I'm a software engineer on a hardware project. Yes, there are definitely a few people who absolutely have to be in the lab for hardware dev, but there's a shock

I'm a software engineer on a hardware project. Yes, there are definitely a few people who absolutely have to be in the lab for hardware dev, but there's a shockingly long tail of people who would have been in the lab some of the time but didn't really need to be. I generally preferred working in the office pre-pandemic, but it wasn't strictly necessary. I also hated living in the bay area. I finally got all the i's dotted and t's crossed and I'm now living somewhere I vastly prefer (far fewer people and a whole lot cheaper). I've only been here 3 weeks and it's already hard to imagine going back.