I haven’t met any SWE that want to go back to the office. Heck, even my managers manager has said she never wants to go back, and she is a complete extrovert. These developers online that claim they want to go back must be as rare as hen’s teeth.

About 30-40% of my engineering team prefer spending 2-3 days a week in the office, if we’re doing anecdata.

My team seems to have roughly 40% prefer full-remote, 40% prefer hybrid, 20% prefer full office.

Is there a big commute? Since I moved to a 15 000 pop town and work here my view on remote as the best thing ever has changed. Also we have private offices. So I don't know if it is the commute or offices that makes it so much better.

We have a remote of you want policy and the only two guys who use it also live in the nieghboring towns.

I recently switched teams from one where all but one other person (who was hired when the office was closed down and would have an inconveniently long commute) works from the office most days to one where I'm the only person who doesn't. So that's about 80% at least partly in office.

Another anecdote: I love WFH but i still want to spend about 20% of the time in the office, just to see and talk to people face2face.

There are dozens of us! DOZENS!!

For me it would be more of a toss-up if software engineers generally actually worked in real individual "offices" (like we used to, as a 49 year old I still remember the before-times).

But when compared to the modern nearly-universal open office plan... yeah there's no doubt I'd much rather work from home as often as possible, and based on my experience in both environments I'll be far more productive doing the job from home. Everyone's mileage may vary.

> But when compared to the modern nearly-universal open office plan...

Indeed. Give me a proper office with a door, like I had for the first 18 years of my career, and I'll happily go to the office every day.

But open office? Nope, nope, nope. Work from home or nothing.

Not just open office. My company doesn’t even have fixed seating. Basically you show up and wander around until you find an open desk. You have to take all your stuff with you if you need to go to a meeting or to lunch. It is ridiculous.

I just want to be able to choose which I want on a day-by-day basis. Some days I am much more productive in the office because I need to, say, communicate with a bunch of people or there's some sort of back and forth that needs to occur. Or I just need to get out of the house for a bit. Other days, I just want to stay home and spend the time focusing on something in particular without being bothered. But I need both to have both to do my job effectively. However, I work at a small company and am the primary software engineer which changes the dynamic a bit.

> Some days I am much more productive in the office because I need to, say, communicate with a bunch of people

But on that day all of those people might've chosen to work from home so you sit all alone in the office.

The hybrid solution only really works well if the office days are the same for everyone.

Forced-hybrid is just using a sledgehammer on the calendar rather than providing the flexibility that is actually liked by optional-attendance-office.

If the staff actually find this face-to-face time valuable, they'll organize and go into the office themselves, personally I've had zero requests from anyone to do that outside of explicit team-building activities.

In the before times, "Is there a Zoom for this?" was a live question. Zoom fatigue, such as it was, did not dominate working life. Savvy collaborators anticipated when a conversation would demand more than Zoom, and they made judicious use of the public transit between our offices to keep things smooth.

My enthusiasm for RTO is not about changing the venue from which we take our Zoom calls, but about changing our relationship with Zoom to something like its pre-pandemic state. To have some conversations naturally again. But there's no getting around that the WFHers would have to either show up or be excluded from them.

I personally find Zoom excruciating, and I blame the transition to remote meetings for all communication for turning a once optimistic and joyful career experience into a miserable slog.

We have a weekly slack poll every Friday for office days the next week. Works pretty well.

We used to have so that every Thursday was "come to the office if you can" -day, but switched to the poll system.

I'm currently working for a fully remote company with colleagues in multiple timezones. I still would be happy to go to an office to work besides my colleagues but only if it would be 20 minutes from my house on foot or by bike and had team sized room with 4–8 desk in it (no open office BS). I enjoy being surrounded with likeminded people, and during lunches talking about project they are working on outside work or activities they did just to broaden my views. But this is a very little upside compared to a typical office work.

The one thing I can see (as a SWE) is if you want to be able to fully box-off your work-life balance.

For my first few years of WFH, my office was my bedroom, so I just threw a KVM between my home PC and the work laptop and shared monitors and input devices. I eventually set up a standalone office.

Nit: Many can still be a minority.

It can also be understood as the majority, per wiktionary

> the generality; the common herd

GP was countering the possibility that GGP meant the above.