I get that point of view, but for me, being alone in an empty office isn't much better than being alone at home. I'm not trying to force people to be in the office, I just want to find a team where people WANT to be there. It seems very hard to find, but it's also hard to believe I'm the only one in the world who wants to be part of something like that.

You aren't alone, although you're in the minority. In our data set, around 9% of candidates are looking for in-office work only (we find a similar value to the OP - 41% - looking for remote work only).

That's an advantage for you, though! Active desire to work in-office greatly reduces the amount of competition you're dealing with for jobs; all else equal, it should ~double your success rate.

Double of "no one is hiring" is "no one is hiring", sadly. My experience with hybrid/in-office hasn't been much better WFH. I wonder if Los Angeles is being hit even harder than most of the country for some reason.

There was a point in my life where I craved working in the office also and seeing people who also wanted to be there. And now I can't imagine going back to one.

I miss nice offices though. Before the whole let's stack people side by side on desks, rather than give them some nicer spaces with lots of room for deep thought. When I was working for HARC, we had a nice former industrial space near UCLA. I totally could go for that, but when the only way to get something semi-nice and private is to work at home, well, that is going to bias people.

This touches on the core of the problem.

The only thing that changed is you can no longer force people to the same degree.

One alternative would be to design offices that people like to work in.

Yes, studies show people are more likely to want to come into the office if they have a nice office to come into. But what's the point of paying say half a million/year for an engineer if you also have to give them a nice space to be productive in?

Anyways, it isn't a mystery why people want to work at home these days, and they don't really need to be in the office anyways considering how hard it is to get conference rooms to VC all the time with your partners across the country or world.

Want me to work in the office? Offer me an office with a door.

I would definitely go in to the office 5 days a week if I had an office with a door and lock on it.

What has worked well is agreeing on a few days where people will focus their office time, no forcing involved. Make a thing out of it, buy lunch or whatever.

The only thing that changed is the power balance. It's still perfectly possible to get skilled workers into the office, they just have to want it.

I have this dream that the closed down/ghost shops blighting towns and cities across the UK will be converted into co-working spaces.

Your employer rents a desk for you, you probably get to walk to work or at least enjoy a very short commute. You have people from other employers around you for the social aspect. Etc

I guess WeWork was a similar idea that shows now is not yet the time for this.

I still think it’d be great - reduced commuting miles / time wasted. Cheaper offices that are nicer (don’t like this co working space? Just book into a different one) etc etc

I don't know if it's different in the UK, but at least in the states, tech companies only have offices in the most locally-expensive areas, so if their offices were converted into co-working spaces, I'd still have to commute to them.

If every neighborhood had at least one pub and if every pub had an upstairs co-working space, that would be amazing.

edit: ah, I realize now that I took the word "shops" to mean the colloquial "tech companies", but you probably meant brick-and-mortar retail stores that have been slow-killed by the internet

Your dream can already be true, just use the turkish barbers and betting shops as coworking spaces. Cheaper too

WeWork was killed by a dishonest CEO, and problematic financials. As far as a product, it was pretty great to drop into a random town or city and be able to have a hot desk to work from.

Are you wanting to be around other people, or specifically your team? You might try working from a co-working space if you want to be around other people.

I like busy cafés for focus work, with music in headphones.

The background hustle keeps my brain going but it doesn't bother me since it has nothing to do with me. Nice coffee helps.

Larger businesses tend to be more on-site focused.

I do worry about the junior talent in the future, yes. This attitude it part of why Juniors aren't sufficiently trained into future seniors. Then everyone wonders where the seniors went.

They don't grow on trees.

Always so weird to see people threatened by something so trivial. I like offices! Sorry that frustrates you, pal.

And yet, you're threatened by an empty office, which is also trivial.

Introverts and extroverts will never understand each other. This entire thread is pointless.

If the team is mostly in-office, the out of office workers become second class members of the team.

How about putting it on the table? As in: talk about it in the team and come up with ways to improve the situation together?