worked in San Francisco. Lived a 20-minute walk away from work, in a 1-bedroom apartment. My mortgage + HOA cost about 16% of my gross pay. This is in the mid-2010s. Sounds reasonable for someone earlier in their career. More difficult later on, especially with an expanded household. > I'm just saying that it's not best for everyone, it's not an automatic 'most efficient choice,' it's not automatically best for morale, it's not best for all families. > it shouldn't be hard to see that the other businesses that are refusing to have a physical office today have their own cynical reasons that aren't for the workers' benefit. Perhaps, but given that the pendulum has shifted towards RTO and away from remote work, the latter seems like a much rarer practice, less worth critiquing. The core problem is whether in-office, remote, or hybrid (personally, I would be most in favor of a hybrid compromise, but at a less frequent in-office cadence than current industry standards), management is setting mandates rather than giving teams, let alone individuals, the flexibility to figure out what's best for their workflow. And more often than not, it's companies that have physical offices that are mandating use of them, rather than remote work, for obvious reasons. And it's most likely true that most companies have physical offices rather than have eliminated them.