Yep. Current employer is doing the same. Team member goes into the office 3 days a week, and all our calls are now very noisy with other people in the background. There's only two of us in this location so all our team meetings are video calls anyways. What point is there to going back in at all in that situation?!

There’s no real point, not in a physical science way

It’s all contrived political points; contracts, socialized norms the elders in charge refuse to negotiate.

The stubbornness and selfishness of the gerontocracy, to serve the dying and dead is gross. Some kind of mental illness fueled by their huffing leaded gas and growing up in world war/Cold War paranoia made it so they cannot escape the idea life is 24/7 militarized economic production.

Why just elders? I see modern start ups and companies, ran by 30/40yo C-suite mandating return to the office.

This is always funny to hear and I agree.

I have worked remote for almost 20 years.

Just because remote is new to the masses doesn’t mean remote or hybrid is new.

Some companies started in person.

They are only so efficient in person let alone remote

Elders here I think means “the kind of people who care more about personal status than any actual value to the company”, so that means most C-suite asses.

They learned it from somewhere.

I think a lot of it has to do with justifying real estate holding, which have likely fallen significantly in value since the pandemic, as remote work had increased. Selling at the worst time is likely out of the question, so they try to make it worth holding on to.

Even before the pandemic, I went into the office mostly to work alone at my desk or go into a conference room alone to zoom with someone in another office.

The only benefit I got out of the office was lunches and hallway conversations, which do have some value to be fair.

The place I work did RTO so I spend all day talking to people across the county and exactly 0 people in office. The main coworker I work with is outside DC and we spend a portion of the day on the phone together. Same as before.

This. If employers are asking employees to sacrifice commute and residence flexibility, the least they can do is also sacrifice hiring and team composition flexibility, so that you actually reap the benefits of in-person collaboration.

Our company has two major locations, with redundant datacenters at each site. The colleagues I work with the most are at the other site, so going into the office does me no good. Now TPTB might decide to shut down the other datacenter (BC/DR be damned), but that's a good five years away.

You lost me with your last sentence.

TPTB = The Powers That Be BC = Business Continuity DR = Disaster Recovery