For me it's mostly about ease of collaboration. I love hashing out math/design problems on a whiteboard. Even with good tools there's nothing that allows the same sort of natural, dynamic conversation. Meetings turn into a series of loosely connected speeches, especially when there's large numbers.
I also find that simple conversations take way longer, especially when there's disagreement.
Thirdly video calls are super draining.
It's also really difficult to get separation between work and life. I find myself doing home chores doing the day intertwined with work.
Unlike some commenter, the social aspect isn't that important to me, but there's definitely some camaraderie missing. In the office, I feel like part of a team that's working together to achieve something. At home I feel like one of a swarm of drones that occasionally communicate for information exchange. It's not very fulfilling.
> I find myself doing home chores doing the day intertwined with work.
This has been a HUGE PLUS for me! Just the ability to run a load of laundry while on a 90 minute call or water the plants when I have a gap between meetings has been a major quality of life increase. Now I can manage the house during the week and weekends are true relaxing and enjoyable weekends, no longer chorefests.
Working at an office is free social interactions. If you live alone and can't muster the energy to organize meeting people at least you still get to meet your colleagues every day. If instead you work from home it is pretty easy to get into a downward spiral where you don't socialize, get even more miserable making it even harder to socialize until you get depressed.
I’m married with one 18 year old son at home. I put 11 gallons of gas in my car early July and still had half a tank mid September. I realized that I only leave the house every two weeks to get a haircut. My older son who doesn’t live with us needed a car and I just gave it to him. I didn’t need it.
I had former coworkers/friends who I would meet up for lunch. But none of them are comfortable even eating outside. The married friends that we had, we don’t get together with anymore.
Working out? I had started going to spin class at the gym pre-Covid and was planning to maybe start back teaching fitness classes once or twice a week like a did almost a decade ago, but that’s cut. We have a gym at home that I use and my wife turned another room into a studio where she teaches online fitness classes.
I’ve really become a hermit. We are going to venture outside to eat out for the first time since March next week. Of course we are going to eat outdoors. We use to have date night at least every other week - dinner, movies, live music, etc.
We are still trying to figure out a nice, safe, drivable getaway.
> But none of them are comfortable even eating outside
They have good reason to be. A recent study from the CDC found that eating out, even if outdoors, was one of the largest risk factors for infection of the disease. They found that people with Covid were over twice as likely to have gone to a restaurant than the average for those without Covid.
The problem is corona - our social spaces are not "wrong" per se, they are rather unsafe to visit in times where about half the US population and a sizable chunk of every other country's population except Spain and Italy claim that mask mandates are restricting their freedom.
These anti-maskers are ruining our livelihood. How many months or years until we take justice into our own hands? I don't want to live like this forever. I'm ready to get some spikey 6 foot poles to start poking people with.
Not really. Even without corona it's hard to socialize when WFH. Suburban sprawl causes this, but if you try to solve that by going urban, then you lose the home office.
It is dangerous to rely on office relationships for your social needs. When you move on to your next role, those relationships go up in smoke. This should be a signal to cultivate stronger ties to friends and family.
Office does not provide for social needs but provides a baseline level of social activity 5 days a week. I don't expect to make any friends in office but I am certain to talk to a few colleagues, have lunch in a group and make small talk every day of the week.
There is not much friction in all this since you know you are going to leave this behind at the end of the day. My interactions with close friends, although longer and much more meaningful, are also very bursty. The "mid-range socializing" (regular and frequent but not very serious) that office provides, that WFH is mostly unable to replicate in my experience, is something I am missing and I think it makes all the difference.
> “I’m not good at making friends therefore no one is”
I think you have it backwards. People who are "good at making friends" can also make friends outside of work, and so aren't left without social ties when everyone is working from home. If the only people you are making friends with are people who you both are compelled/paid to be around each other for 8+ hours a day, you might not be that good at making friends.
I can understand this. For me its' very different as I have my family, so I really love WFH. I can get up early, go run, come back have breakfast with my kids, drop them off at school and sit down at my desk for 9am. Sometimes, I will take a few hours out of the day to my own thing (go trail running) and I just work a little later into the evening (which is no big deal as there is no commute).
However it would be quite different if I was just on my own the whole time.
I see "free social interactions" as neither a benefit nor something that can only be obtained on-site.
These "free social interactions" are often just distractions - taking you out of your context, making it difficult for you to be productive.
That's why I love remote + Slack. Slack is async. I can finish what I'm doing before addressing messages there. On-site, people rarely if ever warn of their intention to come talk to you - they just walk up and start talking.
On Slack or Zoom you can't take a walk around the office to clear your head/take a brief breather and inadvertently bump into a person who asks a question about your t-shirt or new Apple watch, which then leads to a longer convo, which leads to grabbing coffee in the kitchen, which leads to you hanging out with that person and their group of friends over the a weekend.
Lack of social interactions makes most people miserable, lack of productivity is irritating but you can live with it. And although you can fix social interactions without an office it demands effort, so isn't free unless you live with people like spouse or kids. At work they pay you to talk with people, so social interactions there are free since trading effort for money is the purpose of work and the social is just a side effect.
