[peferron]

Don't assume that your own preferences apply to everyone.

I worked remotely for a few years, with my own dedicated room/office in my home, and am much happier now that I moved back to our company office even though it has an open-floor plan. I enjoy face-to-face contact with my coworkers, and the light level of noise really doesn't distract me from my work—if anything, the surrounding activity motivates me.

We don't all thrive in the same environments. The best you can do is find out what environment is best for you and then work for companies (or start your own) that provide this environment.

Edit: since you're also mentioning health and commuting, I bike 30-45 mins each way with most of it on a shoreline trail. It's a net positive for my health since I know I wouldn't exercise as much otherwise. If I had to commute 1 hour or more by car, then I would likely agree with you—I completely despise long car commutes and would rather work from home at this point.

[piva00]

The same for me, worked for almost 2 years remotely and thoroughly missed having co-workers, face-to-face communication and discussions. You lose a whole level of expressiveness being remote, doesn't matter what tools you try to use to mitigate that (video-conference doesn't cover having a whiteboard to draw and people interacting, virtual whiteboards are clunky to use with a trackpad/mouse, etc.).

The perfect situation for me would be to have an office where I can go to when I feel like or it's necessary and working from home whenever I can.

I also like pairing or mob-programming a lot and still haven't found a proper solution to do those remotely.

[fapjacks]

Using Zoom is totally fine for pair/mob programming, but if you want a collaborative IDE, Cloud9 offers this functionality, and everybody on the task can hop onto Zoom (or really anything) in order to facilitate the audio/video. People behave as though there is no way to do this because of their preference for doing it live (the "proper solution"). But this is absolutely possible and I would say actually better facilitated using these tools than everybody gathered 'round a single machine. Anybody can jump in at any moment and make a comment and a change and have it immediately propagated to everyone else's screen. No need for "Let me sit in the chair" or taking five minutes to nitpick over the minutiae of programming to convey an idea.

[lizavp]

Working from home for two years I miss co-workers however I don't miss the commute.