|
I am torn, I 100% understand the huge burden of commuting and the amazing flexibilities of working from home. I have a medical condition where I essentially have to prepare or at least bring all of my own food. This is obviously much easier when I WFH, and can prepare food ad hoc. Although I do work for a large famous tech company, I have a sweet setup where I can bike to work (to my desk) in less than 10 minutes in Bay Area weather (which is cooperative probably 340 days a year), we are not working from office 5 days a week, and its somewhat socially acceptable to work limited hours (lets say 10-4:30) in the office. Working in the office, I am so so so much more aware of all the other projects my team is working on, and the org as a whole. I am able to pick up on so much more. The little conversations, both about work and not are lost when WFH. Obviously many companies never 100% committed to remote work, and some of this could be made up for by different technologies and processes. But in my opinion it will be very very very hard to reach the fidelity and bandwidth of information of in person work. I think you have a long list of pros and cons here. A while back I was thinking about what college may look like in 20 year. I was thinking of my experience in a California UC and how useless I found the lectures and but how incredibly helpful I found the office hours and studying with peers. I was thinking a distributed satellite model could be ideal. The lectures or base instruction could be remote, or even AI based, with small "campuses" or even just glorified rooms somewhere (library, strip mall) where small groups of students can meet in groups of 5,10,15 and learn together. I wonder if something could be done for work as well. If larger corporations could maintain lots of tiny office spaces, near where people want to, or could live and require teams to be co-located. I truly think that if the commute was just a few minutes, and the hours in office were only required to be 6 hours or something, that the working in office would not be a huge burden. |