I think this POV is the _opposite_ of selfish! It's advocating for a system in which everyone gets to individually decide for themselves what working environment they want. Instead of the pro-remote or pro-office crowd trying to impose their preferred working environment on the whole industry.

I think it should be employee based not company based. If you're in the office you don't have a real good reason to discriminate against someone working remotely. If you need the person you'll arrange a meeting or call them regardless, how does it work with clients? If they're working remote, do you just decline their business? If you're discriminating against a colleague on that basis, you're actively chosing to do so. If you're subconsciously doing it, you're probably doing it for other factors, which you should be consciously considering and mitigating.

If a company decides to have an in-office culture and policies, that only works if they can decide it per-company not per-employee. If that means you and I don't want to work there as a result, so be it, but IMO we shouldn't be able to decide to work there and to be remote.

Isn't this sort-of happening, just with the differentiation not being among Big Tech but between them and everyone else?

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?

We're doing something in between here at Meta by generally pushing people to choose one or the other but allowing both.

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.

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

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.