In fact, I've added two days working outside of home instead of one because of the benefits. I think 3 days home/2 days office is the sweet spot.

The entire system is designed around making the numbers go up, not down

I am 100% more effective in person where I can dev and my desk and bounce ideas off if team mates around me verbally. This can be recreated in a remote environment by having things like a team Discord that folks sit on, but it can feel forced at times (just like communiting to the office I suppose).

My take might be heavily skewed though. I am in games and our environment is highly collaborative.

And for many people WFH has other problems - if you're a dual-WFH couple in a small home, lack of home office space is a very real problem. (Although if WFH was a permanent thing, many people could choose less expensive places to live, and have more space)

Still, anything to eliminate a miserable and environmentally wasteful commute.

So? The only people who matter are shareholders and their proxies (management). To everyone else: you don't matter as much as you think you do, quit being selfish and be happy you get anything at all. The world doesn't revolve around you.

This claim might be true but it’s simply not showing up in the data which suggests that even if true, the effect is probably minor.

You don't speak for me :)

I hate it.

https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2020/03/04/8110190...

I worked from home but a few times I needed to go to my parents house during what used to be rush hour. Less than 5% of normal traffic and fuel demand dropped so much that prices were lower.

My job went hybrid in 2022 and then return to office full time last year. Everyone hates it. It's a waste of time and resources.

Less pollution, less traffic means we don't need to use tax revenue to expand roads and less wear and tear means less repairs.

Take it one step further and give tax breaks to businesses that let employees work from home and close physical offices. Then this means less new office construction which can be used for housing to help the housing crisis. It's a win win for everyone except control freak managers.

Let me guess, you live in the West and don't need to worry about your family's basic needs being met?

Imagine if the world had aggressively invested in renewables at any time in the past ten years!

It does seem like a glaring contradiction, but it's actually not. In the West, at least, climate rhetoric is a tool primarily to discipline and control the masses through fear, with actual concern for the climate a distant secondary factor. This is why those elites can cry crocodile tears for the environment while also riding on private jets to private islands and staying mum about intentional environmental disasters caused in the ongoing wars (which they support, of course).

In the current fuel crisis, mandatory WFH is also an attempt to manage populations through controlled demand-destruction, which avoids more volatile forms of demand-destruction that result in unrest, like not being able to afford food.

From an (cynical) governance perspective, there is no contradiction here.

I'd like to think that you see "my 2 programmers" as "my team" but I've come to expect phrasing like "when we have our 2 programmers in office". That perspective emphasizes that we're all in this together, rather than serfs working for the benefit of the lord.

The "my programmers" phrasing plays into my prejudice that one reason you like having "your programmers" in office is the exhilaration you feel in seeing them at your beck and call.

The technology exists to "just talk" in high-definition audio and video. If somebody isn't asking for help when they're stuck that's a people problem, not a remote work problem. There are several possible reasons for their avoidance; if multiple people are exhibiting the same behavior it could be cultural (specific to your workplace, not the person's upbringing). Using physical presence to force their hand is curing the symptom, not the underlying cause.

The majority of my career (years before the pandemic) has been remote work. I find in office work painfully slow. I pair program quite often remote, and when someone gets stuck we also "just talk". Honestly I prefer screen sharing to leaning over someone's shoulder (much easier to doing supporting work in parallel).

I find it really depends on the type of org though. Large corporate places do tend to suffer from remote work because so much of the work is performative anyway. Remote small companies and startups the velocity is very high, but you do need more senior people capable of independent work.

Especially when you factor in the easy of "after hours" work, the amount of emergency stuff I've shipped around midnight is incomparable to the 'in office' equivalent.

Though I suspect the key word here is "my 2 programmers", I find managers don't feel like their doing work unless they're physically watching it get done.

Not understanding how to run a remote team is not the same as remote teams not being effective in principle.

I'm introverted and did just fine in an office, because the company culture was that coworkers all talked to each other about how they preferred to work (preferably no more often than once a quarter) and then respected that. When we moved to WFH during lockdown, that practice continued.

I've also WFH at remote-first companies that did not practice, encourage, or enforce ICs communicating to find and document better ways to work together, and have not been served remotely as well by the result.

Especially these days where it's soooo easy to chat, video call, share screens, etc.

Just observing, not saying it's a good or bad linguistic practice

In this case, “Iran war” is a bit misleading because the conflict is largely a missile and proxy confrontation affecting several territories (Iran, Israel, and parts of the Gulf), not just one battlefield.

Personally, I find it clearer to name conflicts after the primary actors involved. For example:

Russia–Ukraine war U.S. & Israel–Iran war

That makes the participants explicit instead of implicitly framing the war around a single country or location.

I wonder what they call it in Iran?

Truly the hero we deserve.