I feel this is romanticizing office spaces. I understand speaking with people face to face is better, but coworkers are not always friends or people you want to socialize with. With all the "diversity" and "inclusion" talk, I have no desire to interact with people more than I really need to for getting work done. Navigating the social space at work feels like a minefield where at any moment someone will get offended and add it to your review, and we all know companies will not hesitate to let go even the most talented if it means they crossed some kind of social line. This is one of the main reasons I work remotely, to avoid the soul-crushing pretentiousness of socializing with coworkers in the age of political correctness and cancel culture. Perhaps cynical, but I would argue we're living through cynical times.
Once I can start cracking a few jokes without considering everyone's historical background and emotional preferences, I may consider commuting every day again (unless it's SF, but that's another matter).
Something that isn't mentioned in the article is the rise of movements like antiwork.
People aren't super into collaboration now because they feel robbed of their wages by their employers, being laid off when they unionize or when the "economic landscape shifts" even if companies are posting record profits for their shareholders.
I'm not really sure how working harder and justifying your remote status fixes these issues.
This is also a generational issue. Gen Z doesn't see as much of their identity in their work as previous generations. Even millennials had a loyalty to their company while Gen Z mostly see work as entirely transactional.
The problem with this blog is that it is written from the perspective of management rather than employees. The truth is that workplace culture is not really something that employees are overly concerned with. Remote work is hugely desirable for most employees. Lamenting that people used to feel the need to work harder to prove that they deserved the benefit of remote work reads fairly cynical in context.
People are arriving at this conclusion pretty late.
I remember reading dissenting blog posts saying this almost verbatim around November of 2020. It was so severely unpopular to write this blog post in 2020 that most that did are still in hiding or just starting to recover from immense damage to their personal and family relationships, careers, and livelihoods.
I think we pretty much all figured out the pros and cons to remote work over the last 4 years, and at this point it's really up to each individual organization and worker to decide how to approach it.
Once I can start cracking a few jokes without considering everyone's historical background and emotional preferences, I may consider commuting every day again (unless it's SF, but that's another matter).