At my previous job, I worked from home 2-3 days a week and commuted (~50 minutes each way) the rest of the time, then I took a new job less than ten minutes from home. We got sent home due to COVID a few months after that. Management talks a lot about how they know remote isn't ideal and want to get us back in the office as soon as possible, despite most of the software teams finding they've been equally or more productive as before.
For me, this has been the first time I've been WFH on an equal footing with the whole team, I _love_ it, and I never want to go back to the office. I actually prefer meeting via Teams since I can't hear well and the built in captioning makes it easier, I have better monitors at home than I do at the office, there's never a wait for the bathroom, can pull some lunch out of the fridge or pantry and heat it up at my convenience.
I know some people lament the whole "not having hallway conversations leading to innovation" thing but I'm honestly curious how real that is. I've been in the industry for over 20 years now, the bulk of that in software-focused companies or teams, and while I do have casual conversations with coworkers I can't recall any of them ever segueing into "so here's the challenging thing I'm working on right now..." -- I'm not saying it never happens, just that I can't recall it's ever happened to me.
Some of my coworkers do miss whiteboarding, though I don't have strong feelings about that one way or the other. I'm more of a textual than a visual thinker personally so I've never found diagramming things out to be particularly helpful.
At any rate, while I really like my boss and my team, the day management sends out the "mandatory full-time return to the office in (x) months, including the development teams" email is almost certainly going to be the day I update my resume.
At my previous job, I worked from home 2-3 days a week and commuted (~50 minutes each way) the rest of the time, then I took a new job less than ten minutes from home. We got sent home due to COVID a few months after that. Management talks a lot about how they know remote isn't ideal and want to get us back in the office as soon as possible, despite most of the software teams finding they've been equally or more productive as before.
For me, this has been the first time I've been WFH on an equal footing with the whole team, I _love_ it, and I never want to go back to the office. I actually prefer meeting via Teams since I can't hear well and the built in captioning makes it easier, I have better monitors at home than I do at the office, there's never a wait for the bathroom, can pull some lunch out of the fridge or pantry and heat it up at my convenience.
I know some people lament the whole "not having hallway conversations leading to innovation" thing but I'm honestly curious how real that is. I've been in the industry for over 20 years now, the bulk of that in software-focused companies or teams, and while I do have casual conversations with coworkers I can't recall any of them ever segueing into "so here's the challenging thing I'm working on right now..." -- I'm not saying it never happens, just that I can't recall it's ever happened to me.
Some of my coworkers do miss whiteboarding, though I don't have strong feelings about that one way or the other. I'm more of a textual than a visual thinker personally so I've never found diagramming things out to be particularly helpful.
At any rate, while I really like my boss and my team, the day management sends out the "mandatory full-time return to the office in (x) months, including the development teams" email is almost certainly going to be the day I update my resume.