[philliphaydon]

I saw a comment in the Apple thread where someone said people who don't like WFH hate their family, or themselves. Which was a shocking comment.

I love spending time with my family and daughter, but I get paid to work to support my family, and working from home makes me feel distracted.

I thought working from home would be the best part of a job, but losing the separation of work/life, going from avoiding meetings to looking forward to them for social interaction with my co-workers, missing the lunch time outings with co-workers, the chit-chat, asking for help or being asked for help.

I've come to really miss working in the office. I was WAY more productive, kept better hours, and coming home from work to family was great.

[thanatos519]

^ This. Going to the office was my social life, because I'm an expat and the office was full of other geeky expats. I even went to the office when the rest of my team was in another timezone, but I had lost all opportunities for pair programming. When 100% WFH hit, I was talking about maybe 2 days a week in the office being the right balance, but now I'm thinking I could WFH effectively a maximum of 1 day a week.

[Cthulhu_]

It's the first / second / third place theorem; first place is your home and family life, second place is the workplace, and third life is leisure and social activities like the pub.

It's a really mixed bag for me. I finally left my previous job, even though I could finally work at HQ (instead of being sent out to customers) after a few years, and it was a very cushy HQ office with really fun colleagues and all that. On the other hand, they didn't have the work that gave me the gratification I wanted from a job.

I got a different job where the work is pretty much perfect, but the office is bad (basic linoleum rent-an-office with bad chairs and ventilation, although I do have my own office). I've been working from home since march last year and I never really feel like I want to go to the office. I might again now that the temperatures are going up, they have AC.

Yeah there's more distractions from the family, but at the same time it means I can do a lot more to look after them - my girlfriend had an appointment yesterday but also a migraine, I was there to take her to it instead of her having to suffer driving or canceling it, for example.

[anthropodie]

I guess finally it comes down to individual choice.

Let people choose where they want to work from!

[flukus]

Problem is, many of the reasons people prefer in-office require the rest of us to be in the office. Some are manageable, if you like the social aspect there will be others like that and they can be social together. Others like "better collaboration" really require a decent chunk of your immediate team to be there.

[anthropodie]

I mentioned this in other comment thread.

If people who want to work from office find themselves in empty office then they need to adapt to this new paradigm shift the same way rest of us adapted to loud open offices where anyone can walk up to anyone and interrupt the flow.

Some people adapt to whatever reality is while others force their responsibility of adaptation on their peers/environment.

[weird-eye-issue]

It depends on company culture. Some places are "remote friendly" and some places are remote friendly.