Why can't software engineers work from home most of the time? (2016)
A friend and I who have known each other for decades say we manage to stay friends because we only see each other a couple of times a year.<p>Why burden business relationships with forced several hours &#x2F;week physical presence and face time when nobody would impose that on a customer or a vendor, and lockdowns have shown that even (especially) marriages aren&#x27;t designed for people to be stuck together that long.<p>The only other situation you spend that amount of time with someone is a cellmate in prison, and the inevitable and necessary conseqeunce is micro-power struggles over the least significant things because in spending that much time together, you literally exhaust every other way to relate.<p>Show me someone who loves office life and being around people who are forced to be together, and I will show you someone with a perverse addiction to confict. When extroversion becomes immoderate, they become masochists who crave attention and interpersonal intensity. As a result,  whenever someone tells me they are a &quot;people person,&quot; I give them a wide berth because I remember the advice I was given as a young boy which was, &quot;you are what you eat.&quot;<p>I can&#x27;t imagine re-adapting to something so insane as an office ever again.