[SirMaster]

Then maybe you aren't a culture fit for that employer / office?

My experience is just so different. I love the vibe and the camaraderie of my office. It makes it fun to work there.

Just sitting at home working, never interacting with people in person sounds really dull and boring and cold to me. I had to do that in 2020 and I hated it.

Productivity is nice, but IMO it's not all about productivity. As a worker I value my enjoyment of the job, and just being a robotic super productive worker is not as enjoyable as actually feeling like you are part of a team or community and having fun with your fellow coworkers.

We spend so much of our lives on the clock, I would hate to have it all just be serious productive work 100% of the time.

[spokaneplumb]

> My experience is just so different. I love the vibe and the camaraderie of my office. It makes it fun to work there.

Me too! If we had free teleporters I'd probably go into the office for at least half my work day, just about every day, voluntarily.

... I don't like it enough to pay about 15 days per year, every year (5 hours commuting per week, times 50 weeks, divided by 16 waking hours per day[1]), hundreds of dollars a month commuting (gas, plus insurance and depreciation on a car), and make every single thing that happens at home and requires my attention less convenient and more disruptive in ways that probably also amount to at least several hundred dollars per year, one way or another, and quite a few extra micromorts/micro-chances-of-crippling-injury per year (risk of that ~250 hours of extra driving). Plus increased restrictions on where you can live, which can come with significant (tens of thousands per year) costs in many ways, including in raw dollar terms.

It's nice, but the cost is really high. I'd also probably really have fun with a supercar, but I'd rather not buy one just the same. Far too pricey for the benefit, to me.

[1] Perhaps more to the point, that means over six entire work-weeks of extra work time per year, uncompensated, just to get to and from work. A month and a half of extra work every year. And that's with an hour a day spent, lots of people have more than 30 minutes lost per day (nb you'd need to include extra gassing-up stops, and extra car maintenance visits, divided by commute days per year, to properly account for this—so your commute time would need to average somewhat under 30 minutes each way to hit only an hour lost each day, probably closer to 25 minutes than 30).

[999900000999]

My points exactly.

For example, if you want a good amount of space in NYC you're in Brooklyn or Queens.

Your spending 45 minutes to an hour each way just getting to your Manhattan office.

Or you live in Manhattan and spend 6k a month.

Just from a raw math perspective, assuming I make 100$ an hour in NYC, and my Brooklyn apartment is 3k.

That's 1000$ a week for the 2 hour commute if I value my time and apply the same rate.

Let's just say a Manhattan apartment is 6k, but it's right across the street from the office.

To make the math easy, let's estimate your BK to Manhattan commute time to be worth 3k a month.

Vs 2K for an apartment in Philly or Chicago with a remote job.

4k extra a month to work in Manhattan, meaning 48k per year. Once you factor in taxes, you have to make about 70k more to make the in person NYC make sense.

If the option is 150k remote or 200k in NYC you *lose* money going to NYC. Plus, you don't need to live in a city at all .

If I want to I can move out to some small town in Ohio and buy myself a ranch. As long as I have stable internet I'm fine .

Of course this is a moot point if RTO becomes industry standard which it quickly is. With my luck the options are probably going to be have no job or go to New York or San Francisco and make 170 meaning I get the worst of both worlds.

[SirMaster]

I mean, I am biased because my commute by car is 10 minutes and there's barely any traffic. But that was also by choice. I chose to locate myself close to the office like that, because I like working in the office at least a lot of the time, and I hate long commutes too. So I sought out and made happen a situation that was to my preferences.

I live in a suburb and work at a company that is in the suburbs. It's a manufacturing company, but they need software developers all the same.

I don't know, sometimes I feel like a bit of an outlier. I arrange my life for fun and convenience and joy. I don't try to maximize money at the expense of those things. Making say 20% more but having a long commute or working in an office that I don't enjoy being in is not worth it to me because time is money, and my day to day joy and happiness are more important to me than a little more money as well.

People seem so unhappy all the time. I just don't get it. I go for what makes me happy and it seems to work great for me.

[spokaneplumb]

Tensions arise for most folks that can’t easily be resolved by just moving close to work (what if you change jobs, though? Laid off, or too-slow wage increases? Even this is only a partial solution)

It’s not usually a choice to be unhappy, as you seem to be framing it. You live ten minutes from work, but you get a partner, and how far away is your place from their employer? You have kids and all the schools within 20 minutes of your employer are fairly bad, plus the above issue of conflicting partner commutes, and also you can’t just move them between school districts frequently to move around near your current employer.

So yes, lots of people end up with shitty commutes because the alternatives are worse. They’re not choosing that because they’re dumb or choosing to be unhappy, but because of conflicting interests. WFH for one or both adults in a household removes a ton of that tension in ways that basically nothing else can (short of “stay single and never have kids”)

[nunez]

I'm with you. WFH is insanely isolating, and interacting via Slack/Zoom doesn't cut it for me.

I hate that it's either full RTO or full WFH at so many places.

[SirMaster]

Yes, I would agree a hybrid approach is ideal too.