I hate it so much. It affects everyone way too much. It fucks the environment cause of people being forced to travel, often in cars. It causes unnecessary traffic jams since most people enter work and leave around the same time as each other. Insane stress from traffic and feeling pressured to wake up extra early to eat and shower before you leave. When you come home you are exhausted because of traffic and can’t manage the stress. Traveling after long day of meetings and caffeine can lead to unsafe driving.
You get shoehorned into living in areas close to your work. If, like me you work in a field where jobs are concentrated in certain areas (AI for me. So Bay Area, California); you have little say in where you live. For as good as California May be. Not everyone wants to live there.
I’d much rather live in NYC since we have good public transit. But more importantly it’s where all my loved ones are.
As a person, just the thought of your company having so much control over you that it dictates where you live is fucking terrible. Especially if it involves moving countries, states or anything else. Either you stay there forever and miss your loved ones. Or you get fired , decide to move back home and have a lease, car and furniture you don’t have use for anymore.
The only “benefits” are “work place camaraderie” but that’s bulshit too. We don’t work to make friends as companies remind you if you get super close or chatty with people. But also. As people, we can make friends outside of work. We have friends from before our current job.
Most jobs and meetings can be perfectly handled virtually. With my University, we have VPNs that specifically set our IP address to the school. So we can access papers and the schools cloud computing from home. That has to be cheaper than paying for large work spaces.