[skzv]

I go to the office almost everyday by choice. Free food, snacks, and coffee, gym, and medical clinics on campus. And it's just nice to get dressed and leave the house.

But it's really nice to have the flexibility to WFH when I need to, especially just mornings to skip traffic.

[ENGNR]

Same! Tech job, my co-founder and I are only a 5 minute drive or bike ride from the office. It’s nice to get dressed and have that separation from home.

I feel like the commute is what people are actually feeling the worst, because it’s unpaid time that they just straight up lose. Being close to the office resolves it for us.

[redserk]

Unfortunately a new job, even 5-8 miles away, may turn a then-5 minute commute into a 45m-1hr commute in many metropolitan areas.

I think more management needs to realize that forcing in-person isn't inherently beneficial. There can be value in meeting up if it's appropriately planned, though.

My current management has been very accommodating with remote/hybrid. If there's a meeting where face-time is beneficial, people voluntarily come in -- but there's no pressure to do so. Generally, we find it easier to pop into the office for a day every few months to whiteboard things instead of dealing with Miro/Zoom. We have a mix of remote folks who live next to the office, some folks within a couple hour drive, and some who need to fly in.

A former job of mine used to fly people to the same location 4x a year for a week to hash out a quarterly plan and grab drinks. The whole agenda was laid out and not a minute felt wasted. While not everyone went 4x a year, everyone was given the opportunity to do so, and this helped alleviate friction.

Another job of mine had remote folks fly in every 3-4 months for a couple of days at a time. Some teams did it more frequently (1x/mo for a couple days) when critical projects were in the pipeline, but they'd return to normal afterwards.

[time0ut]

I don't have the discipline to stop working when I work from home. Being able to go into the office every day is a nice perk for me to help structure my day. If it was a longer drive, I'd probably feel differently.

[mschuster91]

> I feel like the commute is what people are actually feeling the worst, because it’s unpaid time that they just straight up lose.

There's also the associated side costs: getting ready to leave work (more for women, many feel socially obliged to put on makeup), extra clothes washing (personally, I don't like to wear clothes I had to travel in public transport with), having to schedule around errands like tradespeople coming in for repairs or picking up parcels from the post office, and for those with children all the shit associated with that, like picking up said children from daycare (whose opening times often conflict with expected work availability) or transporting them to school and after-school stuff like sports training... and finally, even though people like to deny even the most obvious (like in Munich, the current explosion of covid in wastewater tracking), there is still a pandemic raging on plus all the other "regular" bugs like influenza, RSV, measles and whatever else shit children catch at school, distribute to their parents, who then distribute it around work.

Had society actually learned anything from the two years of Covid dominance, in-presence work would be the exception not the norm, and people who have to perform in-presence work be compensated for their commute.

[laweijfmvo]

Used to feel the same way, but that was when I always used to always choose apartments near my office. Now that I don't want to live near my office, I prefer to work from home.

[_proofs]

this sounds like the modern, more privileged version of the coal mine's "company shop", and all the dependencies that industry created as "nice gestures" to their employees just to keep them around and on-site as much as possible.

[angmarsbane]

On-site childcare would guarantee I go into the office.

[deanCommie]

You are in the silent majority.

This is a lukewarm take shared by most, but it at best doesn't cause outrage or go viral, and at worst gets you accused of being a bootlicker for the C-suite.

So none of us speak up and the dominant perspective continues that nobody wants to actually go to the office.