I feel bad for people who don’t have friends, family, church, or any social activities at all outside of work. Was work socialization even that good? Meaningless banter about TV shows and restaurants we like. I still have these as a remote worker anyway, but they take a bit more effort.
I don’t like this concerted effort to make me feel bad about these hypothetical junior employees losing out on “mentoring” and lost “spontaneous innovations” that happen supposedly in offices. If you like that keep me out of it. The world has moved on and if you want to commute 2 hours a day be my guest, but don’t make me do it.
Have you ever considered that it's not some concerted effort to make you feel bad, but that there are actually a lot of people out there who could use the mentorship and social aspects of going into the office?
I don't buy it. I share a screen and mentor people over MS Teams in my company right now. The tools are out there.
I think the social aspect of a soul sucking 2 hour commute every day is more harmful to an individual than any positive aspect of being around peers at work.
And it's not like WFH is the universally enforced norm, the way office work used to be. There are still tons of companies that make everyone go to the office. People who need that are free to work for those companies. Nobody else owes them anything.
When you're accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression.
Pay people for commute time (1 to 2 hours a day) and we’ll talk about it again. For now forcing people into noisy environments seems to be in their disservice. As far as productivity goes, forcing people back into offices would probably make them less productive as well.
I just started a 95% remote job (basically a day every two weeks), and the mentorship/onboarding/integration is actually better remotely. When we are onsite, we discuss stuff, we discuss about previsou jobs and work a bit, but we cannot isolate, the open space is loud and it's tiring tbh.
Remotely, i ask "hey, i'm doing task #WXY-99 on project A, who can explain the stuff to me", and i have a two-hour mentorship on the project specifics. And sometimes more. I was taught a lot of stuff.
But the management is the best management i had in my life (Ie very hands-off, but with strict work procedure i had to learn the first day), and they discovered the way to make me twice as productive: 5 hours of meeting maximum every week (as i'm new, i have 3 hours on average). The rest should be work or one to one.
[edit]: And we do a lot of 1:1. Lot of reviews, pair programming, mentoring, discussing new feature, designing a DB... All that stuff that i used to do in "meetings" with 10 people are done on 1:1. Its faster, its a lot less performative, thus more productive and make the interaction more "real".
> [edit]: And we do a lot of 1:1. Lot of reviews, pair programming, mentoring, discussing new feature, designing a DB... All that stuff that i used to do in "meetings" with 10 people are done on 1:1. Its faster, its a lot less performative, thus more productive and make the interaction more "real".
Damn that sounds great. Where I work we have the exact opposite; two people screen sharing and troubleshooting a problem only they are working on or understand, for 30 minutes at the end of morning standup...every day.
For many people that commute is 4 hours a day depending upon traffic. And then small failures in highway system can cause large delays for innumerable people just trying to get to work.
> Was work socialization even that good?
Yes and no. I have friends I met from going into the office. But most were still "work" friends -- people I wouldn't have socialized with had it not been for working at the same company. But for me the inane inter cubicle chatter is gone, and I can focus on getting work done first.
That sounds more like an infrastructure failure and an unwillingness to live near work than a failure of RTO. As much as HN seems to love shitting all over Muni and BART, I generally enjoyed my commute downtown. At one job it meant I got a chance to walk through the Castro in the morning, maybe stop off for a Whiz burger and banana shake if I was making a late appearance. When I was working further down Market the ride gave me an opportunity to interact with (and I know this is terrifying for many) people. E.g. I ran into my barber from high school, someone I went to K-12 with, a friend I hadn't seen in a few years, another ex-KDE contributor, etc. Hell, my commute gave me the opportunity to find and utilize an independent pharmacy – they were more of a community center than some automatons dispensing pills. Commuting via automobile sounds torturous by comparison, especially if you're spending two hours in traffic.
It is but one fender bender can back up traffic for hours. We can argue about whether public transportation is good or not. We can argue for denser housing in urban centers and hope to win over the nimby's.
The solutions we're proposing now would have been good 40 years ago, maybe? Now you need a solution for 40 years of population growth for these urban metro areas, and that won't be cheap, and it won't be free of NIMBY politics.
It doesn't really matter. It was OK for some, useless for others. People still don't have a choice. It's just a different lack of choice.
Debates about WFH seem redundant at this point. There is not much value in endless anecdote-driven BTO vs WFH holywars. By now, it's obvious that WFH is good for some people and bad for others. Companies should do what that can to offer the desirable type of work to the employees who should have a choice. That's it. End of story. Back to work.
One can enjoy spending time with coworkers at work, see the value of being in person together, AND not want to commute. At the end of the day, we all may choose to work remotely over being in office, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t any trade-offs.
Yeah, I was thinking mostly the same about the other thread and top comment today[1] about people who want us back in the office. I have empathy for people who are feeling lonely, but I don't want to sacrifice my own family's quality of life to make those people feel better. Just like the rise in home prices has been a boon for people who already own homes, the shift towards work-from-home has been a boon for people who already have their "foot in the door" with a spouse and kids, career capital, etc. while I know being somewhat disastrous for people who aren't yet established.
The idea of having more of a "third place" sounds good, but I think it will be more realistic for me once my kids grow up. It's very tough to commit to something like an adult sports club, hobby group, etc. with little kids who demand a lot of hands-on attention, constantly get sick, and need early bedtimes or naps. Time is at such a premium, which is why working from home (or wherever else I want) is fantastic for me right now.
I used to think I would want to lose the commute. I mean I still do. But the loss of co-located colleagues is a real genuine barrier to effective productive working.
So many issues that affect a "team" - misunderstandings that would have been a chair roll away are elevated to the status of conflict. Code has been written, lines have been drawn.
And yet we pretend that it can all be dealt with by more "teamwork".
I haven't had this experience at all. My swes are based all around the world and I proudly manage them without having to do all of the annoying agile ceremonies. My philosophy is simple: keep the developers developing. If they aren't then you're wasting your money.
I only break out the agile ceremonies for junior engineers who need the guidance and I do it all over video conferencing.
But at the end of the day, our products get delivered, timelines met on or ahead of schedule, and typically on budget.
But what do they develop? How does the business (which is also dislocated over great distances) know what it wants / express it when ...
aww never mind. I know the answers
Unless you (ie you) are the product owner / guiding light / main decisin maker then any "keep developers developing" is false. But in the likely circumstance that you taking a "product goal" and running with it - then are you getting the recognition and then the linked monetary rewards and access to other resources?
or are you just doing a great job while others benefit?
Former is it! I am a product owner. We're a contract dev shop and build a myriad of things, at the end of the day, I define the functional requirements, work with UX designers, and work with my devs to pass that vision along. Once we have the MVP scoped and designs locked, there's a kick off meeting with the devs to explain it all and off we go.
I'm particularly precise about how I define my stories with granular acceptance criteria linked to UX designs for how it should work.
At the end of the day, I'm just a waiter for my devs to keep them going and prioritized. I don't reap rewards other than a paycheck and the satisfaction of a delivered product.
Post MVP, we'll define a roadmap of what the customer wants depending on budget and do 4 week sprints to deliver.
After working in a agile safe corporate environment for years, this was a breathe of fresh air. I see the agile tools as guidelines for picking and choosing depending on need. This wouldn't work in my old corporate job.
Meaningless banter about TV shows and restaurants we like.
If that's all you're getting out of it then sure, that doesn't sound fun.
Me? I've made long-term friends, gone on vacations, successfully played matchmaker, etc. I enjoyed working with the person who was fluent in five or so Chinese dialects, the folks who engaged in meaningful political and philosophical discourse. I enjoyed the banter about shared hobbies. Hell, I enjoyed the opportunities to goof off (some say there are googly eyes on the inside of the refrigerator door to this day). Come to think of it, while I didn't enjoy working for this one guy, 1:1s involved getting out of the office and just going for a walk which was great.
I think the whole effort to make others bad because of the juniors/mentorship ideas are largely because a lot of people are failing to adapt. It doesn't help that the very institutions that the people rely on learning from haven't either.
Sorry but you can’t opt out; you’re either part of it and therefore part of the team, or you’re not and first on the chopping block when tough decisions get made.
Punch in/punch out mentality has its place, but if you don’t have one of those jobs, the mismatch will eventually become unbearable for one side or the other.
I think that’s where all this is leading; WFH roles will be smaller in scope, lower in salary (not CoL but lower responsibility), and much more focused on churning out work decided by the folks in the office who work as a team to grow the company.
Actually I own the company and everyone is remote (hundreds of people). I have lost entry level hires because they didn’t like remote only. Now we don’t hire recent college grads anymore. I want everyone to work hard when they are working and enjoy their life when they aren’t working.
That’s pretty interesting as the owner to switch to not hiring juniors after they expressed trouble with remote work. Is this sustainable?
Wrt your top comment, it’s probably worth acknowledging that work mentoring and water-cooler banter are two completely different work-social activities. People do need mentoring, even senior level hires, and without it, people are not going to succeed as often. How do you ensure mentoring is working with all-remote work? (I do think there are things you can do remotely, but as a senior developer, I have watched juniors struggling during the pandemic, and I don’t have the choice to stop hiring juniors.)
If their budget allows for it, there will always be enough seniors to hire that they don’t have to eat the cost of training juniors who aren’t compatible with their operating model. Let that be someone else’s problem if you can (and then hire who’ve they’ve developed away with the offer of remote work).
It has not been my experience that senior folks need mentoring, only culture and people ops guidance (as every org is different in that regard). Coaching (distinctly different than mentoring) can be done between peers remotely.
That’s definitely true for one company, but of course can’t work for all companies. And even so, mentoring is still an important task, not to mention many other aspects of work communication that aren’t automatically enabled with Slack and email, so I’m genuinely curious how to make it as good remotely as it used to be in-person.
Sure. What I have seen work is the mentor sitting in on video or conf calls as a regular participant, taking notes, and then coaching room for improvement one on one with those being coached. Praise in public, constructively critique in private.
There’s a bunch of reasons I don’t want entry level people around, in general the drama is a lot higher and the dice rolling is more significant on whether they work out. We do 6 month internships and students either take a sabbatical or their college has co-op programs for longer interns, and if they are good and can work remote effectively, we will hire them once they graduate. Otherwise it’s 2+ years experience and up only and we strongly prefer more experienced people. You need to be self-motivated as no one is watching you, and the people in their 30s+ are typically much better at this.
From home is amazing for those with a family. I no longer lose an hour to commute. I see my family more. I have third places (eg not work or home) that revolve around team sports for the kids. Some tech friends have made slack groups for a few topics and those often end up with meetings at bars or peoples homes. Honest it is great and I’ve never been more productive.
I definitely do not need the semi fulfilling work environment which is a poor replacement for these much more meaningful connections. Honestly if you do long for work, I suggest trying to find peer groups instead. You can be more honest and you wouldn’t lose friends to a layoff, etc.
> Honestly if you do long for work, I suggest trying to find peer groups instead. You can be more honest and you wouldn’t lose friends to a layoff, etc.
Fair, but -- anecdotally, I'm an introvert with fairly limited social needs. In-office socialisation meets those needs quite well, especially as I'm married and have socialisation at home sorted. I also suffer from an anxiety disorder, and the _necessary_ nature of interaction in the office works out great for me -- because "find[ing] peer groups" is quite a big ask, between the anxiety and the social energy expended in doing so.
I worked at a fully-remote company in 2021 and 2022, and it was great, but I'm under no illusions that my experience would be replicated elsewhere. I was on a team with strong social elements, and I had weekly 1:1s with teammates which generally took the form of general chit-chat rather than work-related discussion. Now, I'm back in the office at a new place, enjoying the limited -- but built-in -- social interaction, and not really feeling the need for anything else. I don't like the commute, but oh well.
Obviously, this is all specific to me -- but insisting that your own preferences are universal is wrong-headed.
I've worked from home most of my 13 year career, first as a contractor for various clients, later as a full time employee. I definitely noticed an effect about 2 weeks after I started working from home. I was a bit more socially awkward, more anxious about social interactions. The benefits of working from home are huge, I don't know if I'd be willing to give them up, but I've worried about how it's affecting my personality for my entire career.
So many of my hobbies are related to computers or the internet. I moved away from the place I grew up, and all of that has combined to make it hard to meet anyone at all to make new friends with in the real world. I'm married now and have 2 young kids, with even less ability to easily leave the house on my own. I can too easily see a future where I'm 60 with basically no real connection outside of my immediate family, something that I worry about for everyone if we don't figure out some better ways to be social in the real world again.
I'm not sure what the point of this reply is, this topic just struck a chord with me.
I do think we are in a moment of social upheaval and splintering (which started long before the pandemic). It's always been a bit of a fiction to say that there was anything in the US that people from all classes and backgrounds shared - but the divergences have only grown sharper and we have not even begun to grapple with it. If anything, I feel like it's common to reject the conversation entirely as representing an effort at some kind of political signal (which it certainly is sometimes!).
Personally I suspect that no one has answers and what we are left with is trying to talk about how we feel and see how others feel - a social activity that I've found US culture to be particularly bad at. People want bold, holistic theses about what "should" be - not uncertain vulnerable discussions about where we are. I hope, for all our sakes, that we can find a healthier way to talk about and envision new kinds of community.
> There is little to no social aspect of my job anymore, just an endless stream of meetings people don't want to be in and Jira tickets to be worked on. The rare moments of socialization are fleeting and increasingly fewer as time goes on
I’ve noticed this at work. Somewhere during the pandemic the attitude has creeped in that because we aren’t in the office, there should be no down time ever. Meetings have to be quick and to the point, no chitchat, no social meetings either. What a waste of time. Work work focus!
But on my team we deliberately make time for down time. We often wrap meetings early then just sort of hang. Or we spend the first 10min of standup shooting the shit. We’re one of the few teams that still shows up for “friday hang time” every week. And we have a ridiculous amount of meetings, mostly ad-hoc, for a 4 person team.
People wonder why we’re the most effective team and how we get so much done. I think that’s why. We feel like a team, not just a bunch of people working together.
My team does exactly this too, especially during the pandemic when we couldn't socialise outside of work. We spend 10-15 minutes before standup bantering and our team has come out stronger for it.
Even though we'd lose that 15 minutes of productivity every day, our team is actually coherent while other teams are a mess. We get stuff done, we work together effectively, and we actually enjoy working together. It makes all the difference.
I've been working remotely since 2002. Fortunately I've been married that whole time, so I see my wife a lot, which is great.
At my previous job I was a manager so I talked to other people _a lot_ at work, what with all the meetings, 1:1's, etc. When I started my new job as an IC I realized that I didn't interact with my coworkers nearly as much.
So I scheduled a monthly 30 minute 1:1 with each of my teammates that specifically has no agenda and is there to talk about whatever. Sometimes we talk about tech stuff or work stuff, and sometimes we just talk about random things like travel plans or events we've been to, etc.
Obviously, this is a lot less social interaction than I would have if we were all in the same office, but I do think it's helpful to remind all of us that the person on the webcam is another human, and I enjoy these 1:1's.
Just make sure the person on the other end does too, and isn't doing it out of some sense of obligation to show up to meetings they were invited to. Watch out for signs of them being uncomfortable, like trying to always bring the conversation back to work stuff.
Some people don't want to talk about their personal life with co-workers, they just feel obligated to fill the time with it.
I asked each person via DM advance if they were okay with me scheduling these meetings, and people sometimes reschedule or cancel if they're busy that month.
I also try not to pry into their personal life too much if they're not volunteering that information. Like I said, sometimes we just talk about things we've been working on or general tech chat.
I personally find scheduled meetings really annoying. I'm just not a schedule kind of person. Imo you've done a good thing but I'd hate it. However, a small tweak would make me like it: schedule it in your calendar to ask me, then ask me when your see me online. It would feel adhoc to me and scheduled to you.
It's not like this is the only meeting on anyone's calendar. We all have various standups, ticket review, etc. meetings already. If we were a _no-meeting_ company (does that exist?) I would've gone about this differently.
Well yes, my company also has plenty of scheduled meetings. But I still don't want a scheduled 1:1 with my colleagues, and we do the adhoc meetings all the time. For all I know, they have a calendar entry "meet with jemmyw today" as long as I don't need to commit to a specific time with them it's all good.
Seems like a small thing, but if I see it coming up in the schedule then I don't want to do it.
I think the author is right. Looking back, much of my social interaction was spending time with coworkers that I liked, and the rest was time with friends from college. I didn't really have a "3rd place" and most of my social interaction was with work friends.
But now I have a family, so I spend time with them, and with other people that have kids our age that live nearby and go to the same school, or go to the same art studio nearby. I no longer need social interaction from work to fill my life.
But here is the real problem -- a lot of the people who can "fix" this are like me -- they already have their built in social networks and don't need these other places.
It seems like society is constantly changing in ways that make it harder and harder to meet new people, especially if you are young. The days of riding your bike around town as a 10 year old are over. And now the ladder is being pulled up before them as now the office is going too.
Once the company I worked for went remote shortly after the pandemic started I decided to switch jobs once the lockdowns were over and that's exactly what I did to a place that values in person attendance.
Work is where people from different classes, backgrounds and walks of life come together to work on common projects. Socialization at work cannot be replaced by family activities or hobbies which are always parochial.
People talk a lot about cultural issues and bubbles these days and in my opinion the withering away of a workplace social life has been one of the biggest drivers. Remote work accelerates that dynamic of pushing people into private, increasingly narrow groups.
About 8 years ago, I moved to a new city with my wife and went fully remote. It looked different for me- I was with a consultancy and started by out flying out to customer sites every other week, gradually fading to one a quarter or less before the pandemic.
It took a long time to adapt- about 3 years before I feel like I really adapted, but I feel better about my social life now at any point before the transition.
On work relationships- for me, one of the biggest learnings was that every interaction when you are remote is intentional. If you are going to get to know your coworkers, you have to make time for it. I have 1-1s with peers just to talk on a fairly regular basis, and for meetings of appropriate size (5 or less people) I find it perfectly acceptable to spend the first 5 minutes or more chitchatting. I’ve also worked on “scaling” these interactions by organizing presentations on peoples hobbies, which has been really fun and improved everyone’s feeling of belonging.
As a result of this I have a number of people I consider dear friends who I have never met in person.
I do think organizations need to encourage in person get together a on a semi-annual or more basis. In my consulting days those get togethers created an enormous amount of bonding and trust in a very short time that increased communication for years afterwards.
I actually found it harder to find a social life in my new city than I did to maintain or develop work relationships. I’d previously used my college network or social sports teams to find out of work friend groups and the new city didn’t have either of those. In addition, I was a new father and we quickly had another child, which quickly limits your availability.
What eventually worked for me was a combination of finding a true 3rd space (for me, a teach your kids to ski club), moving to a neighborhood with lots of similarly aged families, and meeting other parents through my kids school.
So I really get the OPs feeling- that the 2nd space has collapsed, and that its tough build the 3rd, but with time, intention and repetition I really think it’s possible to have it all.
The key is realizing that you have agency over this stuff
Look at the things you want or need to do day-to-day, and create contexts around those where social fabric can form
Instead of working from home, work from the same coffee shop a couple times a week. Make small talk with the people behind the counter and the other regulars, learn names
Have remote coworkers who live in the same city as you? Suggest a regular trivia night at a bar. Or host a weekly D&D or board-games night at your apartment
Create parties, cook people dinner, suggest day-trips to do fun things
Reach out, organize, offer to host, make small talk with new people even if it's not especially interesting right off the bat. But get curious, ask about the details, pull on threads, and you'll get past the boilerplate pretty fast
If you're literally starting from zero it can be hard - maybe you just have to seek out meetups or whatever as a starting point - but you have the ability to create change. A social fabric is a thing you cultivate, not something that just happens to you like the weather. Took me many years to learn that, but it's true
I don't mean to make it sound easy- for some of us, keeping a healthy social life is as hard as keeping a healthy diet or exercise routine is for others. But you do have agency over it
This is all so tiring. I've spend the last 2 years trying to recreate the social experience of working in office and you end up burning all your free time and energy trying to coordinate complex schedules and hunting down people to interact with.
I'm never taking a job which is primarily remote again. I want my free time back. I want to spend the after work period relaxing at home instead of scrutinizing meetup.com for events and PMing my whole contact list frequently to work out when people are free to do things.
The hope is to cultivate things to where it becomes self-sustaining, and goes beyond the surface-level meetup.com events and boilerplate small-talk. Digging deeper to form more-than-acquaintance relationships where people naturally want to interact more. It's not always easy, and sometimes things fizzle out. If it continues to feel forced with certain people, sometimes you just need to move on until you find relationships that stick. But the goal is for it to not keep being tiring indefinitely
I sympathize, I know it can be hard, but I think it's possible for most people to do
Hi, I get what you mean and I know it can be hard. I want to add that maybe you should try to not recreate the social exp. of working in the office and instead create something different. Some ways to look/frame this is think about which parts of the in-office exp. resonates with you and try to find that micro experience in another different type of experience. I may wording this wrong but I hope you got what I mean
> Instead of working from home, work from the same coffee shop a couple times a week.
This isn't workable at all in my experience. Most coffee shops are far too loud to have a call in; depending on your work, you might not always have calls only at neatly scheduled times.
Post-pandemic, many indoor dining spots have basically become fulfillment centers for UberEats and DoorDash and that includes coffee shops. Employees serve the drive-thru line and delivery pickup guys first, and are constantly working.
Depends where you are and where you go, I guess. My favorite coffee shop doesn't have a drive-through, and I'm on a name basis with several people who work there. They'll ask me what's been going on if I haven't been around in a while, and I've chatted with a couple of patrons too over time
I don't have many work calls, to be fair, but when I do I can usually just migrate outside and be okay
Having agency is different from having capacity. Lots of us simply don't have the energy to coordinate our social lives to this extent. That's the benefit of a third place, or even just an office.
I sympathize, but I look at (energy/emotional) capacity for life things like this as a resource, and there's such thing as poverty. But poverty is a state to be in, not a fixed fact of your life
Climbing out of it means finding room around the edges, small things you do have the capacity to chip away at, and making yourself more and more room that you can then use to make more and more progress. The same goes for social stuff and for increasing your capacity in general
Capacity? Like amount to produce?
I'm sorry but reading what you wrote, you seem to be self-defeating yourself by putting the responsibility on to the third place or office. There's nothing hard nor easy about coordinating a social life per say, it is simple though. It's literally a fundamental life skill that falls under communication, is it not?
I'd love to help or offer suggestions.
I've never lived alone. We're almost twenty people in the community where I live now. So when I switched to working from home I lost colleagues, but gained interaction at home.
The loss of contact slowly grew into a disconnect from the office over the years. I try to put in a day at the office every week now, to build up some rapport again.
Wouldn't want to face living alone. That this is the new normal state really scares me. Rent a flat and be done, right? I don't have time to mind a nice house alone. But with others, it's fun!
This has been a big concern now especially with the rise of remote work and I feel sad for those who don't have the second-place and third-place. It's a constant thing that needs to be maintained, just like all good things. So if you're reading this and don't have one, I behoove you to start looking into investing time to get started with one (by hosting or joining an existing group/event/etc.)
One thing I'd like to share was I met a fellow remote SWE in Australia by chance and I remember talking about the lack of second/third-place for people working remote. He shared his personal experience with this which I found interesting and very niche. He worked part-time as a barista/help at a cafe that he frequented whilst working since he just brought a long his laptop. He worked 4 days a week and was usually always there throughout the week in different times. I think this is a good model that could be applied for anyone dealing with the lack of second/third-place. Ofcourse context always applies
About half of us have returned to the office, and just speaking for my team of 11, the people who are still work from home, they are getting left behind. Not so much in the work, but in their place at the company. Opportunities for promotion, bonus, preferential, schedules, and projects, none of that is discussed with the WFH people.
Interesting, I checked your profile and are you still working in government? I'd get your sentiment then. In that context, relationships are big factors
Yes, I'm a contractor tasked to a federal agency. Relationships is a really great point that I wasn't really thinking about. That, too, but for us I think its communication. Wfh coworkers are kind of isolated, and it's the people at the office that are getting noticed.
I thought"first" "second" and "third" places were just civil engineering terms? Like, any bar is just a third place, I don't think all people have a "third place" even though they still visit third places like bars, restaurants, etc...
I've come to realize it's not worth petitioning to fix these things. You'll spend your whole life being dissatisfied and making very little progress. Just move to the place which matches your ideals and enjoy a better life now. It's also the "free market" way of fixing things, the better areas become richer and the rest will move to copy when their population and revenue is at risk.
>>Sure I have a job, but I've been remote since January of 2019. There is little to no social aspect of my job anymore [...]
More companies are mandating return-to-office so hopefully this person will be able to find a company culture that matches their desire for social interaction at work. Switching jobs because the culture has changed is hard, but it will be well worth the hopefully positive uplift in mental well being for them.
The inverse is also true where if companies are mandating RTO then those who prefer WFH-heavier arrangements should also considering changing jobs; likely those that already have second places of their own.
I don’t like this concerted effort to make me feel bad about these hypothetical junior employees losing out on “mentoring” and lost “spontaneous innovations” that happen supposedly in offices. If you like that keep me out of it. The world has moved on and if you want to commute 2 hours a day be my guest, but don’t make me do it.