No. I do not think he's implying it is a bad thing by itself. Instead he explicitly says that those are the people who try to solve their problems at expense of others.

The expense of others is a point that works both ways. You could equally say that someone who insists on being remote because it's better for their family life is preventing/slowing down the return to office, and that's at the expense of people who prefer to be in the office.

But I wouldn't put it that way because I don't think it makes for a productive conversation - office or remote, people like what they like and they have their reasons for it.

These are not morally equivalent. The office-worker wants others to modify everyone's behaviour to support them, whereas the remote worker just wants to control their own behaviour. The remote worker is completely ambivalent to where others want to work.

I'm not buying this.

- In a big team if everyone is in-office and 1 person is remote, that person certainly cares about being the only remote person. Maybe some people would be okay with it, but being the only remote person has been known to be a not-so-great working arrangement even before the pandemic. So you can't say that remote people don't care where others work.

- If enough people choose remote, they're forcing everyone else to be remote too (whether they attend the office or not) because the communication model for the whole team has to be different now. <<< This is remote people modifying everyone else's behaviour to support them.

It's entirely possible that at least some of those who prefer to work at the office are equally ambivalent about what others what to do.

disclaimer: I have worked from home most of my life, so I'm not against it, BUT, people like what they like and they have their reasons for it is a very immature thing to say when talking about work: work means taking full responsibility to respect a contract in return of an economic compensation.

If you signed to work in an office and don't like it, resign.

Nobody will cry over it, just know that you signed for something you did not like. Your fault.

Also: people working from remote do that at the expenses of others too. When I am at the office to talk with my colleagues, the one person refusing to come over forces all of us (10 or so) to turn on the video conference in some meeting room, while we could have had the same chat in the garden of the bar down the office.

It doesn’t really work both ways though. Remote fans don’t force everyone to be remote.

They do. They might be able to say that they don't care where their coworkers are (and I believe them), but when enough people are remote, their colleagues are forced into a remote working model too because the team needs to communicate in a different way now.

How people work is a mutual agreement, not something that's being done to one group by another.

Remote fans force everyone to use tools to accommodate their remoteness.

We used to have a stand-up meeting each morning at a time "when everyopne's arrived" and we used to have a whiteboard on the wall with the most current tasks. None of this can work with even one remote worker, so it's gone to scheduled Zooms, online task managers, and endless Slack messages.

In exchange, now you have proper record of everything said and done.

I love the fact that I can always go back to Slack and say “See? This is what we agreed upon”, instead of having to recall the specifics of a meeting where notes weren’t taken in detail.

I don’t find any difference in the record-keeping of remote vs. in person meetings. The record button is available to both, but the resulting video files just as unwieldy, and Zoom’s transcripts are garbage.

Nor do I see any increased willingness to hash out complex issues in writing. The moment things get even slightly complex in a thread, it’s “let’s hop on a call.”

So you like the written “proof” so you can face off your colleagues in case of disagreement? You seem to have negative feelings about your work environment. You should consider changing jobs.

No, I want processes, agreements, and ideas, documented. Slack, Zoom and other tools make this easier.

As someone who had to train many junior employees, having a record trail is the best answer to the question “why the hell did we do this in the first place?”.

Much is still being said in person or calls, because talking is much more efficient than writing, so ... no, we don't "have proper record of everything said and done."

Yet we should.

Whether we should have that record or not is completely orthogonal to the conversation about how remote workers force (or not) the others to behave in a certain way to accommodate the remoteness of these workers.

Office fans aren't a homogeneous whole.

Perhaps it's likely at least some managers want more people to come to the office.

It's also likely that some people who aren't managers, regular employees, just prefer the office.

it forces others to "follow their dream" for the sole satisfaction of remote workers.

> You're implying that this is a bad thing and I don't get why it should be.

The quote points at “social dynamics” and “competition” in offices, not personal relationships or even friendships. Meaning that the mere fact of being surrounded by people with relatively the same professional goals, is good enough for some craving for social interaction. There isn’t necessarily any more depth to it, and it doesn’t really solve any other pending socialising issues.

How is that not a bad thing?

I think his point is that the solution to the problem is not to go back to the office, but to try develop a better social life outside of work.

It's the "root cause" fix.

That argument only works if you make the value judgment that socializing outside the office is better or of higher quality somehow.

Come on of course it is.

Offices have hierarchy, promotions, payscales, politics. Socializing in the office is a PC minefield.

My current direct manager is about my age, with kids about my kids age, he is an overall great guy. If we weren't working together I am sure we would have beers together, but in the current context I would hate to blur the work/leisure line.

I have to agree with you. It's not necessarily a bad thing. Where people get their fulfillment from is their own business, and if their needs are met -- all the better. Everyone deserves contentment and fulfillment.

But, don't force me to make my life worse for that reason. You like the office? Go to the office.

My life is much worse for having 30+ Zoom meetings per week instead of the 1-2 it was before. Design discussions and collaborative problem solving are activities I used to find satisfying & be pretty efficient at. On Zoom I find them excruciating, draining, and very slow - requiring more hours for the same output, compounding the pain of sitting on Zoom, and sapping my own focus time.

Part of the job is to knock out tickets but part of the job (particularly when senior) is to help coworkers. If we lived in a fully transactional gig-worker kind of model then I would bill you 10x as much to get involved in your problem over Zoom. We don't, so that's impossible. And I realize this is silly on the grand scale of labor exploitation but I feel like by expecting me to treat remote workers the same as in-office workers, management is extracting a lot more value from me than was our deal pre-pandemic.

I get very little utility from the "flexibility" (always prioritized living close to the office, prefer the change of scenery) but a lot of disutility from remote collaboration.

I was much better off when I was among a small group of people free to go or not go to the office.

Now that everyone wants to do that, without the knowledge or the experience to do it, but only because they want to work in their pajamas (let's be honest!) I am forced to go through endless meetings where the first half is about "can you hear me?" "can you see me?" "where is X?" "coming, is in another meeting" "OK let's wait another 5 minutes then" and then half of them has an horrible voice quality, worse video, you have to repeat the same things over and over for the benefit of those not listening (let's be honest!) etc etc

it's exhausting and the fact that we aren't physically in the same room make people think two hours meetings are something normal

It's making me frankly think that all of this "freedom to work everywhere" trope has gone too far.