Some companies don't have the choice. If you need people to come in and operate machines, do manufacturing, care for others and similar, then you often need your employees to commute. If you don't need that, why wouldn't you hire the best qualified person, even if that person prefers to live in the Mojave desert?
But if I were to play devil's advocate?
- Because you think the apparently qualified person in the Mojave desert might be a fraudulent person who doesn't exist.
- Because you think the apparently qualified person in the Mojave desert might be interviewing for jobs they intend to quietly outsource, possibly to people worse than themselves and definitely in ways that create security risks.
- Because you think the random overheard conversations and water-cooler factor of in-office work has enough benefits to compensate for nominally lower qualifications.
- Because you think you're not perfect at detecting low-quality work and think remote employees might take the opportunity to slack off in ways they wouldn't in an office.
- Because you think it creates additional security risks by removing the implicit air-gapping of having to physically be in an office to handle sensitive information.
- Because you and your current employees actually like being in-office and having that cultural cohesion, and you don't think you can get it remotely.
...or any number of other reasons.
Like, I get that people like remote work. I do too. But the moralizing of RTO is...just incorrect, I think? There are practical arguments against it (I literally wrote a few thousand words to that effect not long ago - see my most recent HN submission), but that's an entirely different class of objection than the idea that it's just about middle managers wanting to breathe down your neck.
For me it's missed opportunities for business, it's about a better work life balance, reducing stress, improving health, about reducing traffic and the associated pollution and it's about decentralization. As you rightly point out, there will be situations where you absolutely need people to go to an office, or where it will make a difference. These jobs could benefit from less traffic, better service at the edges of working hours, because the work from home people can use the time slots in middle of the day. For those jobs where it makes no difference if you are in an office or would be an improvement not to be, I don't get why more companies aren't just going for it.
Most people are not fraudsters. Probably you will find them from time to time but it's something that's been disproportionately blown-up by the RTO crowd. There were many people like that in the office - they were forced to show up to work but their productivity has always been non-existent. Signing flexible contracts and allowing the company to fire more easily should prevent vast majority of such hires.
There's another weird point about not being able to detect low-quality work. I fail to see a difference between low-quality work in the office versus remotely. If the employer fails to detect it and pays salary, it's the employer's problem either way.
In our data set, the on-paper gap is about 18% (~37k on ~200k) if you just compare remote to non-remote, but given that the remote candidates often live in lower-COL areas, some of that probably comes from COL and not purely value placed on remote work.
The real driver is that ~half of engineers only want remote work, and the vast majority of the remainder aren't in whatever city you're hiring in.