There are two kinds of “in-office” jobs:
1. We find the cheapest capable workers all over the world, and put them in an office for administrative monitoring, while they work on our ideas in fully-distributed teams through email and remote meetings.
2. We pay to get people together in one place so that we can figure out the best ideas together, without meeting schedules or email. We hope to develop friendships and an environment that they won’t want to leave.
In my first several workplaces, there was maybe one scheduled meeting a month, and email was mostly for long-form discussions. Hierarchies were flat, disagreement was common, and leadership emerged by people choosing which ideas they wanted to contribute to. We joked a lot and told stories. Nothing left the time and place of work. This seemed to be the norm, and it gradually changed everywhere at the same time. “Tech” is a monoculture. Everybody says they’re different, but they all use the same tools for their interactions: outlook, teams, slack, zoom, jira, github, agile, weekly update meetings. Nobody wants this, but they definitely don’t want to go into the office for it, nor do they have time to commute when their entire life is already consumed by all this ‘collaboration’, and every day ends with not enough done to show results at the next morning meeting, so they’ll be working at home anyway. Even if a company did have a real in-person culture, it would immediately revert as soon a they hired someone for their success at another company, which turns out to be mostly a function of working the system as a middle manager with an engineering title. New grads are even worse; it’s all they know. School is now mostly remote, even when you live on campus. This all seems like the long arc of the computing revolution, and everything seems to be pointing in the same direction, e.g. metaverse etc.
My guess is that you’re looking for a certain kind of work, not just a desk to sit and do the same as you’ve been doing remotely. I too would like to learn about places that are truly intentionally present physically, or even experimenting with radically different remote methods. My hypothesis is that everybody eventually reverts to the monoculture because fighting it becomes more effort than any benefit gained. So, I’m not sure I will believe it, but I’d still like to hear it.
