- Avoid MASSIVE loss of time, and as a result, productivity and happiness to entire society by having people commute. That is time that can never be taken back. The time lost commuting is lost to the individual who's commuting, the company he or she works in, the economy and the society in general. No need to even talk about the cognitive cost that commuting carries.
- Avoid ripping people off from their families, relatives, friends and their entire social support network which exist in the places they were born and grew up in. The cost of this is immeasurable as the loss of this support network involves a lot of costs ranging from detrimental psychological impact to the person to financial costs as the person must replace this support network by paying strangers to fill in those positions ranging from babysitting to care taking. The result is an entire society dumbed-down by xanax to cope. Which directly affects the companies that they work for as lost productivity. But of course, like real estate, there is an industry that profits from this misery - the pharma - and their profit is society's loss.
- Avoid cramming millions into already overcrowded urban centers and creating innumerable problems ranging from social ones to infrastructure. There isnt any megapolis on the planet that solved these problems yet. And there wont be any until we invent something like 'space/time compression' and succeed in cramming more people into a place than what's physically possible.
These should be enough by themselves as benefits as they are massive benefits to everybody involved and the society itself, while many more arguments can be made for remote work.
I do want to thank you however for making my exact point with an arrogant comment illustrating only the beneficial effects on the individual and nothing on the beneficial effects on the organization. It’s all the sweeter coming from an apparent throwaway account.
That’s the point I think you’re missing. It’s not neutral, the point is that RTO benefits the individual less than the organization - hence why people don’t like it.
Nobody has made a good case for RTO benefiting the individual
The organization gets to decide the work environment for its employees. The employee can decide to work for the organization or not. So if you as an employee want to influence the organization’s decision to RTO you better be able to make a case for why its better for the organization. They hold the cards on where you work for them.
(To be fair, I’m pretty well known in the industry I was recruiting for, and presenting an extremely attractive opportunity for those people to work in a way few companies will allow. So maybe I would have gotten just as many star applicants if they had been required to move. But somehow I doubt it.)
On the less positive side for US workers, it also opens the doors to hiring workers from places with lower cost of living. We can hire two engineers in Latam for the cost of one in the US, and three in India.
Reality because of the HN audience is heavy on tech workers, which is one of the few disciplines that can actually and effectively WFH en masse, it’s out of balance to the real world. Add to that we tech folk already tend to believe we are the smartest humans to walk the earth, it makes for a fun combination of lack of real world awareness coupled with arrogance on the subject.