On the other hand, it is also imaginable that working at home away from everyone else makes communication harder, and more opaque. Or it can make you lonelier. Not every company has policies and culture that makes it conducive to work from home.
> How can being at home ever make you lonely when it gives you more time to focus on relationships that actually matter.
Not all of us have kids or live with our family, and as such those 8 hours of office work are the only option for having a human presence around us during the day. Working 8 hours trapped in the loneliness of your house's walls each day, every day can be quite unsettling in the long run.
In my experience even family men get frustrated with working at home. Sure, 1 or 2 days per week is fine, but more than that is generally too much.
Work is probably the most common (or even exclusive for some) way adults meet new people, especially people they wouldn't otherwise meet. It sounds dumb when you don't experience it, but after spending a month or two working at home it start becoming apparent that you are getting too detached from society.
It's likely that you are the only one working from home in your household, so during working hours you are all by yourself.
By "relationships that really matter" I suppose you mean family. Those bonding happens outside of working hours anyways, so whether or not you work from home you can always relish those relationships.
I am a single, mid-20's male and I did work from home for a year for a software company. It was pretty isolating. I tried to work from cafes or co-working spaces daily, but it was not the same.
Now I WFH 2-3 days per week and the rest in the office which is more ideal. My commute is pretty brutal (~1.5hr) so WFH can help me get more done on those days.
This is true is obvious situations, but also false in some interesting ways.
While physical proximity helps for communication within a team for instance, it also makes it harder to know what happens in other teams, as they also communicate offline.
That means for instance that if you want an idea of the status of a team you'd have to physically go there (are they super busy ? is half of the team off for the day? are they under stress or not ?). If the team is in another building there will be enough enough friction that you won't bother except if it's important.
In contrast, having more people remote would allow to peek into their room and see their exchanges.
You'd also catch some issues or insight on stuff that they wouldn't be discussing with other teams otherwise for instance.
Basically, there is a lot of indirect advantages to have people chat by text instead of direct communication. Does it completely offset the other shortcomings ? I don't know, but it's still a pretty nice effect I think.
It does, but working in a noisy office makes concentration harder. As a developer, I communicate maybe 5% of the time but code 95% of the time; so what you are saying is true, but it's such a small part of what a developer does.
