Often the people here on HN try to make it out that anyone who appreciates or wants to work in an office is evil or stupid or the like, but honestly probably half of people actually want a few days in the office. Comments here are not actually representative of the whole industry.
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'm not saying the office is some perfect, joyous or highly social place or anything. I just think for me, it makes a big difference to have a place (different from my house) where people come together to work on common goals, and occasionally interact face-to-face while doing it.
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.
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
We have forced-office and office-available, no one is arguing for forced-remote.
It's probably even reasonable to organize teams around similar styles, preferences, and demands of the actual work output. But it's good to recognize that a LOT of IC roles benefit strongly from greater control over their work environment and time, which can often be achieved via remote (and even a lot of managerial work that's high contact light touch direction can benefit from the tooling and organization required to support remote work).
What's less good is to universalize. It rarely reflects detailed attention to organizational and individual needs and output. It's more like the fad that produced the categorically inexcusable open-plan-office. Where it happens, it's often a cover for something else, or a reflection of limited interest in good management.
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.
But no, I don't think I'm grossly mischaracterizing anything. Even replies to my post are literal personal attacks against the OP for not wanting to stay at home, or actually making fun of the reasons people want to go into an office. It's truly toxic behaviour.
Can you imagine feeling fine with more frequent WFH yourself, if something about the culture changed?
For example, could you otherwise get the vibe that people were engaged and wanted to be working together, even when it was on intermittent chat and videoconf?
(And if there were occasional in-person meetups, if only for more personalizing or focusing?)
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
Office available with social events and meetups is supposed to be the compromise. The part that I can't wrap my head around is what is gained by making someone who doesn't want to be in office show up? The folks at $dayjob in that position literally just sit at their desk with headphones for 8 hours.
The way forward is finding ways to work together that the entire team is comfortable with. And employers thinking of employees more as humans and less as resources to be manipulated and squeezed. It will take compromises and growth, but it's far from impossible to achieve.
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.
They don't grow on trees.