I thought they'd vanished with AOL, Geocities, MySpace etc a decade or more ago.

"If you're doing something like sales then a fixed office is a terrible place - you should generally be either visiting customers, or communicating with them"

There's a lot more to sales than just parroting the brochure to a client.

As for neighbours , a lot of mine are arseholes. Sure, I get on with a few of them but we have little in common beyond living on the same street and they're working during the day anyway so probably wouldn't appreciate someone just turning up on the door for a chat.

Sounds like you're both a pair of antisocial aspies who would be the miserable buttholes sitting in the corner of any office terrified of anyone speaking to them. Probably best for everyone if you work from a basement miles away.

" otherwise you were (righty) considered a disruptive butthole"

Not all of us work in a medieval monastery. Sounds like you're a perfect candidate for WFH in your basement on your own.

... it doesn't come close to face to face contact for really getting down and solving a problem with a number of people. Sure, its fine for standard team meetings, but for something that requires numerous people to sit together and brainstorm its just not there (and not just Teams, any similar system). Screen sharing is awkward compared to just sitting around a desk with laptops, white boarding - forget it, and the social cues that someone may want to speak just arn't there.

Unfortunately both sides in the debate don't want to acknowledge this simple fact.

If you're a gregarious type perhaps working in a role where personal contact matters such as marketing, sales etc and where the social to and fro is a Big Deal, then obviously working in an office is better than being at home.

If however you work in IT and you like to concentrate on a task without interrupted but at your own pace - so long as you meet deadlines - and arn't that fussed about being with other people then WFH will work for you.

Personally I'm somewhere in the middle - I'd hate to go back to the office 5 days a week but 1 or 2 days a week just to keep those social connections going with my colleagues suits me fine.

YMMV.

No one can work 22 hours a day for more than a few days without total mental and/or physical collapse , never mind 10 months. So someone had got their facts wrong. Unless they meant some kind of on-call for 22 hours a day which is an entirely different thing.

Define big tech. There's probably more code in the avionics of an airbus that in anything facebook etc have. Then there's the physical hardware...

And? They're big tech. Very big in the case of Airbus.

SAP, Seimens, Airbus, Spotify off the top of my head.

People made a big fuss about the USA trying to enforce its laws outside its jurisdiction. How come its somehow ok for the EU to do the same? If the company is based outside the Eu and so are the servers I dont legally see how this can work unless theres a rule saying that EU citizen data can only be stored on servers in the EU. Good luck getting smaller companies to agree to that.

>Being anti illegal immigration and pro selective immigration isn't "anti immigration" and it isn't "racism", it is just common sense

Wish I had mod points. This is the crucial point the liberal left either don't get or - more likely - deliberately choose to ignore so they can continue their ideological race baiting.

Yet diesel engines with a far higher compression ratio and messier combustion process have never used it yet the engines last for a million miles. Don't tell me it couldn't have been done decades before.

China seems to be advancing extremely fast technology wise with breaththroughs that frankly should have come from the west with our supposed "advantage". I suspect in 10 years time it won't be china trying to source AI GPUs and other high tech from us, it'll be us trying to get at theirs as they progress from a manufacturing economy to an innovation one, while in the meantime western tech companies such as Nvidia collapse in value or go bust altogether as the rest of the world buy chinese as they're already starting to do with chinese cars.

Lead has been a known poison for centuries yet leaded petrol was a thing for 80 years (and still is with avgas) with mendacious car manufactures whinging about how hard it would be to make valves strong enough to cope without, so useless governments around the world just rolled over until momentum started to grow in the 80s to ban it. I wonder how many people had an early death so car companies could pay out bigger dividends.