My life is much worse for having 30+ Zoom meetings per week instead of the 1-2 it was before. Design discussions and collaborative problem solving are activities I used to find satisfying & be pretty efficient at. On Zoom I find them excruciating, draining, and very slow - requiring more hours for the same output, compounding the pain of sitting on Zoom, and sapping my own focus time.

Part of the job is to knock out tickets but part of the job (particularly when senior) is to help coworkers. If we lived in a fully transactional gig-worker kind of model then I would bill you 10x as much to get involved in your problem over Zoom. We don't, so that's impossible. And I realize this is silly on the grand scale of labor exploitation but I feel like by expecting me to treat remote workers the same as in-office workers, management is extracting a lot more value from me than was our deal pre-pandemic.

I get very little utility from the "flexibility" (always prioritized living close to the office, prefer the change of scenery) but a lot of disutility from remote collaboration.

I was much better off when I was among a small group of people free to go or not go to the office.

Now that everyone wants to do that, without the knowledge or the experience to do it, but only because they want to work in their pajamas (let's be honest!) I am forced to go through endless meetings where the first half is about "can you hear me?" "can you see me?" "where is X?" "coming, is in another meeting" "OK let's wait another 5 minutes then" and then half of them has an horrible voice quality, worse video, you have to repeat the same things over and over for the benefit of those not listening (let's be honest!) etc etc

it's exhausting and the fact that we aren't physically in the same room make people think two hours meetings are something normal

It's making me frankly think that all of this "freedom to work everywhere" trope has gone too far.