Very nice article Luay, indeed. And very interesting opinions in the discussion, too.

I agree with most of the points. Today, we work mostly in a creative economy in an agile way. And for this the interaction of people is paramount. Not just let say inside development teams, but also across many stakeholders. The amount of atomized work is relatively low. Working from home has a problem to find out who those all stakeholders are, and be relevant. The return back to the office is not because of the manager, it is because of those ad-hoc interactions that foster innovations.

In the discussion, many argue in favor of WFH, where the only argument is „me“. Complete ignorance of the interests of the other stakeholders. I work from home for 5 years now. Before, I went home from the office, stop by the meetup for 30-45 min, and refreshed contact with 20+ people at once. Now I have to plan a trip, travel 4 hours, and spent perhaps 300 bucks to meet one. It is also visible in the amount of work. Before projects were coming in, today I spend more and more time getting one. I am not able effectively to contribute to innovation in products, processes, etc. anymore. These interactions happen elsewhere and rarely among people at home. I also learned many things beyond the project in the office, aka socialization. It is all gone.

There are possible mitigations, like principles of a fully remote company, where all people are appropriately trained for remote work and the system of work is optimized (not jira, but knowledgebase, group interactions, etc). But this is nonexistent yet in most organizations so even hybrid work has issues. I prefer to work in hybrid mode, where the organization is fully designed for remote work.