because "somehow" there are different incentives and reason to do each. Remote work has been a thing for a long time. Wait for the next spike in gas prices, all of the chair-warming will evaporate.
> Wait for the next recession. All this nonsense will evaporate.
During a recession companies will have to cut costs wherever they can. So they might start with high cost office space. So yeah, office nonsense will evaporate. In the same way banks cut costs with less branches, more online banking. Or how cars are now being sold without dealerships.
When cost reduction comes along, human nature will cause people to circle the wagons and protect their own. Depending on the office culture, being remote might result in being left out of certain crucial social groups.
You can be social remotely, even in groups, just start a chat or a Zoom. Google used to have video places which were always open and connected and anyone that joined them could interact with anyone else there. That could be a meeting, but also a coffee room place, a hallway place, a smoke outside place, etc. If "crucial social groups" are what determines whether your job is at risk and not your actual work, then you can spend lots of time on Zoom not doing work and interacting with your crucial social groups.
I spent many years telecommuting and got creative at it. I helped people troubleshoot electronics remotely, had them point their camera at circuit boards, shared screens to examine code, logged into a common remote server so we could both edit, compile, and debug the same code, and a lot more. The one thing I found difficult to do remotely was to reset hardware, I would often ask someone to reboot a computer or flip a physical switch. But that can be automated also, with a dedicated device or maybe it would be a good use case for a simple robot. You could even hire a lower wage worker to go around the office flipping switches when asked to. With good technology, interaction between people can be the same as being there in person (unless you want to create a baby). The only reason to be somewhere in person is if something physical needs to be done, or you just want the personal experience (traveling to a foreign country). This vague "value of being in the same room as the person I'm talking to" benefit CEO's talk about seems to be entirely bogus, except for specific situations (e.g., a musician in a band who needs to be able to see the other players to stay in sync.) What exactly is it the managers are learning from our body language? Next time someone talks about this benefit try asking them to quantify it in a spreadsheet or even define it in sociological or psychiatric terms. If they are forcing people to come back to work ask to see the productivity numbers, did they go down when people physically came back to the office? I think it's basically a distrust of other people ("you'll slack off if you are not here physically") and if they don't trust you, don't trust them; they are likely projecting their own inclinations.
My guess is that managers don't like remote interaction because _it_can_be_and_is_recorded_. Once everything is documented then sleazy decisions are also documented and can be trotted out when trouble ensues. Being held responsible is what managers fear, they want their dictums to go undocumented so they have deniability and so they don't look as foolish when they make mistakes. They don't want to be held to the same standard they hold their employees.
"Cost reduction" basically means the managers screwed up and haven't protected their people in case of unforeseen circumstances and have to shrink their personal empire.
I’m not making a judgement regarding the effectiveness of remote work. But, there are intangible changes to the social dynamics that develop. People overhear and share jokes, develop office friendships, etc. which becomes harder to do when everything is “on the record”, or physical distance gets in the way.
From a political perspective, I have seen firsthand how being local can keep you in fresh in the mind when new projects are being discussed and assigned. In years past, it was always considered better for one’s career to be “closer to the mother ship” than a satellite office. I suspect that this was/is at least partially human nature, rather than a learned anachronism.
It's mainly built with people employed in bigger companies, where they have fruitful exchanges with their company peers.
The contributions they push in the kernel is part of a larger effort in their respective companies. And the mailing list is the way they communicate around the kernel. They still have physical colleagues in their day jobs.
Just because you don't like remote work (or if remote work doesn't work for you), doesn't mean that everyone who favors remote work is lying and that remote work is nonsense.
Remote happy hour, garbage. Remote school, garbage. But somehow remote work is just dandy.
Wait for the next recession. All this nonsense will evaporate.