Poll: Do you prefer the office or work from home?

If by "office" you mean some large open office that you're forced to report to by 9:30-10:30 and stay for 8 hours glued to your desk the whole time with countless meetings, then no I prefer the freedom of working remotely.

I think "working remotely" is more accurate description because one can work remotely without working from home (eg. working out of a coworking space, coffee shop, or park)

Here's a story that explains this concept. A programmer goes to his manager, presenting a paper with a lengthy problem for the manager to solve. The manager looks over the paper, thinks for a few minutes, then writes down the answer. The employee then tells the manager "What were you doing for the last 5 minutes? It didn't look like you were working at all". The manager responds saying "I was thinking about the problem before coming up with the solution".

The programmer then informs the manager that this is what it is like to write code all day. But since programming looks like you are just sitting there not doing anything for much of the time, then you have to pretend to be doing something whenever someone walks by so it doesn't look like you are just goofing off (otherwise they feel that they can interrupt you breaking your train of thought). And that makes programming less efficient.

The manager was then enlightened.

Maybe it depends on how the team is structured. For the team I belonged to, most of our long-term planning was done informally, we were small enough that we could often spontaneously discuss future goals, present problems, and potential solutions. But with the advent of WFH, those discussions no longer happen, and nobody seems to have time or interest in regularly scheduled meetings.

But I don't know, I only learned recently that my own team members had been working around a broken feature that I maintain for over a year without telling me. I kind of feel like I've been abandoned.

WFH has become so monotonous. It drags on far longer than working from the office. I can't focus. It's more exhausting. There's nobody to talk to.

My employers are getting half the efficiency they used to get. Anything I used to find enjoyable about the work is now gone.

I'm probably going to go on a looong sabbatical soon.

The pandemic really helped me confirm that I prefer the office.

I always sought to establish a clear distinction between my work life and home life and the enforced work from home due to COVID has made the two blur to a point now where I feel like I've lost all rhythm. Now living through a pandemic itself has a way of disrupting the rhythm of life but I feel that the collapsing of space into a singular living and work area doesn't help matters.

Another unexpected thing I've found that I missed while working from home is a commute. Now I imagine a person's opinion of their commute is highly conditioned on the mode of transportation but in my case it's a mostly relaxing public transit ride where I had 20-30 minutes of unstructured time to read, listen to a podcast, or just zone out. It similarly helped create additional space to separate the work life from the home life.

This second point on a commute would probably completely change if I had a 90 minute drive in bumper to bumper traffic. If that was my life, there's a good chance I'd find work from home preferable.