Yeah it's awful and the lack of any sympathy from people further along in their career with kids made it even worse. Everyone thinks it's great but I literally developed depression and anxiety from isolation.
Isn't that kind of how society works? i.e. If a senior employee benefitted from having close mentorship and a strong social network when they were a junior, then they may wish to pay it forward by being present and mentoring juniors now that they're a senior.
Wishing to go to office and make friends is very different from forcing everyone to do so. Many of us remote senior workers have rich social lives and were able to upskill ourselves, without needing coworkers to substitute for a failing social experience.
Begrudging more senior employees for lacking sympathy for younger employees who feel left out by remote work is not the same as begrudging them for working remote. Regardless, I would say it's a fair hypothesis that the vast majority of senior employees now would have reacted negatively to working remotely out of college. My experience and my peers has been that it's a significant negative to working relationships or gaining a mentor which is crucial for younger people. I see no reason why this would not be a universal experience. Studies back this up even before remote work was a thing. One I recall of the top of the dome was that it was actually cheaper over a lifetime in many occupations to go out to eat for lunch with coworkers than packing a lunch because just going out to eat with work peers had an immensely positive impact on promotions and networking. If just going out to lunch does that you can easily extrapolate to what effect not even working in the same place physically has.
I cannot find the exact study that concluded this but here's a recent one making a similar case. I know this isn't the one I've recalled since I read it back in high school. This one speaks to the benefits to the employee and employer.
Your hypothesis that the vast majority of senior employees would have reacted negatively is a projection of your own isolated lifestyle. You yourself noted “I literally developed depression and anxiety from isolation” which is more reflective of your own social issues than it is a representative experience of a healthy lifestyle.
Relatedly the most successful engineers in my social network are those who have worked remote most or all of their careers. It’s not a coincidence that they have more fulfilling social lives and earn more money, when they are able to spend more time with their spouse/kids, learn skills on their own, and switch to higher paying jobs that are not location-bound.
Yes, eating together is great for forming social bonds. A great many of us senior engineers (in my opinion the actual vast silent majority) are able to form social bonds that improve productivity, without needing to go to an office daycare to make fake forced friends.
I feel for your experience. To note, as a field we've long been one of the worst when it comes to depression and mental health (from the top of my head, we're par with teachers ?)
It was brutal before any glimpse of remote work, open offices didn't help in any way.
Some saw remote work as a way out of the quagmire, others like you had it worse.
PS: participation in local communities would benefit both the lonely people and the community.
It's hard to really compare when we(the pre-internet generation) were raised in an offline environment from the start.
At my current job we see "junior" devs with 3 years of GitHub contributions and fully in production personal projects. Those obviously learned through a different path that what most had 20 years ago, but they're definitely not an exception either, and I genuinely think there is an adaptation process that many are missing.
Perhaps everyone can't follow that path. but not everyone could follow the previous one either. We'll probably only know when the dust fully settles.
I did that and it was rough at first. Turned down the internship -> full-time option in favor of freelancing so I could do the level of work I wished.
15 years later...there are good parts and bad parts. Great for focus and getting real work done, terrible for feeling like you have any real connection to your peers (even if/when I went to meetups, conferences, etc, you always feel like an "outsider"). Eventually embraced the "lone wolf" aspects and learned alternatives to socializing, but yeah, that first lap around the track was brutal.
