>And I like working from home, but... man, working on truly new stuff, in person, with people who also care, looks like it was so much fun.

It is fun. It's popular to say office environment sucks and remote work is superior. and similar statements about long hours causing burnout instead of a 40/hr limit for better "work/life balance". But those depend on the personality AND the type of work they're doing.

If you're a cog-in-the-wheel code monkey working on JIRA tickets to move a "APPLY COUPON" field a few pixels on a pet food online store, that's going to push one to prefer remote working. On the other hand, if you're working on cutting edge stuff, that can push one to prefer working onsite.

The most fun I had working was 80 hours a week at the office back in the 1990s because I was working with the new thing called the World Wide Web. Fun to hash out ideas quickly with people in the room. No Zoom video conferencing needed. If you want to show them something, they just walk over and look at your screen. No screensharing needed.

The most burnout was working 40/hrs a week creating migration plans to upgrade database servers. I was remote but wasn't happy. The work was mind numbingly boring.

The personality and type-of-work being a huge factor is why a Andrew Karpathy (who's already a multimillionaire) publicly let it be known he wanted to be hired by a frontier lab. And he got his wish when Anthropic recently hired him. So why would a person who's already set for life because of previous stints at OpenAI & Tesla not just retire and relax in a hammock on a tropical island?!? Because he wants to get back in the game to work on the latest AI innovations as an insider instead of being an outsider using AI on a $200 month plan.

Unfortunately, 90% of devs probably never get to experience what working in an office for fun feels like.