I don’t know many WFH advocates who want to close all offices and force everyone to work from home, but many (most?) WFO advocates want to go back to the office AND have everyone else go back too. This includes almost all company execs who are pushing for a return to office. I think that’s the big difference between the camps.

You can't be a Bossy McBosserson and get big bossy promotions if you can't poke and prod your employees in person all day.

Also cognitive skills like reading comprehension become really hard to fake when you are at home interfacing with text only. It is much easier to fake competence when you just float from meeting to meeting all day.

Y’all work in some weird places.

Large orgs have many of these people.

Yea this all screams 'I need someone to scream at'.

Was a satirical article posted here a while back about a CEO wanting his people back so he could feel powerful again, and IMO that is 99.9% of the reason for management/C-suite's push.

Management becomes redundant/useless and c-suited only have each other to boss around, and we can't have that.

Or, as my grandparents used to say 'If everyone is rich(powerful), no one is rich, and no one would do the work.'

There are good reasons to go advocate for as few people in offices as possible though. Keeps people off roads, less traffic and pollution, those previous offices could be reused as homes that most cities desperately need.

I also don't see the point of an office when you only have a fraction of the people there.

Isn't it a better idea to work on public transportation and housing to actually fix those problems? Simply forcing everyone to work from home will probably alleviate traffic, but also introduce its own myriad of problems.

Public transportation seems to always bother someone. That's why we have nimby. It's the best solution when people have to go somewhere. If there is a solution that involves not even needing it in the first place, why wouldn't you advocate for that. Public transportation doesn't comes for free, there's still pollution involved and often runs at a loss

I don't know any WFO advocate who thinks that everyone must work from an office. Managers saying their workers must work from an office doesn't do that from the perspective of an WFO advocate, but to make their workers more efficient as they think that office workers perform better. Similarly managers who forces all their workers to WFH (by not having an office) doesn't advocate for everyone to WFH, rather they think that it is more efficient to work from home so that is how they run their team, there is no grand social statement about this.

What is the distinction between what you say and being an advocate? If they truly believed one way is more efficient, and managed accordingly, how are they not an advocate insofar as their team is concerned?

An advocate tries to convince people to do something without forcing something. CEO's doesn't try to convince everyone that working from office is great, they just say that if you don't come to office you are fired. A CEO advocating WFO would be if he was trying to convince other CEO's to also adopt WFO policies. But doing something yourself doesn't make you an advocate.

You're being obnoxiously literal with this. Words typically lead to action but action is the stronger proof. They don't need to be literally "advocating" anything if they're already showing it through action.

> I'm not ok with people saying "everyone needs to WFH" or "everyone needs to go to the office"

I think that's the rub, as most people/roles who want to "work from office" also mean be surrounded by their coworkers.

Surely you'd want to be surrounded by other people who also want to be around one another, not by people who would rather be somewhere else.

> "everyone needs to WFH"

never heard of anyone who ever said that. is it simply there for rhetorical purposes?

It's a thing. My employer (Dropbox) has mandated it, for instance, and no longer has offices at all.

Was that before or after COVID ? Because Gitlab for example was always remote by principle. We are talking here about companies that were mostly in large offices in the first place.

Very much after.

Surely they have some offices? As a small company that has no offices, I actually run into problems at times because we don't have an official office address. For example, some financial and other types of companies want things like a copy of an office lease or a utility bill in the name of the company.

Probably not an issue for a public company like Dropbox. I suspect they have an official address and SEC filings ought to demonstrate they're real as much as an office lease.