He didn't talk about food. The largest incentive for me to want to go to office.
"We have initially designated 9am to 3pm Pacific Time as “coordination hours” where most employees will be expected to be available for meetings and impromptu communication, regardless of where they are located."
Having a certain window for meetings is a good thing even if not going remote.
"The first factor is the commute. People lose large amounts of precious time and energy getting to and from the office every day, and the process adds stress to their lives."
Commute for me has always been a plus.
"Many of our employees feel that they can concentrate better and get more done at home because they don’t have to spend mental energy focusing amid the noise, other distractions, and real anxiety that can come from presence in the office. Some people argue that these costs may slow down individual employees in the short term but help all employees as a whole in the long term because of the increased communication. However, both the data and my own personal experience point toward the conclusion that open office plans actually significantly decrease communication, because people keep quiet in order to avoid bothering their neighbors."
"Another trait, it took me a while to notice. I noticed the following facts about people who work with the door open or the door closed. I notice that if you have the door to your office closed, you get more work done today and tomorrow, and you are more productive than most. But 10 years later somehow you don't know quite know what problems are worth working on; all the hard work you do is sort of tangential in importance. He who works with the door open gets all kinds of interruptions, but he also occasionally gets clues as to what the world is and what might be important. Now I cannot prove the cause and effect sequence because you might say, ``The closed door is symbolic of a closed mind.'' I don't know. But I can say there is a pretty good correlation between those who work with the doors open and those who ultimately do important things, although people who work with doors closed often work harder. Somehow they seem to work on slightly the wrong thing - not much, but enough that they miss fame."
Hamming, You and Your research
If you assume remote work to be an extension of closed door and if what
Hamming says is true, then we have a paradox.
Any metric that tries to measure the quantity of work but not quality over
a long term will give a wrong impression. Since Hamming says that people
with closed doors work harder, number of pull requests, lines of code
changes, issues solved, emails sent etc will all be higher.
But, in the long run you would still have lost productivity due to lower
creativity, innovation, solving of wrong problems etc