goofy_goober

Some people don't even have dining rooms, guaranteed this is some upper-class snob (not that all "upper-class" people are snobs), related to one, or they were commissioned to write this piece by such a person

If they have non-negligible amounts of office space then staffing said office space to a certain level will end up in the local government granting some tax breaks to the company (for that property and possibly for other things).

Companies that were remote before COVID-19 anyway are not suddenly realizing that remote work doesn't work (because it does work), so they are staying remote. They had no offices and aren't getting any so there is no incentive to bring people into an office.

Companies that weren't remote before COVID-19 are usually locked into long term leases, and conveniently enough, these are the same companies extolling the "benefits" of in-office work and the "downsides" of remote work that (also very conveniently) only they have observed.

This all boils down to whether or not the company has a significant amount of skin in the game with regard to office space.

Heavily disagree with that first part; I have never worked at a company where the juniors learned by watching a senior do his job over his shoulder. They learned by absorbing information over time, doing work, going through code reviews, looking at architecture diagrams, etc. Anything else was done mostly over screen sharing even before COVID.

The same is the case at my current company, and the new juniors have had zero troubles with learning. Why? Because all of that can be done remotely.

You only need to learn by watching if you are engaging in the physical world, and software itself is not physical at all, so there is never a reason to do anything in "real life" unless your software happens to be operating a robot or other physical device of some kind. There are endless wonderful cheap or free tools to enable everything that was previously in the physical world to be done remotely now, and if a company and it's employees can't use them right then it is a mix of organizational and personal failings.

Sometimes I just leave people on read for a bit because I have more important things to be dealing with. This happens to me too sometimes with people leaving me on read,and I understand because there is almost always something more important than whatever someone is messaging about. If it were important, they would have told me explicitly or sent a meeting request.

I sincerely doubt everything you were asking this guy was very important, so perhaps you need to learn how to handle more of your own issues and ask more people for help other than that one guy. It is not that guy's job to do your job; it is your job to do your job.

This point is moot, because those people would be out of office on PTO dealing with those contractors anyway. At least they can hop in and out of the meetings when working remotely, which is an upgrade from them not even being there to be honest. If tools like Outlook or Google Calendar are not enough to help someone schedule meetings without a struggle, that is a personal failure.

Let us not forget DuckDuckGo, also a successful fully remote company (and it was that way before COVID-19). MatterMost as well.

I am sure there are plenty of others

An interesting development as cloud services become increasingly more important (if they aren't critical already for businesses looking to get big) would be cloud services providers structured as mutual companies, like we see in some insurance and financial services companies (Vanguard, State Farm, etc).

This would create a fiduciary duty to not soak the customer for everything they've got (no more sky-high public internet egress charges!), but also a structure where the customers of the company are the company's legal owners, so both workers and external customers could technically own a piece of the means of production if they use the services for their hobby projects or business.

I would not be surprised if this comes to exist in the future as people want downward pressure on public cloud prices, and it would be an interesting development seeing legal ownership of "the means of production" (public cloud infrastructure) and earnings from it titled to anyone who uses it.

BTC isn't even a good comparison in this case. We can talk about its intentions endlessly, but the fact of the matter is that you can buy some actually useful stuff with it at the end of the day (pornography, VPN services, domain names, computer and electrical equipment from NewEgg, etc), pay state taxes with it in Colorado (and taxes in the Swiss canton of Zug), and it has even gained legal tender status in some countries.

Generative AI and stuff like that will be much easier to judge the success or failure of. If we are ripping our hair out when contacting customer support 15 years from now (roughly the amount of time Bitcoin has existed), generative AI (I assume that's what you're talking about) for the purposes of customer support is a failure. Beyond that, sophisticated generative AI is the digital equivalent of discovering nuclear fission: it destroys online human discourse and pollutes the areas it infects with artificial garbage (fallout). I know I'm not the only one who's sick of seeing DALL-E stuff on Instagram and DeviantArt, and seeing stuff obviously written by LLMs in internet comment sections.