[jovdg]

I'm in Belgium. I absolutely don't look forward to it. Just posting to make sure the "silent majority" does not stay silent. We had major changes in the past because of that silent majority thinking "it's just a fad, it will pass"...

[apexalpha]

Fair enough! But hopefully we can in the future choose ourselves between being in the office 5 days a week of fully remote.

I understand not everyone has an hour long commute or has a home situation suitable for work. But before Corona I didn't have a choice and the 5-days-in-office norm was almost set in stone. Maybe if you're lucky your company allows working from home on Fridays.

Although, I can't comment on working from home with Belgian internet. ;)

[jovdg]

First: my employer allowed an average of one day from home per week (you can schedule them as you see fit). Also, internet in Belgium is reasonable, depends on what you pay ofc.

I think choice is most important. But whatever the choice, it has some consequences. With "work from the office", team meetings are assumed to be in person (everyone in the same room). With "work from home", team meetings are assumed to be online. Both require different infra, and if there is a 50/50 mix, you just need both...

Every meeting starts with 5 to 15 minutes of hassling with the online infra (someone got a new laptop, browser update, local infra was replaced and is not compatible with our stack) - this is how we had it for the past few weeks since we were allowed to work from the office again.

And indeed, it depends on your home situation: while my kids were home schooled too, work from home was just terrible.

However, if I can work from home, how can I justify sending my kids to school...?

So maybe now is the time to f* it all and become a stay-at-home dad

[ghaff]

>But whatever the choice, it has some consequences.

I think this is one reason you see some fairly strong pushback on the idea of a lot of permanent remoting. When everyone has a choice, those who want co-located teams actually don't really have a choice. I say this as someone on a very distributed team who has been on and off, more or less remote for about 15 years now. But if the rest of your team chooses to be remote, you can presumably choose to be in an office but you'll be mostly talking to people over video.

[jovdg]

Agree, but it still has another side: when me and a number of co-workers choose to be mostly in the office, you get some form of discrimination. The people in the room get my full, almost undivided attention, while all remote people get a time share.

How long before this discrimination will be considered unacceptable and all "offline" communications will be frowned upon, so to speak?

[ghaff]

>How long before this discrimination will be considered unacceptable and all "offline" communications will be frowned upon, so to speak?

Hopefully immediately on a distributed team. No one is going to keep you from having beers with your local buds. But making decisions while having beers with your local buds should absolutely be out of scope. That's how distributed teams operate.

Which comes back to my earlier comment. If half the team goes remote, the half of the team in the office can't just pretend those who aren't in the office don't exist. And management needs to take action if that happens. So, yeah, if a choice is given to not be in the office, that's going to/should affect you even if you're fine with going back to business as usual.