> In the Before Times, you just came to the office every day. It wasn’t even a question; “working from home” was just not practical. “Going to work” meant leaving the house. Then the pandemic happened.

Well, now… hold on a minute. It was entirely practical. I did it … my whole team did it. We didn't do it 100% of the week, since the expectation was that we worked in the office, but we had an informal "work from home Wednesdays" that permitted us to collectively accomplish the various chores that life requires must be done inside working business hours (i.e., mostly visiting other businesses).

The tradeoff is pretty straight-forward: I'm going to trade the commute hours for a mix of "work, not work, and getting stuff done", and my employer gets effectively the same real work out of me. That we collaborated (all took the same day) made is simpler since we knew to avoid scheduling each other for meetings that day.

But there was nothing that stopped that from being 5d/wk, and I was glad I did it when the pandemic hit, since I knew that it was quiet possible to work remotely.

> Be honest now: would you want to work in that?

…but yeah, nobody. My home "office" (i.e., the living room) is (especially now; upgrades were made in the pandemic once it became obvious how much I'd be home) the nicest office I've ever worked in. Because I've never had an office.

> And the concept of a completely customizable workspace didn’t sit well with executives who didn’t value the individuality of their workers.

Some things never change.

> Extroverts always think, “We need more communication!

One of the things I witnessed even prior to the pandemic was that some people are truly incapable of effective communication. I had a coworker who was utterly terrible at Slack, and real difficult to handle when remote … but it wasn't much different if you were sitting there talking to them face to face either. Bad, faulty logic, spewed as fast as the fingers would go, and often with less than a sentence per message.

Orgs are mostly terrible at Slack. (And email. And meetings.) Things lobbed into n-way DMs is terrible. If it has a topic, put it in a channel. People act like there's a shortage of channels & user groups, and they must be rationed. Same with email DLs. IT is of no help here: for whatever reason, I'm forbidden from creating new email DLs or channels, so it is no real wonder to find my coworkers cramming things into n-way DMs. (Thankfully Slack finally added a "copy the history" to DMs. So clearly Slack sort of sees the problem … just not an effective solution.)

And if only people could stop with the "Hi." followed by line silence.

Meeting tech is still terrible, though. Bloated and slow, and features like {draw on screen, not banning multiple people from screen sharing, etc.} just aren't widely available. Teams is utterly terrible, only loading successfully like half the time, and the one third-party we have to deal with, however they're sending invites, they often don't include a URL in the invite body, only in a non-standard (i.e., invisible in any Calendar program aside from I presume Outlook) attribute called "x-skype-something-something" which is a quite the tell as to Team's roots. And I only have to use it when some other org forces me to. Even calls with Microsoft themselves will run into technical issues.

… and it seems like some orgs (users of Zendesk in particular, maybe?) expect one to auth by sending from the contact email on the account. Except that it's a DL, such that emails can reach my whole team, and sending from a DL is utter black magic. (But possible, it turns out!)

And like, one wonders … y'all know you can edit messages in Slack and correct your typos, …right? The amount of politely worded "parse error in English, line 1" replies I have to send is kinda ridiculous. There's "they made a typo" and then there's me, cocking my head, trying to find a parse that even remotely makes any sense at all. That XKCD YT feature of reading your comment back to you could make a comeback.

We need people to work on their writing skills. I don't know how, though.