>Training yourself to work a solid 8 hours at the office without distraction should allow you to leap over others who've gotten lazy sitting at home.

What in the corporate HR flyer is this?

"We think you need a hallmonitor to actually work, also you'll appreciate that we give you one"

I returned to office years ago. I need the ability to move hardware between employees with less than a day turnaround. But you will never convince me for a second that loosing my private office was an improvement.

My experience is that working in an office is _much_ worse for distraction. Even if you're lucky enough not to be in open plan, the shoulder taps and quick chats easily demolish any chance of focus for me. At home I can knuckle down for a few hours and deal with something complex easily.

Personally, I am somewhere in the middle. I use in office days to catch up on gossip I would not have gotten otherwise. The amount of work I actually manage to finish seems higher, but I wonder if it is simply because of how some of my work is structured.

Honestly, I don't think I care that much. I am practically checked out now. I can't imagine I am the only one. I also can't imagine this change making a difference.

Yeah, 100% agreed with this. My team is currently 1 day/week (Thursdays) in-office, and for both better and worse, there are conversations that happen which wouldn't otherwise. A lot of great things come out of those conversations, but also I can reliably write off getting work done that day.

That might also be because you're not in the office every day, people use those days to talk more (scarcity bias). I'm in-office 5 days per week and because we don't have this scarcity of time, there are lots of periods of quiet. When I wasn't in person all the time at this and other jobs it was exactly as you described.

The biggest advantage of being primarily in person is actually that we have fewer meetings. I don't have to schedule 30 minutes on Zoom with someone and if I pop over for a question (when I see the person isn't in deep focus and can contextually grab them which is fantastic as well). If it takes 5 minutes to come to a decision, great - if we need to go over to the whiteboard and take 2 hours to flesh something out; also works.

This is definitely not true universally.

The highest earners I know are self-employed or own small businesses and were 'alone' for most of their career. This includes a craftsman who owns small machine shops for boat parts, a high-end coach and a hairstylist who provides staffing for modeling/concerts. Absolutely none of them are 'office' personnel.

I do enjoy the social aspect of the office but I find that motivation comes from within.

You've got the basic sketch right here. Better focus than the competition is indeed an advantage. Working hard to focus in an office environment - noise cancelling headphones, people walking around, suboptimal coffee and so forth - is however not better than carefully setting up a home office. It's not a remotely safe bet that the people working from home are being lazy.

I think this is heavily life-and-career-stage dependent IMO.

If you're young, early career, and don't have dependents, you should absolutely prioritize in-office.

Otherwise, the calculus varies.

Yes. I'm in my 30s now but I can't imagine having started my career out of college with a full time remote position. But quick feedback from mentors and osmosis won't work if senior engineers are all remote.

Bingo. I'm a big WFH person, but I'm old and have all those other things now. A young person just starting out should absolutely try to be in the main office every day.

I've worked remotely for around 12 years and love it (it's even better now that I have kids) I had a good 10 years in the office, when I was starting out.

This reads like something Amazons PR team came up with. “Train yourself to work a solid 8 hours a day” what are you even talking about? Remote workers do this now and aren’t lazy. The assumptions you have are conpletely out of touch with reality and insulting.

I highly recommend anyone especially early in their careers go into a real office where you'll see your immediate co-workers on a daily basis. That said, I don't want to go in :)

> Being able to focus more than your peers will give you a leg up on the competition

Which is why i WFH. Office is literally the worst possible environment for focus.

> less lonely

Some of us prefer to PICK friends, not have them chosen for us

> facetime with important people at work for more opportunity

I refuse to work at a place where promotions work like this

This is a soft layoff not some BS productivity hack. They've also kneecapped comp.

Not sure why you got downvoted for this. There's a lot of common sense in your comment. The hate against RTO is real.

Thank you - Yes its kinda funny and very sad at the same time.

They seem to be blind to the fact that facetime is what gets you promoted along with output of hard-work.

You can't work hard at home - at least 90% can't.

All in all its good - being able to outcompete a whole bunch of people through their own delusions is probaly the easiest victory for every hard working person.

Kind of poetic really :)