I think that what isn't discussed enough is the variance in quality of your office environment and of your home office and how that quality affects your preferences about working from home. It sounds quite obvious but in these arguments people often just state what they personally like and leave it at that.
Your office can be place where you still have the option to work uninterrupted but also get the benefits of face-to-face interaction, casual exposure to work ideas, better meetings, having all the equipment you need, separating work and personal life. Or it can be a hell where you hate every second and can't get anything done. Your commute can be a 15-minute walk or it can be a couple of hours of driving - vastly different experiences.
Your home office can mean working on a laptop at a tiny desk in a small bedroom in shared accommodation with loud housemates; or it can be a great setup in a separate room in your own flat/house. Again, those are completely different experiences.
I suspect that a lot of people talk about how much they like remote because they happened to be on the bad end of the office-quality scale and the good end of the home-quality scale. And when your work circle is made up people who also worked in the same bad office environment, it's easy to say something like "no one I know wants to go back to the office".
Personally, I've had a great office with a short commute in the past, and my home office situation is quite poor right now. So I'm looking forward to working from an office in the future.
That's a very good point, I'm really enjoying working from home and I attributed it mostly to not having to do the one hour commute each way, but there's so many more things that add up:
- At home I have the most comfortable chair I could find on the market that fits me perfectly. At work there are very basic adjustable chairs and they use some slippery fabric.
- At home I have an ergonomic mechanical keyboard vs. a cheap rubber dome keyboard that kept running out of batteries at work.
- An ergonomic mouse, vs. a tiny mouse that doesn't even have a back button.
- Two 27" 4k monitors, vs. a single 24" monitor.
- Always a nice room temperature, vs. often being too hot or too cold.
- Bathroom always available, vs. sometimes having to wait to use the bathroom.
- No interruptions, vs. occasional interruptions.
- Working in silence, vs. having to use noise cancelling headphone and listening to music when I don't want to.
To me the only drawbacks are that Zoom meetings are worse than in-person and not being able to have hallway discussions, but the many gains in quality of life easily make up for that. But the situation could easily reverse for someone who only has a tiny laptop and no room for a home office.
Your work just sounds very subpar. Crippling developers with that sort of equipment and environment is a poor move and also an awful trade-off, business-wise.
Yet it feels very common to see employers buy subpar equipment, because they either don't understand how much of a difference it makes, or it "costs too much" to give every developer higher quality tools.
I'm also in the camp of preferring to work from home with my triple high-res monitor setup, good chair, height adjustable table, ergonomic keyboard/mouse, and so on.
I dread the day I'll have to go back to the office.
> I dread the day I'll have to go back to the office.
Unless you have a real vote in the decision, then the the best move, is to accept either result. Otherwise you saddle yourself with the mental and emotional baggage and clutter.
I suppose this is easier said than done, but worth the effort in converting the dread to acceptance.
This is just some random opinion on the internet of course.
While figuring out the latter would take some first-hand experience of reading the accounts of others, the former is easier to filter companies by, for example:
- https://github.com/yanirs/established-remote
- https://weworkremotely.com/top-remote-companies
- https://remotemasters.dev/fully-remote-companies
- https://remotemasters.dev/remote-first-companies
Of course, those are just the links that a quick Google search turned over, some job ad sites also have filters for remote/on-site positions etc.
There is no reason to settle for something you deem to be sub par, unless you feel more comfortable that way (since people have valid complaints about the hiring practices in ICT nowadays), which is also okay.