Just the opposite for me. We produced a TON of paper, and always had pretty fine printers/copiers in the office. For a decade or so I had my private laser printer in my office. That was sweet! One of the few challenges of covid/telework was not having fast printing available for “reasonable personal use.” 
Confucius say…if your work can be done from home, it can be done from Outer Hickistan…
{Sorry, my generation was savaged/lived in fear of outsourcing}
Re Laser Printers- A relative who makes a living buying cheap at boxes-off-a-truck store gave me a laser printer. The toner doesn’t clog or dry up and the quality is great. Very satisfied with my printer.
Very, very fortunate. I go in person meetings once a month. But that’s it. I purchased my Workstation setup and satellite dish on my dime. It’s my computer. I just use it for work too.
What also made working from home work for TPTB, is that things where getting a bit crowded in the office.
I feel I should clarify, Turn 7 and Off The Truck (one is in Philly one is in Coconut Creek Florida) buy unsold container lots. They then sell most things for $1 each. Certain items are sold for much higher prices, but still at a small fraction of their retail value. When I went to Turn 7, I got a pet-grooming glove, a new plush Lego Grogu and a few other neat things for $1 each.
I did not mean that these stores sell stolen merchandise.
For me this was the case already, to an extent. We had teams across the globe including France, England, India, and Russia (we no longer have colleagues in Russia). Most of my immediate team was in my office, but we had already hired onto that team in a Texas office before COVID. There were a select few WFH people.
If they could find somebody in another country to do my job that person would have been hired instead of me. But they might have come to America to do it anyway. We had a number of Green Card holders in the office. At least one naturalization happened since I started. I do not fear the competition.
We’re not allowed to connect to our home printers. Can only print remotely to the office printer via VPN.
Because … security.
Surveys suggest that many workers would prefer to work from home, but go into the office two or three days a week for the personal contact, technical reasons or escape the spouse and kids. Obviously, people and workplaces differ.
Bosses tend to prefer a bigger number. People vary enormously in their self-motivation and ability to avoid distractions. In theory, if equally productive some companies prefer lower costs and some prefer more traditional methods of management.
I’ve worked in many places but each had a different feeling. Some had workers who wanted to spend all their free time after work socializing with coworkers and discussing both work and the people who work there; others valued independence and family and were quite the opposite. Some were cliquish. Some were more inclusive. Some had odd weekends away to bond by climbing things and solving puzzles. Some involved the memorization of slightly autocratic company songs. So I don’t even know what work culture actually means.
I’ve been working from home since the early days of the pandemic. I absolutely love it. My wife and I bought a house about a year in, and specifically bought a house that would allow each of us to have our own home offices.
My company has mostly moved to a hybrid model- two days in the office, three days working wherever. I still found myself resenting the 1-2 hours I spent commuting on those days, especially since over half of my team are in other provinces or other countries. I wasn’t shy about letting my bosses know, either.
Luckily, they have since restructured so that people in my particular strata can work remote full-time if we want.
I’m in my mid-fifties, and lately here on the SDMB there’s been a few threads on retirement. I’ve been looking forward to retirement, even though I absolutely love my career, just because I’ve always felt that we shouldn’t have to work to live. I’ve also been worried that I won’t have set aside enough money to retire- I’ve been trying to make up for that over the past two decades, but I’m still concerned that retirement won’t be in the cards for a long, long time.
But I noticed one thing in all of those retirement threads- many retirees end up working part-time jobs just to keep themselves busy. And then I realized that I’m already, effectively retired: I get to define my own work hours for the most part (since I work from home), I get unlimited sick and vacation days (as a benefit from my company), and I get paid a hell of a lot more than I would at a part-time job that I’d hate. The only thing I really need to do is find social connections that I can maintain while working from home (oh, and exercise more often).
My wife prefers to work hybrid, but she’s a lot more social than I am. Her company allows her to work two days remotely, so that works out well for her.
Not unlimited sick and vacation days, but seems like it since I always have plenty. I also feel semi-retired. I’ll plow the drive today, so I’ll take a mid-day break. Then tomorrow I have a septic company coming to pump the tank. So, I’ll be taking about a half day off for that. Don’t know if it’s morning or afternoon though. So I define my own work hours too.
That’s sorta me too. The sick/vacation days are not unlimited, but they’re more than I use in practice.
My problem is in another few months I’ll be forced to retire. Full bore then zero, no in-between. And a bit like you, there’s nothing I can do afterwards on a part-time basis that would pay anywhere near what I’m used to. So that outlet for energy consumption, boredom relief, or social needs is 99% foreclosed.
We shall see …
I think both are happening, and more.
I’ve worked at my company for 41 years, in the company buildings up until March 12 2020, when I left my office in a hurry, recognizing with some alarm that this could go on for, well, weeks! I have not kept an office there since, working 100% from home, except for a few visits of several hours to do something in the lab or factory or retrieve things from the office and move out of it.
When I started, there were no desktop computers (the IBM PC was just getting introduced to the world but we didn’t have any). No email. No voicemail. No FAX. It was a somewhat different world then.
Our company always emphasized culture, with I think more sincerity and energy than most companies do. A great deal of the relationships I grew there happened in between the meetings or other formalized working partnerships. A lot happened in the hallways. I even remember one of our divisional leaders sitting in the toilet stall next to mine (and having a noisy time of it!) as he went on about strategy and priorities. Not that this is a part of the culture it was important to retain!
I like working remotely. I really like it! As an introvert I do better work this way, and I find it more comfortable. But I haven’t significantly expanded my network. I’ve mostly grown trust in people I already knew, but that’s pretty much it. I have close friendships that started at work in the Before Times but now we travel and hike and rent houses together.
I don’t know how new people will get by. There are a few I’m making an effort to help with this. It’s worth doing, trying to make special efforts for new folks.
I realized yesterday that I’m not actually going to see how the world adapts to this in the long run. I’m preparing to retire, and “weeks” has now turned into the rest of my career.
But the culture wasn’t staying the same anyhow. It was always evolving.
I’m in the same boat. All I need to do is clock in for 80 hrs over each 2 week period, with up to 12 hrs on any given day, between something like 5 am and 10 pm. Can sign in/out unlimited # of times per day. Anything over 80 hrs is credit hours which can be accumulated up to 3 days and used just like leave. More annual leave than I’ve ever needed, that I can take whenever I want in 15 minute increments. Over a year in accumulated sick leave.
We’ll see when that retirement nut is big enough that I’m comfortable we can live out our lives free of financial care. Maybe 5 years from now…
I’ve recently retired after working fully remote for 8 years. I loved working remote. The company has an office an easy commute away but since all my “teammates” were on a different continent it didn’t make sense to use it. I live alone and had a spare bedroom for an office.
I think what made it work so well for me was a combination of personality and and the type of work. On a scale of 1 to 10 where 1 is crippling introverted and 10 annoyingly extroverted I’m about a 4. I can quite easily go days without speaking to a person face to face.
I put teammates in quotes above because we were only a team in that we had the same manager. None of the work I did was input to someone else nor was I dependent on anybody else’s output.
I’ve enjoyed some form of hybrid / flexible work for the past 20 years. I love not having to go into the office if I don’t have to. I hate having to spend 8+ hours sitting in a desk pretending to look because some jerk says so.
That said, I sometimes miss the camaraderie of actually working around other people. I lead distributed client teams, but every now and then it’s actually nice to meet people face to face.