[papito]

How many people out there randomly zoom with their former coworkers that they never met in real life, after leaving their job?

Your 20s are a critical time for your career to make connections and friendships - in person. You need to be around people, making friends over beers and community lunches, and learning social skills in a professional environment.

Are we that spoiled that the excuse is "I don't like public transportation"?

Do companies take a productivity hit when people are in the office? Probably. And many openly acknowledge that, but asking people to come to the office two times a week is not some sort of wage slavery.

[lopkeny12ko]

> Your 20s are a critical time for your career to make connections and friendships - in person. You need to be around people, making friends over beers and community lunches, and learning social skills in a professional environment.

Okay, sure. But why does this need to happen in the workplace?

And more importantly, why are you advocating for employers to unilaterally declare that this needs to happen in the workplace?

[MikeTheRocker]

Connection doesn't need to happen in the workplace, but the reality is that most people spend a majority of their weekday waking hours working so would be great if building connections there were feasible.

[parzivalm]

> Your 20s are a critical time for your career to make connections and friendships - in person. You need to be around people, making friends over beers and community lunches, and learning social skills in a professional environment.

No one is saying you don't need to be around people, but a job can be just a job. I don't need to make a ton of friends at work to do my job, and the idea that that should be a requirement/expectation needs to stop. It enables the chance for too many unhealthy boundaries to be created young workers that don't know any better. If you start in your early 20's and are made to see everyone as friends, family, etc. Then when someone tries to push you into a 12 hour day, it doesn't seem that bad. You can forge working/professional relationships virtually just as well, if you put the effort in.

Now sure it doesn't work for everyone, but again my argument isn't that one is worse than the other, it is just that we make too many blanket statements. What works for you might not work for me, and these organizations trying to force one or the other is harmful in the end. You can have co-existence, especially in a company the size of Meta, you can have a plenty successful office presence and remote presence.

> Are we that spoiled that the excuse is "I don't like public transportation"?

I don't think anyone said that in this thread... That being said, it shouldn't be a surprising fact that people in US cities dislike public transportation. In a previous job of mine, it was quicker to sit in 45 minutes of traffic outside of Washington DC then take the metro, and I was in an area with supposedly great access to public transit. Maybe if all these companies were serious about their workers' best interests they would do more to help invest in and lobby local governments to support public transportation.

> And many openly acknowledge that, but asking people to come to the office two times a week is not some sort of wage slavery.

If you were hired with the expectation to come into the office x number of days, that is fine. A lot of people were hired with the promise of being able to work remote, so changing that is where it tends to be a bit of a bad situation.

In general this animosity between office work and remote work advocates has gotten out of hand. These can co-exist.

[mehlmao]

I've worked with people (remotely) in the past that I'll still hop on Discord and play video games with.

Working remote lets me make connections and friendships where I live, and have more time to do so than when I was spending hours each day commuting.