Yes I know what you mean. I also do need to work closely with my co-workers/team as much as possible. For me, that face to face appeal is just too important. yes not always but I would prefer it at least 70-30.

You claim that you can't work remote because working from home doesn't work for you. When it becomes clear that working remote doesn't mean working from home, you clain that you actually can't work remote for another reason.

This is a common phenomenom, though I don't know a name for it. You seem to be finding justifications for your preference (in this case, to work at a company office), but my experience think there is some other real reason. What is it?

I would note that working closely with co-workers can be achieved with text, voice, video, and shared whiteboards/screens. It is probably less efficient, but are you going in to work because you truly can't afford that loss of efficiency? Do you have an quantitative estimate of those losses, and a quantitative estimate of other efficiency gains/losses due to working remote? Do they take into account that it takes a while to readjust? If not, you just have a preference, and it doesn't need to be justified or defended.

> You seem to be finding justifications for your [ ... ] but my experience think there is some other real reason. What is it?

People _can_ have multiple deal-breakers, multiple reasons for not liking something, when you try to ask why, they usually give you _one_ of those reasons, instead of writing an essay with multiple bullet-points on why they don't like it. This is most likely just in the interest of saving time, and not to hide or avoid the _real_ reason. Also, sometimes, people take position by an intuitive feeling, hard to put into words, an understanding built by absorbing evidence and confirming hypotheses in the background over a long period of time. This, probably, is especially prone to confirmation bias if one's not careful.

> I would note that working closely with co-workers can be achieved with text, voice, video, and shared whiteboards/screens. It is probably less efficient, but are you going in to work because you truly can't afford that loss of efficiency?

For many people, this is about maintaining a healthy psychological state, for which, social interactions _are_ essential. It is _not_ about measuring efficiency. Productivity is hard to quantitatively measure in a lot of contexts, but it is easy to notice when your mental state is deteriorating in loneliness. Also, in general, worse mental state will likely mean lower performance.

Communication using video and audio and text can get you far, but for some reason it is not a substitute for the subtleties of face-to-face interaction. The communication bandwidth is just not there, a real life office is just much more immersive. Not to mention that online interactions tend to be more limited in duration. You'd be around people for an hour, and alone for seven. While in an office, you're around people _the whole time_.

> you just have a preference

Yes this is true. People are different, and prefer different environments. People vary in background, temperament, responsibilities. Some are more extroverted, some prefer longer periods of alone time. Some are mentally stable and resilient, some tend to easily spiral into depression. And some jobs just lend themselves better to remote work. Between an active extroverted salesman, and an easy-going introverted software developer, you know who's more likely to prefer working remotely.

> and it doesn't need to be justified or defended.

but we can try anyway :P

How about 3 or 4 days onsite work per week?