Came exactly here to say this. Because of WFH im able to have a awesome job and see my family living in other countries and also my parents at home much more frequently now.
If you want to work in an office you can do that it’s your choice. Many people also have young kids and two working parents making the WFH flexibility ideal. Lots of reasons for WFH exist but they don’t matter. If you do your job and the company is happy why do we even need to have this discussion?
The issue is that I don't just want to work from the office, I want to work from the office along with my coworkers. Sitting there alone is only marginally better than work from home. In the end we just need to self select into companies that follow our desired "work from" policies, it's just tough now since the pandemic made every company temporarily WFH so some workers need to swap as companies change back.
Thats great then find one of the companies that forces people to work from the office.
Don’t be upset when you have trouble finding talent unless you are paying out amazing salaries though.
This to me just gets into people trying to control other people. You have your preferences and thats fine but forcing it on others always causes problems.
If you start your job search with this requirement in mind though i don’t think people should have issues. I look for my jobs based on being listed as fully remote and the rest of the company being largely remote as well. As long as you aren’t at a company trying to force everyone back in the office I think its all good.
I do know my last company of size 1000+ has been trying to force people back slowly. 50% of my team left and now that they are pushing harder i am having people reach out to me every week about openings.
So that's fine and all, but the problem is that large corporations impose top-down one-size-fits-all policies -- a lot of us work for large corporations. If the Dems lose the next election, corporations will probably continue to consolidate down to an ever-smaller set with more employees each. A large corporation mandating only one policy for the entire bazillion-employee set doesn't make sense. We need per-team flexibility, and most of the billionaire CEO's don't seem to want to allow that.
If you want to work in an office you can do that it’s your choice. Many people also have young kids and two working parents making the WFH flexibility ideal. Lots of reasons for WFH exist but they don’t matter. If you do your job and the company is happy why do we even need to have this discussion?