It's not unfair when knowledge on the effects of these practices were public several decades ago and companies still insisted on optimizing for employee per square foot while giving their executives private offices.

All remote work did was showcase people can in fact rebel against the status quo when the inertia associated is entirely self-inflicted.

Nice post! At my company, one of their locations has insufficient space for all employees. As a result, they introduced "hot desking". It is widely hated by all non-executive-level employees. Literally, you cannot keep anything at your desk. (Put it in a locker everyday that feels like high school!) The message received by non-execs: "You are not human; this is the matix; you are interchangable." Of course, none of the execs are forced to hot-desk their nice corner offices. (FYI: I have a terribly combative personality.) When I saw one of the execs after the plan what annouced, I casually asked: "Oh, what days are you WFH? I'll take your office." They almost fainted with fear.

>wasn't even really possible until a decade ago

I think that's an overstatement. I've been more remote than not for close to 20 years and 90%+ remote for close to 10.

That said, there is some point in time before which companies would have had to largely shrug and tell people that they had to stay in the office pandemic or not. (Which of course many jobs and professions basically had to anyway.)

AS my grand father would tell you, who retired from AT&T in the early 90s. The "telephone company" had the ability for pretty much every employee to be remote except for field techs and sales people in the 80s. And he in fact had people he worked with who were 100% remote in the 80s. Field tech, because that is obvious. Sales because when he sold a large contract, he was expected to supervise the install, and he wanted to. Before he entered sales he was a field tech, or "telephone pole climber" in his words.

I think you make a reasonable point, but I'll also echo some replies that remote work has absolutely been a possibility for many industries for much longer than a decade. I've been working 100% remotely for 21 years, and some of the people I was learning from in the beginning had already been working remotely for years before me.

That said, I've been a professional programmer for all that time, which in my mind is practically made for working remotely. It's definitely taken longer for some other industries to be as amenable, which I believe has been due to the people in charge, not the profession.

I agree that general inertia has something to do with it, but that's a terrible reason to accept the way things are.

Perhaps only "anywhere in the world" remote has only become possible in the last decade but I have coworker programmers that have been fully remote or what we would now call "hybrid" since the 90s.

The GP to your comment is suggesting that it's intolerant to push for remote work, but you're suggesting that it's simply "inertia" to push for in-office work. This clear double standard frequently shows up in these discussions.

The ability to work remote has been around longer than that. I was working remotely in 2003/2004, 2007..

Most people didn't know remote was possible until 2019

It was 100% possible to do this at technology companies in 1995 (in retrospect).