I read a history of England during the Restoration, and the author described why the government favored a tax on salt rather than a tallow. Tallow could be made at home, but a salt on tax brought in revenue and also made the household less productive. I have to wonder if entrenched, hierarchical structures reflexively view increasing household sufficiency as a threat.

At the C-suite level, the bottom line should be the biggest concern. If productivity is as good or better than before, then the obvious choice is to reduce facility related expenses, have more offsite workers and make more profit.

Middle management (and/or CxO’s as you refer to them) will want to return to status quo because the job of aligning the workforce under corporate policies becomes so much harder when the workforce is not in one location. The roles of middle management will need to change in the new work model, and nobody really likes change.

For startups, I think that companies smaller than 50 employees and less than 3 years old will likely not do as well in a distributed work environment. There just isn’t enough common culture or process to make it work, in my opinion.

Personally speaking, the big split is if I actually have to collaborate with someone or not. If I just need to focus on writing code, wfh is great. But if i actually need to design something, use a whiteboard, and have a conversation, it's a million times easier in the office.

This is why I think productivity went up in the short term, companies had plenty of stuff in their backlogs already and WFH let it get done faster. Give it a few years though and I'm expecting product and feature quality to start going down.

Hashicorp is fully remote and is worth billions of dollars as a public company. I think there are challenges working remotely from a collaboration perspective, but there is evidence those challenges can be mitigated or solved.

Oh I'm not saying it's possible, but I do think it requires a culture of remote first. I believe Hashicorp was remote from the beginning. That's a lot different than trying to pivot an existing large company to fully remote.

> For startups, I think that companies smaller than 50 employees and less than 3 years old will likely not do as well in a distributed work environment. There just isn’t enough common culture or process to make it work, in my opinion.

It is possible this is why some startups will fail sooner.

It is possible this is why some pre IPO private buyouts will be less likely, there won't be enough "there" there to acquire as a work culture or visible asset holding outcome.

But I personally believe the ones which survive being more WFH will be more resilient long-term and make more persisting value long term.

So I half agree and half disagree. Founder-Vesting-VC wins may be net smaller in my case. That's a downside for one point of view.

“You scratch my back I will scratch yours.”

1. Control. The people at the top got there by pure ambition and thirst for power so if they have employees WFH they lose the fundamental juice they get.

2. Politics. The WH,Mayors and others are pushing the corporations because the Commercial Real Estate won’t exist tomorrow if this trend continues. There are trillions at stake. They scratch the back of lobbyists who in turn scratch the back of politicians who I turn scratch the CXOs

Less dramatic is simply a complete lack of empathy. The CEO of my company is really a sales guy at heart and got upset enough to start pushing for return to the office once the company lost deals because his competitors were putting people on planes for face to face meetings and we were still exclusively using Zoom.

But the thing is his IT support organization and other people in non-sales roles are also being told they too will RTTO. Surely the risk to their health far outweighs whatever immeasurable benefit to the firm accrues from butts in seats? But to a sales person who deals in relationships I'm sure anything but people working from the office feels unnatural.