my wife's company is trying to convince people to return to the office because one of their executives thinks its embarrassing when clients come by and the offices are empty, anyways, theatre students always need some pocket money and if someone wants to join my exciting new "potemkin village as a service" startup
seatfillr is gonna be huge
Avenue 5 nailed this, with a deck filled with attractive, well-dressed actors pretending to work on a bunch of high-tech-looking panels for the sake of the company's image while the actual engineers worked on a bunch of regular computers in a dingy, crowded, messy office.
as a dumpy ADHD man who wears a robe for most of the day and who has built a tremendous amount of real actual software I feel like if I had to operate in a traditional corporate environment, having a productive looking actor representing me would actually be a real career boon

he could go in, look attractive, and attend all of the meetings and report back to me and I could do all of the actual work and cyrano de bergerac for him in key moments, I think we'd be a productive team

pretty sure we'd be VP of Engineering before long

"why are you always wearing that bluetooth headset?"

Curtis's Actor, Handsomely: "I'm very busy with all of my job"

@cube_drone
It scares me how people get more distant to each other. I believe we need community. Pandemic reduced social interaction in all parts of life and virtual interaction is just not the same.

@Konfettispaghetti @cube_drone at least at my job, no, most days I don't need community to do my work. I need to be able to ask for input from colleagues occasionally and the rest of the time it's a distraction. I'd happily spend time with them, they're lovely, but it wouldn't help me accomplish my work tasks.

I compromise by travelling to the office for dedicated social time where we give talks and generally chat about once each month.

@Flamekebab @cube_drone
I understand that for completely individual work you don't need colleagues around. But I guess mostly you need input and I am a lot more reluctantly when interaction happens digitally and that's what I perceive with my colleagues as well. Maybe the lack of finding solutions in a team also contributes to the decreasing usability of software solutions? I am not convinced that a big part of work is better done without interaction.
@Konfettispaghetti @cube_drone my point was more that it depends entirely on the nature of the work. There's plenty of work I've done where team work is super important and doing it at a distance is significantly harder. The work I currently do doesn't need it most of the time and so distance is no hindrance.