[shade]

I don't want to go back. The one bright side from the last 14 months was getting to experience working on a remote-only team and discovering that it's great. We have a team distributed across offices anyway, and meetings go a lot better when everyone is using the microphone on their laptop instead of a terrible conference room setup. It's also tamped down somewhat on "let's have a meeting to talk about that" in favor of asynchronous communication.

Unfortunately, while our leadership hasn't said anything official yet, there's so much writing on the wall that you'd have to be illiterate not to see it. They're making anyone who has an office go back full time next month and have been pretty much ignoring the employee surveys saying people want remote flex and a hybrid policy.

My wife is job hunting right now so I'll grudgingly go back so as not to disrupt my family's health insurance, but once she finds something, I'd say it's good odds I'm going to start looking. It's a shame because I like my team, but I don't feel a need to actually see them in person more than once or twice a year. I'd much rather work in my nice home office where the bathroom's never occupied, people aren't walking around/talking and being distracting, my dog wanders in occasionally to see what I'm doing, and my daughter runs in to say hello when she gets home from school. None of the office "perks" measure up to those, for me.