Why do so many people want us back in the office?

Im happy for all the people that can live happily hours outside of urban areas but the insistence that remote work is uniformly better for all people is just so exhausting. I for one, will be glad when it ends and will continue to prioritize companies that keep most of their work force in office; bringing work into my living space has been terrible for my mental health (anecdotally this sentiment has been shared among other single young people i know in the city).

"I don't know what to do. I guess if you wanted to send an electrician out to install a new circuit with its own meter, things might be more reliable."

I also miss my dedicated workspace, and I miss being able to separate work and home life easily by going no contact after 5PM without management thinking that means I am a bad employee.

But most of all, I miss being able to let my bosses "micromanage" me in a way that didn't disrupt me. “Office Politics” has changed at my company in a way that is taking up a lot more of my productive time than it used to, and I hate it.

Before the Great WFH of 2020, my boss would walk by my cubicle or speak to me in person regularly. Short conversations, didn't ever bother me, and allowed me to focus on work. Made him feel busy and made him feel I was busy. Ultimately I was able to spend less time "appearing busy" and more on actually getting work done.

Since management at my company doesn't know how to actually track real work output, they have always used proxies like "how long does this person stay at the office?", "Are they still in their cubicle when I am leaving?", "When I walk by their cubicle do they have their IDE open doing 'coding stuff'" etc. etc.

I’ve always been decently performant at code production. So all I had to do was stay on my coding tasks for a few hours each day, have an IDE always open on at least one of my monitors and wait til exactly 5:01 PM every day before I left as that was when my boss went home. I ended up getting stuff done quick, got to avoid most meetings, and could screw around the rest of the day if I wanted. Personal projects, internet surfing, etc.

Great reviews from management. I would prefer an actual meritocratic standard based on actual work done, but that really has never been the case at any of the companies I have ever worked at so far in my career as a software engineer, so I’m used to it at this point.

But now that we are all WFH, they really don't seem to know what to do. They don't know how much work anyone is, or isn't doing, instead daily standups have changed from 10 minute short succinct updates to “how aggressively and for how long can you technobabble bullshit about your coding tasks you did yesterday” turning these stand ups into at least an hour or more, and now I have to also technobabble bullshit or management will think I’m slacking.

Even more so than before, they now seem to think pointless emails and multi-hour zoom meetings are the true marker of productivity. I hate this. I don't want to have to spend hours per day making up bullshit technobabble emails and sitting in on multi-hour long zoom meetings talking about unrelated boring bullshit. I just want to be able to focus on getting my coding tasks done for the day. Some of the lowest performers on my team love it though, because they are great at meetings, scheduling meetings, and making themselves feel important with pointless technical presentations during these meetings. Not to mention we are expected to have our webcams on at all times during these meetings, so I can’t even “pretend” to be present while I go make myself tea or something.

The barrier to entry for meetings has lowered. Before, scheduling a meeting in the office room down the hall and giving a presentation on why we all should add “bureaucratic coding standard addition xyz” was both too scary and too much work. Now, its “why not, management will think I am showing leadership skills!”.

Thanks guys, I love more poorly managed bureaucracy. Test driven development might be good if someone actually managed it and maintained standard during code reviews, but now everyone just creates shitty unit tests to meet the 70% code coverage requirement we are told to meet because the literal lowest performer on my team scheduled multi hour meetings with management on why we should all follow tde and convinced them it was a good idea.

For example, take something like presence. The boss wants to know if you are working. With software, there are ways to track that if it's really necessary. For a manager that doesn't trust the employees, activity tracking software gives about the even more information than being there, because you can actually see screenshots.

That is what UpWork does. It's quite invasive, and most people would not tolerate it if they felt they had the choice, but I bring it up as an example of how the software configuration makes as much difference as the physical location. And in fact tens (hundreds?) of thousands of people on UpWork have tolerated it. So it's a real thing, even though it's abhorrent.

The more sane way is having some way to see your reports' work output on a regular basis. And there is no reason that needs to be minute-to-minute or even day-to-day if there is a level of trust.

But presence is not just useful in a physical setting for monitoring employees. It also allows for things like spontaneous communication or types of communication not possible or difficult on a computer screen. Here I think again, the actual software available and the configuration can make a huge difference.

For example, if you truly feel that water-cooler meetings are critical, you can build that into your at-home software setup and just make it mandatory. There are a lot of ways you could do that. It could literally be chat rooms named "water-cooler1" and "water-cooler2" and then you put some piece of required information like an expense code in there so people have to enter.

Or there are various types of software with virtual spaces, such as top-down maps where you see the location of your co-workers and can even hear their conversations if your avatar is close by. There are also 3d world's, both with a screen interface and a virtual reality interface.

I think especially as VR and AR headsets get more comfortable and usable over the next few years, that is really going to be able to compete with physical presence. For example, they are starting to track eye movements. That's going to make it possible to actually communicate using your eyes in VR.

Point being that there is a big spectrum in types or level of presence that is about the type of software and hardware configuration (and culture/rules) as much as it is about actual physical location.