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The last thing I want is to spend extra time with my coworkers. Intense work interaction is enough, I strongly prefer to meet "outsiders" in my spare time to actually be able to relax efficiently. Thanks but no thanks.

>The last thing I want is to spend extra time with my coworkers.

That seem to be a common point that divides the WFH vs office people. For some, it's really wild how much they rely on the office, and the people that are only there because they're getting paid to be, to act as a stand in for friends, family, or fulfillment of general social need (plus, in OP's case, the office lets him get his steps in each day(!) which is a topic he surely strikes up a long, tedious conversation about with his coworkers as they're held captive at their desk).

Most coworkers are merely tolerated socially. Even if I think they're wonderful to work with, and cherish and rely on their contributions, I've got zero desire to spend any time with 99% of them outside of situations where I'm paid to be there.

The people who make blanket statements about how integrated, in-office teams are better than remote teams ("every time") fill me with contempt. Mostly because I know over the long haul their arguments will win and we'll all be back in the office because that's what managers who need to be seen want, and coworkers who need a family want, and CEOs who need an empire want.

Don't trust you're lying eyes! Distributed doesn't work! The last two years were a failure. Open source doesn't exist. Now drive into the office so we can have a meeting where everyone sits in a room and midlessly browses Reddit while someone drones on about something that could have been an email.

Yep, I'm ok with the occasional "event", restaurant and such ; but I don't want work to socially pressure me into a small holiday with my colleagues. My time off I want to spend with friends and family, not drinking corporate coolade.

I did one of these kind team junkets in like 2001 when I was just out of college and realized immediately I never wanted to do it ever again. They've been offered a handful of times at other places I've worked and it's a hard pass.

Absolutely agree! I like my coworkers and enjoy going to the office 2 days a week but anything more than that no thanks. I have a life outside of work that I care about.

> This seems not so much as an argument for office vs remote work but an argument that pandemics are bad. I think a lot of people who didn't work remote before the pandemic have the wrong impression about what working remotely is actually like.

That's exactly what some of us said would happen at the beginning of the pandemic. There were a large minority of people complaining about remote work and questioning how anyone could do it. But the pandemic was not a typical remote work/work from home situation. People were forced into it. You couldn't bug out to the library to get a change of view. You couldn't meet up for drinks or coffee to get even a bare minimum of face to face. Some of us who had been remote working for a long time predicted this anti-remote work backlash specifically because of this.

It's prescient, I think many people were feeling like their house was being invaded and molded by work requirements, and it wasn't a choice they were making. I think when someone chooses remote, it's their responsibility to offer a suitable working environment and that's clear.

For many working remotely is about the freedom of choice in the act of working, choose the time, choose the place, choose the equipment. Whereas the pandemic was a situation where that freedom didn't exist, so even previously remote workers were not as happy with remote work.

It was often trying to make an office environment out of a smattering of digital communication tools, and I think that's the wrong approach for remote work. Previously I had all the above flexibility, in the "everyone's remote" model, I was clocking on at 9am, sitting in 10x the bullshit meetings I used to be in as they tried to simulate ad-hoc communication, and all from my bedroom, not a co-working space or cafe or outdoors etc.

> fixed cost of downtown office space

There you said it. With the office being a fixed expense, budget is formed around it, since you “just need it”. While the trips and conferences are always discretionary expenses, and as such will not be made if they could be not made.

But I think the whole point is that we don't just need it. The trend towards remote (or at least remote-friendly) work which was dramatically accelerated by the pandemic means that office space should be viewed as a discretionary expense. If you already are locked into a long-term lease and that money is already a sunk cost, then that's one thing. But if you are starting a new company or at a point where you need to renew an office lease, you have to ask yourself whether there really is an ROI on office rent. It's a lot of money after all and you can still get a lot of the benefits of in person team bonding at a fraction of the cost through regular offsites and team building events.

I'll just throw in that "fully remote but with regular company off sites" is actually a really attractive proposition to an employee. Instead of commuting every day to some dreary office I get to work from my very comfortable home and still meet my coworkers at some nice destination a few times a year. I actually feel like I have a better bond with remote coworkers in that situation because when we meet in person it is in a "vacation" atmosphere and being time limited means we really focus on hanging out together and doing group activities.

It’s not fixed. I’ve been through several office moves to save costs on leases even at successful companies.

The fixed budget item is "office", not any particular office.

I meant "fixed" just in the sense that there is a set amount you are contractually obligated to pay regularly, as opposed to discretionary costs of something like team offsite. If everyone is on vacation for the month of July then you can't just decide to not pay office rent for the month, whereas you could decide not to have your July team offsite.

But calling it "fixed" in the sense that you just have to pay it is begging the question. The whole point is that you don't need an office in all situations. Or at least you don't need a dedicated desk for every employee. So you shouldn't look at office rent as a cost of doing business thing. You have to really look at whether the ROI is there. Maybe it is, maybe it's not based on your particular circumstances but it IS a choice.

You could probably afford a month of shared holidays with the savings from a physical office

So why aren't companies constantly on ski trips?

Because employees have families and lives outside of work so can't just drop everything to go a team ski trip. Once or twice a year, sure, but more than that it's a chore more than a perk :)

My company is remote only and the money saved on office space has been reallocated to additional team outings and a longer runway. Constant outings sounds a bit overwhelming, personally.

Because that money is also just profit if it's not spent.

My last remote company had quarterly offsites, and sponsored at least a conference of your choice per year if you wanted to go to it. My current remote company hasn’t had many offsites (covid + clients in healthcare) but hires aggressively and pays significantly above market. Also spares almost no expense on employees. It’s hard to compare like for like though. How much of any company’s actions can be attributed to budget savings from cutting physical offices, as opposed to any number of other variables: decisions from leadership, market strategy, or quality of last funding round? It’s hard to isolate just the one cause, but it might be worth gathering that aggregate data to see if patterns exist.

Because they have offices?

Anecdotally it seems much more difficult to get an offsite together in the modern remote office than it was in the old offices. With the new remote world, senior leadership struggles to stay in touch with the general feeling of workers. While this surely results in fewer time wasting pep talks, it also means that the worthwhile activities are also getting side lined.

What about it is more difficult? The (admittedly few) off-sites I've been to have been scheduled 6+ months in advance and the general expectation is that everyone is going unless there's a wedding or a kid is sick or something, in the sense that it's not really culturally acceptable to take PTO during that time unless it's for something very important. When the VP or CTO comes around in February and says "we're going to $CITY for a week, all expenses paid, in September" it's pretty easy for all the teams to get around that.

> With the new remote world, senior leadership struggles to stay in touch with the general feeling of workers.

I’d say that is more of a sign of poor management chain management, communication, and people management. Senior mgmt can stay in touch by, surprise, staying in touch. Remote makes it harder for those poor at written skills and tech skills, but a good manager should’ve been writing things down to begin with.

Opinions from someone doing mgmt for quite some time now.

And that's a MAJOR contingent of people against remotework.

Most middle and upper management can't do it. They fail. They're impediments. They're also the ones who want glass "fishbowls" to show off their employees' toil, AND to "supervise" professionals for the lack of appearance of work.

In reality, companies would do themselves a LOT of cost-cutting to getting rid of ineffectual managers who get in the way of process and progress. But then again, its that class of workers is why we're dealing with anti-remotework all the time.

> Most middle and upper management can't do it. They fail.

Yep, your post is 100% correct :) That’s the reality we live in.

You can’t get rid of the C-suites’ safety layer. Middle management exists to take the fall when the C-suite makes major mistakes. The sociopaths at the top won’t even consider it.

Only a few need to consider and do this. And once they do, the others will be forced to do similar to compete.