> almost the singularly most important factor is the social life of interacting with your colleagues I'd like to make a slightly different response than "I don

> almost the singularly most important factor is the social life of interacting with your colleagues I'd like to make a slightly different response than "I don't want my company to be responsible for my social well-being": I think part of what you're saying is less that your (pure) social life is derived from work than that work itself is a social experience and that helps productivity/morale. I think many of the productivity benefits to being work-social don't apply in a remote environment. For instance, at my current non-remote job, one of my teammates is going through a divorce, and it's helpful for me to know that and how it's going so that I'm aware that he'll be out at random times to meet with lawyers or pick up kids or whatever, and that if I needed something from him and he wanders by my desk with his coat on, I should probably drop what I'm doing and switch context because he's heading out the door and this is my only chance to catch up until tomorrow. But if we were working remote, we'd just have some communication system that's geared toward async work, and if he needs to head out and be online at home, that's fine with me—I expect everyone to be online intermittently, and I only expect real-time communications during scheduled meetings. So, I don't need to know what's going on with his personal life, and honestly he might be happier not telling us. And the second-order effect is that when my team is communicative about what's going on with their lives and willing to let me be communicative about what's going on with mine, and we have matched expectations about whether you're there (both physically and mentally) between 9 and 5, things work well, and when they're not, things work poorly. But again, those expectations would be fundamentally different in a remote-first culture. So the fact that people would be less communicative about personal stuff would not be as much of a negative impact.