SLAs and maybe even company politics. Incidents are politicized at a lot of companies. Even if the official rhetoric says "when it comes to incidents we don't blame people and there are no politics" the reality is often the complete opposite.
Maybe this is true if you are stuck with roommates, but given how terrible most open offices are now the bar is pretty low for home to be better.
My home office in my small 2br city center apartment has a better monitor than the one at my open office workstation, I can listen to whatever music I want, no BS small talk, and I don't feel like there are eyes on me constantly. Plus, commuting sucks no matter where you live, most city dwellers don't live within walking distance of their offices.
I do like the opportunity to socialize w/ coworkers from time to time but 2-3 days/week in office is more than enough for me.
Based on what we've heard from Google yesterday, and FB's Q1 results just now, it looks like the much heralded ad crunch is turning into not much more than a speed bump.
You're making a sweeping assertion with zero evidence to back it up.
One obvious counterpoint to this argument is that this recession was not caused by markets realizing that many publicly listed tech companies actually had no market and no path to profitability.
Also, non-tech companies took on a large number of engineers in the late 90s to address Y2K - many of whom got laid off afterwards. Not an issue here.
not sure Westerners are in a place to criticize given that we love to thoughtlessly appropriate Hindu/Buddhist imagery all over the place in our culture
personally I love this aspect of Evangelion because it makes me examine my own orientalist biases