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(my choice).
2+ years ago, we were all "forced" to work from home.
I decided to go back the office, at least for the summer
Main reason is that I needed a break from being at home, I have a small apartment and I don't have an office, so my work area was also my living area.
Cons : It's dirty and dusty, and grey and beige (it needs a lot of love and new colors on the walls) and the watercooler is probably a cesspool of bacteria after 2 years; I have to bring a lunch; there's no good monitor at the office (compared to mine at home)
Pros : I can cycle to and from the office (30 minutes leisurely ride), I will probably eat less and have less distractions; there's also the espresso machine (which I just spent some time clean it up)
anyone else moved back to their office ?
CI/CD = Continuous Impediment/Continuous Despair
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Maximilien wrote: anyone else moved back to their office ?
Never left the office. Would have loved to work remotely but...
1. We are not set up for it from an IT perspective.
2. Admittedly, we have to be hands-on with our products fairly frequently.
3. Management is 100% against remote workers.
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Oh yes. As soon as I could.
I even snuck back into the office during "lockdown" because of the amount of data I work with.
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I was sent home 2 years ago last March - my employer (Mayo Clinic) has fully embraced remote working and has no plans to bring us back together on or near campus. My previous office space was in a leased building and my employer has discontinued leasing it. I have no on-site work place where I could return. Those who have direct patient contact, those who support those with direct patient contact, and those who work in research labs are the ones most likely to work onsite.
I love the current commute -- I cross the hall from bedroom to my (now grown and married) daughter's former bedroom - but I miss the community of coworkers -- Team, Zoom, and Skype meetings are not the same.
I'll be retiring in the fall of 2023 so I expect my remaining employeed days to be spent in my home office.
I do get out and walk a few miles every day - and my immediate team (3 of us) try to meet for breakfast at a local pub Friday mornings.
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Fortunately I have a great home office, separate from the rest of the apartment. So it has been most productive.
I do understand the need to get out though. I sometimes go 4-5 days without leaving home.
But tomorrow I start going back to work. The mandate is that everyone needs to come back to the office once a month. Not so bad. Back when it was a daily commute, it was more than 3 1/3 hours on the bus (both ways). Once a month that's ok, but every work day got to be a drag....
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Back to the office for one day per week only, which is nice considering the ridiculously high gas prices over here in the Netherlands.
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I worked from home for three months.
Extended it by a month because they were renovating the office.
I actually worked from home for a few months in 2019 as well, so I knew what it was going to be like.
I can't work from home very well, too distracted by my TV and PlayStation.
Plus I don't want to end up a hermit, bad for business.
When I work from home I see no people, hear no people, don't leave the house...
Moving to an office actually got me a client who turned out to be a very good client indeed 
Plus I loved the 20 minutes commute by bike.
I moved to another office which is 50 minutes by bike, I still cycle regularly, but it's a bit too far for comfort
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Back at work 2-3 days a week. It's actually quieter in the office than it is at home.
I have an office at home (shared with my wife), so working from home wasn't too bad. I certainly didn't miss the "gourmet" meals at the office canteen. 
Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.
-- 6079 Smith W.
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If I were a cat, maybe I would, too. 
Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.
-- 6079 Smith W.
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Been working from home for over 20 years, with only rare visits to clients for meetings. These days I don't do much work anyway, so I tend to work on the laptop in the living room instead of the home office.
My son-in-law is in presales support for a software company, and used to be 100% office based. The office now hasn't been used for over 2 years, all staff work from home. The offices are empty (of staff and fittings) as they'd taken a long lease, but he uses the associated town centre car park sometimes. This week is his first week not working from home - he's visiting a client in Spain for 4 days.
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Reposted from the survey:
Technically we still have an office but at the end of last year we downsized from one that could seat 25-60 people to a smaller place with something like 2 or 3 offices and conference room or two for client meetings. I'm not 100% sure since I've never actually been in the new space.
So there's not enough space left for anyone but the few people who can't or really don't want to work from home for some reason.
Did you ever see history portrayed as an old man with a wise brow and pulseless heart, weighing all things in the balance of reason?
Is not rather the genius of history like an eternal, imploring maiden, full of fire, with a burning heart and flaming soul, humanly warm and humanly beautiful?
--Zachris Topelius
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Dragged back in (kicking and screaming) for two days a week. Two hour commute each way - oh joy.
General consensus amongst my co-workers is the same as me - why?
My job includes analysing metrics on work throughput and they clearly show that more work was completed during home working than during the traditional(?) office based working.
Management disagree with the numbers, which they originally requested (to keep an eye on staff during the lockdown?)...
So, it seems to be a case of "tell me what I want to hear, not what I need to hear".
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Management disagree with the numbers? They don't like the data?
I once had a boss who hired me to run testing to prove his theories, and when the data was not to his liking, he asked me to delete the bits he didn't agree with. I told him that that is not the way data works. You'd think someone with a PhD would know that.
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How did he obtain the PhD?
Deleted the data that did not fit the thesis?
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I would like to. But there's no one there. Aside from me, everybody prefers to stay at home for work. Just once a week I have an appointment with one particular co-worker in the office, which is better than nothing. The coffee in the office is so much better! 
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I'm still working from home.
Last year I moved to a bigger house with a very nice office space.
Fitting out of the office cost a fair bit of money, but it is finished now.
I don't miss having people (Colleagues, Clients, etc.) around. 
I have never been more productive.
We have a morning meeting on Teams, and I can call any of my colleagues for a video meeting when I need.
They want us to return to the office, but so far I have been able to evade that.
I'm not missing the daily commute of 2 hours each way.
They want me to come to the office at least once a week.
If they want me to come more than that, I will look for another job. 
NO MORE OFFICE BUILDINGS, SOLVE THE HOUSING CRISIS FIRST.
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I don't have an office to return to 🥺
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Not I.
I had a 1 hour commute each way, and with gas as it is, even with my over 30 mpg Saturn, I would need a raise just to break even.
I have a huge house with a nice porch on two acres, so I have both work and break areas built right in. Plus I also much prefer my own monitor to the one provided.
I do miss the monthly lunches out with the team. I work with some fascinating people.
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I actually went in to the office for the third time in the last two years, because we had a severe storm come through Tuesday night and the power at home was out. We're supposed to be returning to the office one day a week in September, and the office is open now for anyone who either wants to go in or has to go in. Yesterday, there were a total of six other people in the office, spread over two floors of the building - the office manager who has to be there to keep the office open, two people who told me that they actually want to be in the office and feel lost trying to work from home and three who had to be there because of a focus group they were running, one of whom actually prefers being in the office. Pre-covid, there would have been two hundred fifty or so people in the office. My personal plan is going to be to just keep working from home; by the time they notice I'm not going in, I'm figuring that my wife will be eligible for Medicare and if they try to force the issue, I'll just retire instead. It makes absolutely no sense for me to spend an hour commuting each way to sit in a wide open noisy cubicle farm instead of sitting in my nice quiet office at home when I have better hardware, faster internet access and larger monitors at home than in the office. Over 95% of my interactions are with people who aren't in the same city as I am; roughly 45% are with folks who aren't even on the same continent.
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Before I retired (pre-pandemic) I was able to work at home as much as I wanted. I only worked 4 days a week but I pretty much always went to the office. It was only a few miles from my house and there were way too many distractions at home (wife and multiple dogs). Plus, my boss and I became good friends (we were the hardware department), he'd dot the hardware design and I'd do the firmware design/programming.
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I'll be going to the office next Wednesday for the first time since March 2022. I'm picking up a new laptop. And then I'll scurry back home to my little (but big enough) office, to work on the new laptop, dog sleeping with his head on my feet, coffee machine ready to make coffee the way I like it, stereo cranked with music I like, and no need to listen to any other people's inane telephone calls...
Suffice to say, I'll only go back to the office for as little time as I can get away with...
Java, Basic, who cares - it's all a bunch of tree-hugging hippy cr*p
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No thanks
I do have a reasonable office space now at home, so that helps, and reasonable internet too. I have zero desire to go back into an office again. Interestingly, we started WFH a little before the whole mess started (it was optional) and then it became "take whatever you need from the office and go home" and now I believe we're going to give up on having an office at all because it's mostly empty, but costs monthly rent.
I like the "cycle to/from work" idea, but have no love for the drab surroundings or the time wasted in traffic driving to and from work, let alone the fuel cost.
I recognise it's "courses for horses", but this hoss is happier in a home office where I can properly disconnect from the noise of people - silence my notifications and get down to getting it done.
------------------------------------------------
If you say that getting the money
is the most important thing
You will spend your life
completely wasting your time
You will be doing things
you don't like doing
In order to go on living
That is, to go on doing things
you don't like doing
Which is stupid.
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In office pro
Looking across the aisle to a teammate on the same zoom call to see that they are also rolling their eyes at the same point in the meeting.
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