TLDR: the working arrangement you prefer is a personal preference and there is no right or wrong answer. I've personally made the choice to leave the Bay Area b

TLDR: the working arrangement you prefer is a personal preference and there is no right or wrong answer. I've personally made the choice to leave the Bay Area because I've been offered the opportunity to work fully remote and my wife and I have long wanted to live closer to family so my kids can know their grandparents. Longer Version: I've been carefully reading posts like this for a while and it's really telling how emotional commenters get about WFH. Obviously, it sucks for some, and it's great for others. I think both pro-on-site and pro-WFH folks get it partly right and partly wrong. In the short term, I suspect articles like this vastly overstate Covid's impact on office culture. Our society aligned on office work as the "solution" for working for many reasons, not all of which are sane, rational, or healthy, but here we are. Conversely, I think we're probably overlooking or at least understating the effect that covid will have in the long run. Small incremental change compounds rapidly and it seems clear that covid has turned an otherwise continuous curve of WFH realization into a step function. So my personal bet is that 2020 will see a collective sigh of relief as people stampede back into offices, only to realize that some people aren't coming back at all and others aren't coming back every day of the week. That realization will lead to some weird outcomes that are hard to predict, but don't lead back to office culture as it existed in 2019 even if it superficially appears the same. For my own part, I'm a product manager at a FAANG company and was given the opportunity to work remote permanently. I'm going to give it a try in 2021. We're moving to Texas to be closer to our family and live in a place that will make it financially easier for one or both of us to experiment with less lucrative employment in a couple of years. Will I be forced to return to the bay for work? Maybe. Do I want to come back? Not really. I think it's probably just cohort dynamics: if I were 25 and single, the Bay would still be a great place to live and grow my career. But I'm older, I've got a great marriage I want to continue prioritizing, I've got very young kids that are a handful, and priorities shift. I probably would have left the bay in the near future with or without covid!