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Comment by gottorf | Hacker News Reader

I've been full-time remote for many, many years longer than Covid, but I still look back on my time in office fondly; there was a camaraderie that is difficult to duplicate over Zoom. For software engineers at any rate, the optimum may be remote with frequent enough face-to-face gatherings for social connections between coworkers. Of course, individual preference will vary.

Given that office spaces are concentrated in downtown areas, and downtown areas in many of America's most renowned cities have deteriorated rapidly in the past few years, I'm not surprised that this is happening. Hopefully developers are able to convert some of those office buildings into residential use, which the article looks at briefly.

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Same, and had the same thoughts about... missing the office.

Then I realized it's probably rose colored glasses, because I was younger and more social then - going out to lunch, bars after work, joking around.

I think today, older and married, I'd be a bit grumpier and less social, so probably wouldn't enjoy it much at all.

The whole office and home debate is not about working physically outside of your home. It is about excessive and unhealthy commutes to work due to myriad factors.

If you could hop on a bike/trolly/bus/train/walk to work (to multiple employers) in 10 minutes consistently, then this would not be a discussion.

Which is impossible without density, so in the end, the discussion is about how densely we want to live vs how spread out we want to live.

Interesting, I had many friends who got more positive and playful after they got older, got married and stopped giving a fuck how they interact with others. As I can see now it’s the older cohort that wants to socialize at the office not the young folks.

I'm not positive we're disagreeing here, just sharing my personal thoughts. I definitely quit caring what people thought long ago, though, that part is true.

I find the younger generation antisocial to detriment, but maybe that's the old guy talking. So I think a lot of the folks missing it are of my ilk. Kinda how some guys miss playing high school football and such. I didn't, so my 'glory days' were in the office, and I admit as much.

> Given that office spaces are concentrated in downtown areas,

There's a lot of commercial sprawl far from downtown cores. Sure, big glossy companies like to splash for nice views and central locations, but a great number of office workers are in suburbs, working for businesses that you've never heard of.

I think it's a grass is greener thing right now.

We miss the office because of a couple particular nice things. We're not thinking about the traffic, The daily grind, having to fit in lunch time while at the office, having to deal with the people that we hate in the office, higher pressure, somebody looking over your shoulder all the time, etc. I work from home and I would never go back to an office if I could.

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