"Treating you like peasants demanding whatever they can get away with" is exactly how I feel about having to spend 4-7 hours every day on Zoom. Collaborations involving remote participants are excruciating and move very slowly. The workload hasn't decreased to compensate. We've just privatized onto everyone the costs of remoteness, in the form of longer hours and Zoom fatigue. Any union contract I'm going to accept needs to protect me from that.

This job used to be about solving hard problems with brilliant people, now it's about barking dogs and echo cancelation artifacts.

What do you do that requires 4-7 hours a day on zoom? I’m a project manager with multiple projects and generally keep it to no more than 4 hours total per day. Unless your job is all about talking to people, then someone has made a big mistake.

As a senior engineer pushing staff, my job is partly to code and also partly to mind the architecture, practices, and quality of the several teams I have a hand in. To be a resource for problem solving, voice of reason in org level design and postmortem reviews, represent the org’s needs in company-wide projects, etc. My job’s not all about that, but it takes up a lot more of my time with the demise of the hallway conversation and the fog of Zoom making meetings a lot less information-dense.

This past year or two would have been prime time to do that while labor power was at an apex, but once the recession hits that opportunity will be long gone. When the trend flips back to employer power dominant then WFH will no longer be as prevalent as it has been. Not to mention the chipping away at untold amounts of perks and benefits that tech workers, primarily Silicon Valley ones, have taken for granted for the past decade. This was a lost opportunity, a real "the ants and the grasshopper" situation.