This is essentially the same argument that Paul Graham made, which is that WFH worked decently during the pandemic because people were able to "coast" off of pr

This is essentially the same argument that Paul Graham made, which is that WFH worked decently during the pandemic because people were able to "coast" off of previously built pre-pandemic relationships, but as time goes on that the difficulties in building new relationships that are as strong remotely shows up. I get particularly worried about younger employees and new grads. I learned a ton as a new grad being onsite, and I had the benefit that the first company I joined after college had a "bootcamp" training onboarding for new grads - a quarter century later I'm still friends with many of the people from that bootcamp and have gotten many professional jobs through that network. The strife over WFH vs WFO is what I call a standard "all of these are true" problem, meaning that the points people make on different sides are both true - the problem is people want to optimize for different things. E.g. I think all of these are true: 1. People can save a ton of time and money WFH. 2. The additional flexibility from WFH makes it easier for people with outside responsibilities (e.g. child or elder care) to contribute productively in work. 3. Overall productivity, especially for non-rote tasks, goes down measurably when the vast majority of people are remote. The FAANGs appear to have data to back this up. For everyone that says "but I'm more productive!" it's not hard to believe a bunch of other people are taking multi-hour lunch breaks. 4. The overall strength of work relationships goes down when people are remote. Again, not for everyone, but in aggregate. 5. People are spending much more time alone. The article shows the data for this. I think long term this will be particularly bad for society. It's much harder to empathize with people from different groups if you never interact with them, nevermind that loneliness in and of itself is something of an epidemic. 6. WFH makes people less likely to be "career obsessed" in the first place. I think this is the thing a lot of companies are realizing, that if anything the masses are actually getting to see the "wizard behind the curtain". That is, pre-pandemic, loads of tech companies wanted to motivate their employees with grand talk of "changing the world", and it's a lot easier to feel that motivation in a colocated group. Of course, for most companies, you're not actually changing the world, and most importantly, the company doesn't really give a damn if you change the world or not. They just want to make money. So I think WFH leads a lot of people to re-evaluate their priorities into what they want out of life in the first place, and this is overall bad news for companies that want to convince employees that they should put work above all else (primarily for the benefit of shareholders).