I worked in an office 5 days a week, wearing a shirt and tie, for 20+ years of my career. My commute door-to-door was nearly an hour each way. Most of that by train fortunately. It was just normal.
"I worked in the mines / on the farm since I was 13, it was just normal" - until child labor laws protected the kids (mostly)
"I worked 12-16 hour days in the factory" - until a lot of people fought, incredibly hard, to push that number down.
People have learned in these last 4 years that they can work just fine AND have a life AND not have a commute and it can be many, many companies' "best years ever!".
Inertia is a sad, but common, excuse for bad practices.
Not trying to excuse it at all. You're completely right. But at the time, it was normal. Few people could even conceive that working from home could possibly work. I just mean it as an example that whatever people do, it seems normal if that's what everyone does. You see your dad go to work every morning, it's normal. You go to school every day, it's normal. It's only when something shakes that up that you get the idea that it might not be ideal.
WFH did not seem normal to most employees or employers until they were forced into it, and forced to make it work. I can't think of any other way we'd even be talking about it if the pandemic lockdowns hadn't happened.
> WFH did not seem normal to most employees or employers until they were forced into it...
True. To nearly every goddamn programmer in the world it was clear that the tech to make WFH work for programming jobs (and similar) had been in place since the mid 1990s, at the latest.
The fact that millions of people had to die in order for the suits to use the tech in place is heartbreaking.
It's also quite painful that the suits are trying to claw back the thing many of us been quietly screaming for for ~thirty years and that we've all proven over the past ~four years generally works really well.
True, while tech salaries may seem great, when you factor in inflation, well the earnings are not much. Needless to say people in the non-tech sectors have it terrible. The 'middle' class is a rapidly thinning.
