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Comment by ByteJockey | Hacker News Reader

There are two camps that want something mutually exclusive (work from home vs work in office). Additionally, in order to get what they want, they need the other group to comply.* The struggle is spilling over into the comment threads.

* If everyone works in the office, and the work from home people are still remote, they get passed over for promotions and basically have a good chance of tanking their career. If everyone works from home, the work in office people lose a lot of human interaction that they need on a human level.

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I think there’s a lot of WFH folk who are worried less about promotions than they are the availability of WFH jobs in general.

People who favor that style of working viewed COVID as a transformational event, and are going to push back hard on anything/anyone suggesting a return to the previous status quo, where WFH was something you had to be a relatively special snowflake to be afforded by many/most companies.

> I think there’s a lot of WFH folk who are worried less about promotions than they are the availability of WFH jobs in general.

I feel like this was covered in the "tanking their career" part of my statement, but fair. It's rather important, I guess it deserves an explicit call out.

I still find the replies to my personal experience very baffling. I didn't say what anybody else should be doing; I didn't present it as a universal truth.

It seems very clear to me that there is room for a variety of workplace types. Strictly in-office, hybrid, and strictly remote.

I said I enjoyed getting together with my coworkers; I also said my ideal situation would involve spending a majority of time remote.

At this point, the mere existence of the other group is a danger to what the first group sees as their interests. The human instinct is to minimize the other group, making their group appear larger, and strengthening the argument that their interests should prevail.

Someone who wants to be completely untethered from the office is threatened by someone who wants to work in the office a couple days a week. It means they will have to choose between moving and having job prospects within a much smaller area.

Requiring any amount of office time completely eliminates the most meaningful advantages of working remotely.

Is that really true? Even a quarterly offsite can be accommodated from almost anywhere on the world.

It’s loss aversion. Many people perceive office environment to be unpleasant for various reasons (long commute, psychopathic coworkers, noisy, lack of privacy) and so now they have tasted freedom they have a strong negative reaction to losing it.

I just said I enjoyed one week in the office. After four years.

I'm not advocating for folks to stop working remotely. I'm not advocating anything.

I'll certainly never share another personal experience on HN, that's for sure.

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