> Nothing against other people working from home but please keep in mind that people's can differ greatly from your own.

It is clear who is stopping them from working from home, but who is stopping you from going to the office?

People want to work in the office with other people. If they go and end up working alone because their team is remote, then there is no point.

This happened to me once. The team was in NYC, and I wasn’t so I was coming to the office uselessly. I do like coming into the office since it’s easier to turn onto and way from work with travel as a context switch but that aspect made it worthless for anything else.

So people who want to work in the office are entitled to keep their coworkers who dont want to be stuck there?

This is an extraordinary and disingenuous leap, and it doesn't even merit responding to as a proxy for your willingness to engage with others, but to make the superficially obvious point more crystal clear: the existence of folks who prefer the communal and social aspects of work in a common location is not up for debate, and no, their preference on this subject does not imply that they uniformly think everyone should share their preference.

Please take a deep breath and consider the extent to which your unwillingness to even acknowledge the existence of people who don't share your opinion may harm, rather than help, your cause.

Disagree. The comment addresses the sentiment fairly

> People want to work in the office with other people. If they go and end up working alone because their team is remote, then there is no point.

The author would crave for others to be present to satisfy their whim of not only wanting to go to work, but also dragging others reluctantly there. It's worthy of a walkout

Not really. It’s just that you can’t satisfy office workers simply by opening the office doors and walking away.

At the least, you have to reorganize teams so the office staff have other team members who are also in-office and not remote.

If you can’t do that then you are better served with going all remote in my opinion.

I don't think many of the commenters here assume that at all. It is abundantly clear that working in-office is not threatened - it would be like have been worrying that men would be disenfranchised by women's suffrage. Assuming that in-office work did somehow disappear entirely, then there would also always be the option for WeWork or similar.

This is not a zero-sum game. It is possible for everyone to get what they want.

> It is possible for everyone to get what they want.

At overall software-industry level? Yes.

At individual company level? It is much better to have uniform policies for the entire org. Either be completely remote, or completely in-office, or if you want hybrid then mandate the days when everyone must be in office.

> It is much better to have uniform policies for the entire or

Why? There are ample examples than not where this is not applied. Significantly compensation

Because organizations rely on internal communication, and remote/on-site/hybrid each require very different processes to manage work and internal communications.

If all your organization processes are set up to work well for on-site, then the effectiveness of the remote people in your organization will hurt; if all your organization processes are set up for remote interactions, then the overheads of that don't make sense for the on-site people sitting next to each other; and if some units are fully on-site and some are fully remote, each with different style of working, then you might as well have two separate organizations with vendor/contractor relationship, that would be more efficient as their collaboration anyway have to be managed that way.

"uniform policies regarding WFH/RTO ". FTFY. I thought that was obvious from the context but oh well..

Still, why?

It’s easier to talk a big game on the internet than quit your job and work for a remote company.

I have just done that :-), but then I've worked remote for years.

As a software engineer, I needed to meet people for my growth in the start of my career, and I needed to meet people for character development. Old farts complain that younglings are not socially/emotionally independent and apt to talk to their computer all day, but that’s also a recipe for suicide.

as a software engineer (and lately manager) my most toxic workplace was my first and only non-remote job - from 2010 to 2014/2015. and to my surprise my best job (in terms of org patterns, good tech and people management) was as a contractor.

also, just to make sure it's clear to anybody reading about remote vs non-remote. remote doesn't mean no meatspace meeting ever allowed. remote team members are not under chess king rules. we did meet IRL. for some jobs it was just 1 week in 10 months. (thanks COVID) but otherwise it can be a lot more. (1 week every quarter kind of makes sense, but so does anything that members are up to - especially if they live close to each other.)

While I believe the benefits of being remote outweigh the downfalls, I definitely feel that growth as a professional and as an engineer is stunted by being remote. I miss the days of being able to easily ask questions and collaborate, even with people on different projects or in different departments. That, to me, is the biggest downside

Counterpoint: I didn't need any of that.

Counter-study to your counterpoint (better than sharing random anecdotes): https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03044...

From the abstract: Findings show that early career artists have the least social capital, established artists have the most, and late career artists begin to lose social capital unless they actively maintain it.

What about the corollary logical leap that is social capital is a measure or predictor of success at the workplace.

I think burden of proof is on you to demonstrate that social capital is not needed for success at workplace.