We don't need to rehash each side. Obviously there are two strong camps, each with merit, for how to optimize productivity.

I think that information is also known to people making decisions and is why we’re seeing hybrid policies which essentially codify the pre-covid behavior of taking a WFH day. Pre-covid, having two or three company sanctioned WFH days was the dream. Let’s not forget.

So what really annoys me at this point are the holdouts still arguing for 100% fully remote positions for every employee or the employer is essentially abusing them and just wants to creep on people working in desks and watch them type. I mean come on… fully remote just doesn't work for every employee, sorry. For every “I’m more productive at home” there’s an “I need face to face interaction with other humans to effectively collaborate”. That’s life.

IMO, hybrid work policies are an incredibly positive and generous outcome of the pandemic. If you don't like even that then either become a fully remote employee after a discussion with your manager. Or go work for a place where it’s explicitly part of the policy/job/contract up front.

Mostly sick of hearing whinny parroting of the same arguments ad nauseam.

Its not the screens during meetings that bother the extraverted ones, it's the lack of people nearby which sets the temperature of their workday.

This is what bothers me, why should I lose an hour+ of MY day because some people like the feeling of others around them. I don't get that time back, I don't get the money for the wear and tear on my vehicle, all so someone feels warm and cozy, unrelated to the actual productivity of the work.

Employers love to treat employees as numbers, but when employees say "Hey I'm a number, look at my productivity, don't make me participate in these rituals", people act like its childish.

I don't owe anything to my employer, because they don't owe me anything except the legal compensation for the work.

If professional managers with the power of economic incentives behind them can't match that with a remote team, holy fuck, they're terrible at their jobs, literally providing negative value.

There are clearly preferences for both styles. Choose the style you want and work at a place that can accommodate. No need to force everything to be one way or another. Why is that such a hard concept?

In an office probably works fine too, sure, but I don't think remote needs to prove anything, in the software world. It's proven. It's very proven. Managers that can't do better than some developers self-organizing online, with the same or better tools and a budget, must be pretty bad at what they do. I'm not making the point that some of them evidently find that incredibly difficult and even impossible, they are, which seems to me like telling on themselves. Guess they're bad at their job, should let a developer do it. It's pretty clearly not rocket science or something that requires some kind of expert, since it keeps being done over and over by people who aren't professional managers. Seems to just require someone halfway competent.

So if a company says, "we prefer a hybrid work model", then shouting out "but look fully remote projects can work as is evidenced by all these successful ones" simply doesn't matter.

My comment (that you were responding to) was explaining that apparently there are leaders who have seen a difference in product quality, velocity, collaboration, team morale, what have you, between fully remote and pre-covid in-office work styles. Presumably they believe that bringing people together is best for their company/product/team. You simply can't argue with that, at least not generally, since it's a valid viewpoint.

Rhetorically the existence of anecdotes to the contrary does not invalidate an argument/position/viewpoint.

There are valid anecdotes from people being more productive working remote. And there are valid anecdotes from people feeling like remote work has take a toll on their mental health and productivity and ability to collaboratively solve problems. And there are valid anecdotes from people who feel like a balanced hybrid model is exactly what they need. And there's even data that shows hybrid and remote work does improve productivity.

The only opinion I've state as fact is the observation that there does not seem to be one perfect solution for every person and situation and team out there. The only opinion I've truly state is that people should consider compromising on their work requirements because it's silly to rehash an unresolvable argument about which work style is the ultimate global best, ad nauseam.

If I were in charge of this topic at a large company, I do believe this is one of those "every scenario is a bit different" situations and I'd advise managers to work with their teams to make the right call. But I'm not so who cares.

Arguably you do, but there’s evidently a disagreement on the value.

The places that I and my friends worked at pre-pandemic were already like this. Meetings were held via videoconferencing even though everyone was in the office, people mostly interacted with each via chat and email, etc.

The only thing 1 day a week RTO kills is the “work from Bozeman” camp, which affords zero to people who want to collab in person.

You missed the "to live wherever the fuck I want" part that it absolutely kills...

No I didn't. That's called a remote job not WFH. If work from wherever the fuck I want is important to you then go work for a remote company or convince the one you work at that your roll can be performed remote, from wherever the fuck you want. Nobody is arguing against that.

That's the thing, it shouldn't be left up to the companies to be remote or not.

It should be a conversation between you and your company. Employment is a two way street.

It should be an available option enforced by law.

Did you think my suggestion meant that e.g. waiters and sailors would also work from home?

>You clearly haven't given a fraction of a second’s thought to this topic

Oh, the irony!

Anyway... you're deeply gravely missing the entire nuance: management/leadership at Google is arguing that "the job" of a general employee expected to be a collaborative team member can't be done completely remotely to a quality level or at a velocity that is acceptable for their business. Sure there are exceptions that the business decides are okay, like that ops guy working 3rd shift from Seychelles who isn't building product and closes all his incidents in an acceptable time window that meets SLAs, he's allowed. But they are exceptions, not the rule.

The law doesn't just handle objectively measurable things. It's not a computer algorithm, and it has to apply to society, where things are not always black and white. So, the law has differentiated such things since the dawn of man, it's nothing new. Examples of such cases would be obscenity laws, defamation laws, fair use judgements, personal/psychological damage compensation, etc, where there are general legal guidelines and court/jury judgment if further required. There are tons of other such examples in all legal domains.

>You've got to be kidding me if you think the law can tell a business whether an employee can perform their duties remotely or not... LOL I'm trying to even imagine the wording... please provide some example prose.

This juvenile "LOL" approach isn't very conductive to conversation. Just saying.

In any case, the law could give general guidelines, and also list some unambiguous remote-capable job roles, and the rest could be left to per industry evaluation, and, if it comes to that, case law.

"In order to promote workplace flexibility and adaptability in the modern economy, this law establishes a distinction between remote-capable jobs and location-dependent jobs. Remote-capable jobs are those positions that can be performed effectively and efficiently without the physical presence of the employee at a specific worksite. Such jobs may include roles in software development, content creation, customer service, and other knowledge-based occupations. On the other hand, location-dependent jobs are those roles that necessitate the employee's physical presence at a designated workplace due to the nature of the tasks involved, such as healthcare professionals, emergency responders, construction workers, and other hands-on occupations. Employers shall assess job functions and determine the suitability of remote work based on factors such as operational requirements, employee productivity, and the preservation of essential services. This law aims to facilitate remote work opportunities while ensuring that critical functions requiring local presence are duly addressed."

>management/leadership at Google is arguing that "the job" of a general employee expected to be a collaborative team member can't be done completely remotely to a quality level or at a velocity that is acceptable for their business.

They can argue whatever they want.

If employers were left on their own devices they'd also argue that people should work 12 hours a day, that paid overtime is detrimental to their business, that child work is fine, that their business don't need to provide safety standards and work accidents should be pinned into the workers being "non careful", that they don't need to hire women in executive roles because they're less competent and have impaired judgment "once a month", and a whole lot more.

In fact, they have argued, and practiced all of the above, before labour laws (that they fought against vehemently), had them begrudgingly accept them.

What is "acceptable for their business", based on their own judgement, shouldn't constrain what is accetaptable or even best practice for society, the environment, and so on.

That said, I'm also not convinced remote is amazing. I do wish they would move to more performance oriented metrics on who they are allowing to work from where. This is akin to having school focus on attendance instead of test scoring. If you just want people in the office, surely you have a reason for that.

This is especially true for a company that famously lauds OKRs. If they work as well as we've been assured that they do over the years, make that your push. Don't focus on "percent in the office X days a week."

Yes, it mentions fully remote people with the hopes to get them to switch off fully remote. But the meat, as it were, is in the reminder to everyone else that absence factors into performance reviews. That is, they don't measure you by OKRs, but by attendance. (I can see an argument that it is "in addition to OKRs," but that doesn't change my challenge here. If those work, why have attendance?)

I'm reminded of the scene, "I am altering the deal, pray I don't alter it any further."

And again, I'm actually not fully pro-remote. But this is a bed they made.

This example is funny because tying school performance to standardized test scores has been a disaster that makes overall schooling less effective in favor of "teach the test".

More numeric performance metrics would have people work the metrics, not do the work effectively. IE back when programmers were measured by LOC, so they wrote senselessly verbose code to play the metric.

These policies both have costs (financial, talent-wise, administratively depending on what state/country you are in, etc.), and while it sounds ideal, it's not always a good idea to let an employee "do whatever they want". That's a less talked about way on how you cause office clashes. Sometimes the best way to settle those disputes before they start is to lay a foot down say "we are doing X", and inevitably let those who feel strongly walk.

Ideally while clearly explaining your rationale. Because you're communicating with fellow adults, not wrangling kids into a playpen.

That's the part companies forget, and reading fake platitudes or empty statemes like this memo don't make me feel confident either way, regardless on how I feel about remote vs. office.

No, if your rationale is "we are still paying for this building and must use it", just say it. If it's "we don't need an office anymore and it's saved costs", say that.

Hopefully, there will be companies that are in one camp or the other as well. That seems to be the only way to create a workplace that is beneficial to everyone.

Google demanding RTO, for instance, doesn't impact me because I have negative interest in ever working for Google. However, I still retain hope that the sorts of companies I am interested in working for will have a working environment that suits me.

We collaborate through reviews on PRs, virtual documents, links, search queries, and yes, conversations. But this has all happened in virtual settings for a long long time, and almost can’t work any other way.

But I have noticed that it's much harder to brainstorm ideas remotely. Where you want fast back and forth, everyone to speak their minds, notes to jot down. These aren't as efficient to do on a computer, at least not for my generation raised between tech and analog.

As a result, we never needed to have specific days "in office" or "you can do what you want"; as long as you could attend the meeting, you could be wherever you needed to be. I found just as much value on days in the office as days elsewhere, but the biggest value was that every day it was my choice.

Then the pandemic hit and we lost the office, and naturally I discovered the downsides of being permanently remote.

Today's "compromise" of forced "in-office" and "do what you want" schedule doesn't strike me as inducing the best collaboration based on what individual teams and groups need.

Perhaps having a goal of "optimizing productivity" is the problem.

If employeers were allowed to drive this to its ultimate conclusion they would adopt with forced servitude as the maximum productivity case (and historically and even now in many places had adopted).

But also, quality and productivity are not totally separate, let's not be coy. If you can't collaborate effectively then both productivity and quality can take hits.

If the product suffers, it's not because they're working for home. Microsoft, Adobe, Apple, or the famous old examples everybody loved to have Avid and Quark, have made no end of crap releases, or crapped on their priorly good products, while strictly working from an office.

And that's with product oriented companies - corporate and government software is, of course, much much worse.

Still, why optimize for product quality either? It's a bottomless pit. We should optimize for a decent product (that would already be an improvement), and work-life balance. Work is 1/3+ of daily life, and people's time is not something people should be forced to sacrifice (by piling up forced relocation or commuting time, open plan or cublicle farm environments, and lack of day contact with kids, spouses, ability to drop the kids to school or handle some chore over the week, and so on).

Seems like the way to go, but instead these companies are all copying each other.

Big Tech is forcing people to put butts in seats; smaller companies that can't afford to pay that much are embracing remote work as a competitive advantage in the labor market.

At least that's what I'd expect, and it fits with how a lot of my friends are working. OTOH I have seen a lot of companies advertising for in-office or close-to-office (keeping their RTO powder dry) despite obviously having no chance of competing on compensation.

I want to blame that on the recent mass layoffs, hirer's market and all that, but I'm not sure -- maybe they're filtering out employees with high self-regard on purpose?

If I were hiring I'd probably look for "insists on remote" as a positive signal at least for devs. Values things other than cash, willing to have work output measured, can take late-night meetings sometimes, won't be poached by FAANG -- what's not to like for a manager?

The company just announced a 3 days per week RTO policy for those assigned to an office, but employees are free to go remote if that's what they prefer. The main thing you give up by going remote is an assigned desk in the office -- if you live nearby you can still drop in to an office whenever you like.

That's the problem, IMO. Tech companies, down to the smallest start-ups, love to cargo-cult the big guys. If Google, Apple, and Twitter do something, pretty much the whole industry will follow suit without needing much more justification than "Well, Google does it and they're amazingly successful. Therefore, we should do it."

So, I'm very disappointed at how many of the big tech companies are forcing people back into the office.

Their bulk of hiring will be younger folks. Those people generally move closer to work and show up everyday at office.

Smaller companies will be pragmatic in a different way. They will try to retain good employees. They realize the benefits of remote workers.

You have two wrong assumptions here - one is that all the good employees want remote. That's not true. Good people also like offices with some flexibility to work remotely whenever they choose. Second assumption is that companies big and small won't make exceptions for their superstars. That's not true neither. A lot of companies are forcing their policies on their cogs while bending over backwards for their superstars.

I just meant relatively, compared to big companies; smaller companies will make more exceptions to retain folks. And smaller companies realize and value the pros of remote workers more, like savings in office space expenses.

In other words, there should be a way to accommodate everyone. In fact, there is one. We just seem to want to do it.

Recently a company I work with (but not for) announced a similar policy: everybody is required to be back in the office. Through informal conversations with two senior managers I know that this is effectively just a fishing expedition to reduce the amount of people that will be involuntarily laid off in the next round (here in Europe it's much less costly if they walk away on their own). Aside from the fact that this is a terrible way to make a selection (you will lose good employees), I find it also immoral to use a list of bullet points to justify the move when there is a totally different reason behind it.

During COVID I also saw a lot of middle managers nervously squeaking through the pandemic ('maybe all of those meetings COULD have been and email' syndrome), and now that it's possible to bring people back to the office there is lots of rationalization about why it's good and/or necessary to do so. When in reality their job depends on it, not the company's success.

I think if commute time was even partially employer-paid we would see a much more honest evaluation of the pros and cons of remote vs office-based work.

Another poster here said recently: the unspoken truth in the industry is that good employees will still be allowed to work from home.

Definitely not the case where I work. We’ve lost A LOT of good people to RTO

Well, if the actual intent is to be left with a smaller number of more obedient people who'd bend over for the company and do things without asking questions, putting a bogus reason out is an effective way to accomplish the goal.

Companies do have to pay for their office space. My employer did not review our lease during the pandemic. Recently, we got out of the other lease in the region and consolidated both offices into one smaller office for people who want to work in an office. We're saving a ton of money.

There is one side that is unambiguously pro-family, pro-environment, pro-church involvement, pro-bowling league, pro-parents in kids lives, pro-marriage, pro-divorced child raising. As in something for each and every side’s loud and clear broadcasted preferences.

The other is pro-people in seats, pro-commercial real estate, pro-commuting, pro-certain type of manager, pro-one type of extrovert who can’t find friends outside of work.

There are clear lines here on where the wfh benefits are how it aligns with many, many stated needs for the country from each party and various stakeholders.

Work from home decimates some of these areas if people simply aren't there any more and all the 2nd order effects of other businesses going away as well. So I think it's wrong to assume all of the pressure comes only from the corporations themselves and not also the local governments putting pressure on the corporations to to change work from home policy because otherwise their budgets are busted.

Now, this is one of those "you problems" for the local governments; workers themselves should care about their own interests and lives and none of that changes just because some city you don't want to live in is harmed by the trends. But this dynamic should be understood when discussing the issue.

Cities are concerned bc New York of the 1970’s is staring them all down bc tax revenues take a dive and the equivalent of structural unemployment is hitting city revenue models.

That said, anyone who’s lived in the main cities can likely attest to the following. These places are corporatized shells of what they once were, and what they once were is why NYC is considered cool in the first place - live music, local bars, “scenes,” that unique city approach to local community. Sometime in the 2000s, while they lost the gnarly crime, they also started to lose all that for 7/11, Chase banks, and mom and pops owned by PE. Essentially rich person playgrounds. Nyc of 2013 was a lot of fun but also more an amusement park for wealthy millennials or NYU kids cosplaying as one. Same with SF and techies.

So these cities simultaneously bemoan the loss of that character and exponential cost of living increases, but also want back all the conditions that caused both.

If Manhattan gets it’s actual artists and culture people back from outer Brooklyn or Ohio, and it takes a dive in tax revenues and a grungy NYC for a bit, that seems a good thing. NYC of the 7/11-Chase Bank height really sucked.

I don't think you need to have crime, open drug use, harassment by mentally ill and homeless...all sorts of things that are pushing corporations, and workers, to simply move out of the cities, abandon projects or large retail presence (Whole Foods, Hilton San Francisco Union Square, Parc 55 etc).

I think gentrification is good, actually. Having a nice safe clean productive city with wealth and investment flowing in vs out is good actually. Having crime, degradation, and flight is bad. If law and order was established across many cities, then even in lower income neighborhoods and housing units there could be safety and stablity; it wouldn't have to come at a premium.

I mean I'm sure there is a type that likes everything you describe, but personally it just seems like nonsense to me. I'd prefer to not have harassment on public transportation or in the streets walking home at night. And if I made good money working in the city, then good for me. If the selling point going forward is, "Come to the big city..it will cost more than your smaller town, but at least we have crime and grunginess to go with it!", I think these cities and businesses and productive people that stick around there (they won't) are going to have a bad time. Part of dynamic during the era you describe is there was 0 remote work for all industries, while being centered in certain metros. Now people won't put up with that bullshit like they had to back then.

That said, drugs and crime and… aren’t a forgone conclusion if NYC gets cheaper and local businesses can afford to come back and cultural folks can find places that aren’t 3k.

Both are likely to happen if nyc tanks a bit. The crime isn’t necessarily likely. A lot of other cities manage it.

I have no respect for the RTO side of the argument though bc it’s proxied by a corp using scummy arguments. It is obviously about 1950’s org culture and extroverts who buy into it (who cares if this survives), short term possibly cataclysmic decline of cities (this certainly should concern everyone), and generally rejiggering a large part of how the US works due to the WFH diaspora (this is just a slice of what the internet is doing overall, can’t fight it).

Instead of leadership, we get corps doing proxy messaging. And the last several years showed they don’t deserve to be listened to IMO. I will listen to the first public service leader or newspaper who frames it in an honest way. I was told the environment matters expect for when it’s the entire country commuting to the office.

If you can run a company on the go or at home, certainly I am capable of shipping quality code at home.

I work at an HFT firm as a C++ dev as a junior. Finance loves the office. I go in 5 days a week.

The one person that doesn’t come in at all? My boss with 15 years of experience. He wrote most of the trade engine himself, the firm would fall apart if he left.

So he can set his terms and he is home 100% of the time.

I get that he's probably good at what he did, but to be fair, if you as an organization leave such a high bus factor open, having the company's livelihood depend on one developer, you're dysfunctional at best and asking for trouble at worst.

Ideally good leadership should want that knowledge spread around or just not let it get to that point from the start.

The one thing that I am still in awe is that the new engineer had his PhD in chemistry, and never attended a CS class once, but was nevertheless a world class engineer and hacker. Miss working with him.

That's unfortunately not something that most smaller companies can afford to replicate and still be alive.

If you've got unlimited money sure, everyone's replaceable as the problem boils down to having enough money to poach the next best replacement, but hiring the best of the best with guarantee they can take over the most complex codebases quickly without impacting operations, is an endeavor that can sink small companies if the bus factor hits their core.

This is the sort of banal nonsense that seems to be obviously true on its face but bears no semblance to reality. In fact, it illustrates the classic East coast vs Valley divides. The original team of secdb was half a dozen people. Each of them was invaluable & their code managed literally a few trillion USD of the world economy. person who wrote the proprietary graph language & compiler for that system was 1 single hotshot c++ guy on the standards committee, who also wrote a chapter in the programming pearls book. gs continues to use secdb & the firm is over 150+ years & counting. Meanwhile, the Valley startups I worked for since - they had this idea that everybody must know everything, all knowledge is diffuse etc. Lot of time taken in teaching backend programmers javascript, frontend guys system infra...all out of goodness of their heart. End result, neither the startup nor the programs we wrote lasted even a decade, even in the best case. In fact, median tenure in these places was under 2 years, whereas most east coasters are lifers.

I don't live in the Valley neither on the East Coast, I'm from Europe which is where my vantage point for my argument lies. Maybe Valley companies can afford to do that because they pay the highest salaries in the world therefore they can always fix any problem because they can throw enough money at them.

>Lot of time taken in teaching backend programmers javascript, frontend guys system infra...all out of goodness of their heart.

That's equally dysfunctional. Reducing the bus factor doesn't mean that the front desk lady must know your codebase, it just means that there shouldn't be any master in the team who holds the keys to the knowledge kingdom and doesn't sahre his knowledge with the rest of the team.

that's exactly what i'm disagreeing with. It sounds like a good feature on paper. In reality, it seldom is. Most east coast companies of significant size, if they do anything sufficiently complex, will have 1, sometimes 2-3 guys, who hold the keys to the kingdom & know everything. The kind of domain knowledge that cannot be transferred in kt sessions. In all the IBs I've worked at, there was always the point person who knows everything about one thing, & if he got hit by a bus, man you were in serious shit. Its just the cost of doing business in that domain, can't really derisk it by writing everything down. otoh most Valley firms do very generic shit, with young troops recruited every so often, who stay just long enough to make the jump to the next faang. Even in the Valley, you have L8,L9s whose disappearance can cause significant damage. Its simply not possible to transfer all knowledge to rank and file. some things are just very hard. Code has a way of getting very convoluted very fast. End of the day, SWeng is a very young field. There are no rules like multiple people must know your codebase. There are actual prop funds in chicago running out of 1 big R file written by the cofounder. Whole fund runs out of a single R program! No joke. Big world out there.

Of the five directors on the call, one was in the office. Three were at home. The CEO division of support employees were also exempt from the requirement.

We’re asking for half a billion from the government, I wonder how closely they will look.

That’s not hypocritical. To be effective in those require that they meet in person to make those deals, rather than zooming in lot a call from home or a tropical island.

It is very reasonable to expect different jobs/roles benefit from different operating modes.

", but sometimes they just want to be at home with their family, or take a semi-vacation."

Personally, I favor WFH for scores of reasons. That said, I am aware of the pluses (and the minuses that often cannot be clearly delineated) of having people together in locations. A fair amount of the benefits are subtle, and fairly unquantifiable. These factors balance off against often similarly subtle drawbacks. Most of this comes out of human psychology and social traits / elements of social cohesion.

To provide at least a little specificity, some examples that spring to mind:

On the plus side, you have little bits of useful information, quick answers / responses, knowing who knows something like 'where to find X', ... even being able to SEE how people look day-to-day - that colleagues seem healthy and well, and to ask them in person how they are... lots of little cues, small semi-random interactions of these types.

Of course, these can also be minuses to some / to some degree. I.e., the interruptions that come with semi-random interactions, digressions in conversations (of overly substantial length) about current events &/ recreational activities etc., the "talking behind the backs of others" gossip, ...

It's a very mixed bag.

Now, as always, people are constantly changing too. Generations replace generations. And, those who have grown up with text messages and all sorts of other channels for keeping in touch, ... well, it's another factor in how useful / important "physical presence" may or may not be.

Ultimately, though, for me, WFH has been substantially more efficient and productive most of the time. I didn't even have a long commute or some of the other hassles of many, but, cutting out the commute, transitioning between environments time, random interactions and potential for distractions (ADHD being a factor), etc., has been beneficial to all parties. I agree with your points to a very large degree ... the objective advantages to (substantially) reduced "company office presence" are generally quite clear, and are mostly to be contrasted with more subtle human / social factors including the needs of some "managers" to feel like they are "in control" and are "the employers".

The "MBAs" may have won the "round" starting in the 70s and 80s of decimating unions, but, the environment has changed yet again - including in terms of demographics in as basic a way as sheer quantity of workers available (vs. roles to be filled).

I look forward to more power returning to labor, so-to-speak, even as someone who is involved in running several businesses and operations.

I keep thinking about the many recent theories that these "minuses" of office work were essential to the systems to maintaining an illusion of a scarcity in labor and maintaining a controlling grip on employee time inside and outside of work. As things got more automated companies knew that they didn't have 8 hours of work each day for the average employee, so they built fortifications of busy work and moats of "social life". It provided defense structures against labor asking for more time off, longer weekends, shorter work days. (In US at least, the 5-day, 40-hour workweek was never the compromise, the preferred request of Unions at the time that was established was 4-days, 20-hours which more closely resembled useful productive hours and provided better family time/family planning. The hoped-for compromise was 5-days/30-hours or 5-days/35-hours and the hard won 5-days/40-hours was the bare minimum they asked for. 5-days/40-hours is the bar line for "human exhaustion".)

Of course, in no economy would any company admit that they were concerned about being "Too Productive" nor would any MBA program overtly have courses like "How to Sabotage Productivity and Get Away With It".

But there's so many little things built up in the systems and norms and practices and rituals of "office culture" that seem to only exist to waste time, to give the appearance of work without the productive essence of it. These seem like "bugs" in the system, but they are so ubiquitous it is hard not to wonder if these didn't become accidental "features" somewhere along the line (even if we can't ascribe intent or malice to them) and why they became so ubiquitous. Especially in a time like this when so many companies seem so desperate to return to that old known to be buggy status quo. Especially in a time when many of those same companies seem adamant that the impossible and weird choice is between "layoffs" or "return to office work" or "iteratively both until 'morale improves'".

I think it's great if everyone can work where they prefer. I miss the days when I could see my colleagues in person in the office. But on days when I work from home, I can totally see why they prefer it.

I do think that newer employees can benefit from being in an office with experienced team members. However, if this is the new way of things, then I suppose they will need to adjust.

I think layoffs would be way better than trying to force out one group of people, but the people at the top don't care about what's good for the company - they care about themselves.

C'est la vie.

Previously, large tech companies were interested in hoarding employees to slow competition.

Now, that is no longer a necessary strategy as the environment has changed and smaller startups have many other headwinds (difficult to raise $, etc).

So as the previous strategy is unwound there will be more pressure on employees and attrition is definitely part of the plan. A side benefit for the companies is less upward pressure of salaries and operational savings.

Businesses fail and are replaced with other businesses all the time, it's part of the normal flow of capitalism. Within a specific community, as businesses come and go, as long as the old one is replaced with a new one then employment opportunities are still around. Eventually something will open up that is a home run and then that store will flourish in the community, which will likely create even MORE employment opportunities and if it's a local store then a lot of that money will stay local in the hands of employees, owners, local government (taxes).

I don't think 100% full time remote is going to work for all cases/all positions, but I am pretty sure that the companies that are going to be above the curve the coming years will figure out the best way to handle a hybrid environment.

"Everyone in/Everyone out" is so cludgy when we've got the tools to customize better, and the ones that do will probably attract more talent. Obviously there are issues when places like FAANG are resistant because they can pay the most and set the tone, but there's enough advantages to getting this right it'll filter in eventually.

Then proceeds to repeat the arguments of one side.

Everyone understands easily how remote is more comfortable for individuals; all the benefits have been repeat times and times providing examples of thousands of individual situation in which being home is better than being in an office. This is example 15768984.

The question that execs are trying to answer is "are we stronger with an in-office team", knowing they will cut themselves from the "ragneses" in the talent market, but looking more attractive to the people who prefer in-office work; or "are we stronger with a distributed team of ragneses", and having other people who prefer presential offices flock to other companies. It looks like the GAFAs (and many other) are choosing the first option and are fine not having access to some remote-only talents. Others are sticking to their remote-first (or remote-only) culture.

Many of the bigger companies seem to go on the same direction; maybe that decision is based on internal data they have gathered showing that office-first teams are more efficient and performant. Or maybe it's based of sheer traditional management backwards reactionary push. If that's the case; we should soon see fully remote companies starting to take the lead in terms of growth, IPO, successful exits etc since they have been able to identify a better collaboration model that yields better results for less costs.

If an employer wants me to return to the office, I'm very direct in communicating the additional cost to them and salary bump for me. My go-to response to any request to return to office is "I require a 40% salary increase or no bueno" and thus far they have backed down.

Back when I was working in the office, I had co-workers who liked to lounge around my desk making small talk, asking questions, and generally trying to be friendly and social, which I understand why they would, but it interrupts my "flow state" and leaves me more disgruntled than anything.

Work is work to me, and I don't care to socialize nor is it critical in my current job. Not hating on others who feel anything to the contrary, it's simply not my cup o' tea.

The benefits of WFH greatly surpass any conceivable benefit of having to return to the office, for me. And with my current employers, I cannot see any benefit of it for them.

Corporatism needs a wakeup call and it's finally receiving just a taste of it. Considering salaries are repressed and have been for more than 20 years, it's the very least of what we, as workers/minions/peasants, deserve (at least in the U.S.)