I don't miss the office at all, and I never want to go back. If management asks us to go back full-time, I will start looking for another job. I'm happier and more productive than ever. I never want to go back to rotting in a cube farm pretending that 1-2 productive hours a day is enough.
1. Cubes, cube pods, and "open offices" are inhumane.
2. I don't have to wear headphones to "hear myself think" anymore.
3. Meetings no longer produce the positive feelings that result from the presence of another human, so there's incentive for everyone to eliminate the pointless meetings.
3a. I can multitask during the truly pointless meetings that haven't yet been eliminated. I can't tell you how much work I've gotten done during "town halls" during the last eight months.
4. No commute.
5. My house is way nicer than my office. I know this isn't the case for everyone. But if you're working as a software engineer, you can afford it. You have to ask yourself why it wasn't a priority before.
Absolutely. There is absolutely nothing I miss about the office. I get my own bathroom at home that is clean and doesn't smell like shit all day long. I don't have to time my bathroom breaks or wait in line. I don't have to search on different floors to find a free bathroom. Not to mention the shitty quality public bathrooms you have in the US with 1 inch gaps so people get a nice view of you taking a dump.
I can do laundry during the day, I can go exercise during the day. I can take a nap if I'm tired.
Meetings start on time more often because you don't have to wait for a meeting rooms to clear out.
I could go on and on. I will say this though, I hope everyone gets to work the way it works for them. I'm not going to tell people that want to work in an office that they shouldn't be able to. I hope we get the same respect and not have in-office advocates push their ideal environment on remote workers.
Every point you mention is spot-on. Even simple routines like going to the bathroom and eating have so much time shaved off of them. I didn't even realize that 3a was true until you articulated it -- town halls, all-hands, brown-bags, et al., are now a great place to listen in casually but do email hygiene or even some light "real work" without getting judged.
At my previous job, I worked from home 2-3 days a week and commuted (~50 minutes each way) the rest of the time, then I took a new job less than ten minutes from home. We got sent home due to COVID a few months after that. Management talks a lot about how they know remote isn't ideal and want to get us back in the office as soon as possible, despite most of the software teams finding they've been equally or more productive as before.
For me, this has been the first time I've been WFH on an equal footing with the whole team, I _love_ it, and I never want to go back to the office. I actually prefer meeting via Teams since I can't hear well and the built in captioning makes it easier, I have better monitors at home than I do at the office, there's never a wait for the bathroom, can pull some lunch out of the fridge or pantry and heat it up at my convenience.
I know some people lament the whole "not having hallway conversations leading to innovation" thing but I'm honestly curious how real that is. I've been in the industry for over 20 years now, the bulk of that in software-focused companies or teams, and while I do have casual conversations with coworkers I can't recall any of them ever segueing into "so here's the challenging thing I'm working on right now..." -- I'm not saying it never happens, just that I can't recall it's ever happened to me.
Some of my coworkers do miss whiteboarding, though I don't have strong feelings about that one way or the other. I'm more of a textual than a visual thinker personally so I've never found diagramming things out to be particularly helpful.
At any rate, while I really like my boss and my team, the day management sends out the "mandatory full-time return to the office in (x) months, including the development teams" email is almost certainly going to be the day I update my resume.
The ONLY thing I found tricky was getting enough physical activity and movement in days, especially lockdown. I picked up a treadmill laptop stand and every day I walk 3-5 miles while working. I will never go back to sitting in an open office again.
Apparently, only people in relationships are allowed to enjoy working from home because you must be rotten if you're single but don't miss meeting office people.
Some people need social interactions. It's their life blood. Others require very little of it and enjoy being alone.
1. Cubes, cube pods, and "open offices" are inhumane.
2. I don't have to wear headphones to "hear myself think" anymore.
3. Meetings no longer produce the positive feelings that result from the presence of another human, so there's incentive for everyone to eliminate the pointless meetings.
3a. I can multitask during the truly pointless meetings that haven't yet been eliminated. I can't tell you how much work I've gotten done during "town halls" during the last eight months.
4. No commute.
5. My house is way nicer than my office. I know this isn't the case for everyone. But if you're working as a software engineer, you can afford it. You have to ask yourself why it wasn't a priority before.