Working remote , never being late to a meeting , never having to commute, vastly outweighs all that.
I have an odd feeling many people like in person work so they can socialize. We have bars and concerts for that.
We somehow went from COVID will kill us all if we dare step into an office to shut up and get back to work.
Stop wasting money on office space. Let people live wherever ( assuming your in the same country for tax reasons). I love the sheer level of freedom I have.
If I get sick of the city, I can work from a small town in Alaska, Alabama, etc.
Vs being told to commute for 3 hours a day
The splitting of society like this is awful for humans, we really aren't built for it. There are ways of addressing this and still keeping remote work, but removing socialisation for 8 hours a day is not it.
I personally don't need to be around people all day.
Your not entirely wrong, Tribe is a good book that addresses modern social isolation.
I've already done this.
Mentorship, communications, even just basic professional behaviour.
All of this is learned, and you're learning all the time.
But ideas even, discussions, blackboards ... they don't happen over Zoom, especially without an appointment.
We don't get enough 'alone time' at the office, but 'group time' is incredibly important for all aspects of our work.
For some kinds of things, like 'going deep' for a few days, being alone is a godsend but it comes with a heavy price.
Also - just being around other professionals, putting on a pair of clothes designed for professional appearance, thinking about what you are going to say, i.e. 'being a professional' makes us almost all better people. It has it's drawbacks, but mostly it's good.
I think we're going to have to find the right, blended approach.
That said, what remote work does do is enable a kind of role-fitting that was never possible before. We have yet to contemplate the economic advantage of that - but that one comes along with a massive White Elephant: that everyone reading this will be displaced by someone working in a 'poor country' who is super sharp and who will work for 1/2 the salary.
Soft. Devs. think they are important until management can hire fully offshore for 1/3 the cost.
The arguments that a lot of people make against offshore apply almost as much to remote.
The most productive person I've ever worked with, who was responsible for the biggest initiatives at a previous company worked solo in Hong Kong while the rest of the team was in North America. Never presented an issue. He came up with many innovative ideas in NLP and other ML techniques (not my area). All of his collaboration was over video calls, was never an issue.
Perhaps you are not being inclusive of your remote workers in your brainstorming sessions?
Doesn't need to be done every day or even every week.
I mean, I get why in-office work is unpopular, but for some tasks/jobs I think it can work well. So far, if you need to set up furniture or infect with other humans with your viruses and assorted bacteria and sometimes exchanging feces on our hands because we don’t wash them properly, nothing replaces being in the same room.