My company gave us 3 months notice and said 100% RTO in January 2026. I warned them this was a dealbreaker for me. They said sorry, no exceptions. In January I submitted my two weeks notice, citing RTO. They accepted my resignation letter and then called me a few hours later saying they could make an exception. Now I'm back to 100% remote.
I wouldn't consider myself to be an irreplaceable superstar employee, but they folded almost immediately. Not sure what the point of this dance was.
Most orders are issued assuming compliance, or they'd be more considered (and less of them) or costly to enforce. To say there's "no exception" it's to say "we've done NO analysis whatsoever to understand if there should be any exception so, we'll cross that bridge later".
You did well, because someone with actual some skin in the game considered you irreplaceable at that moment.
It's to reduce dance partners. Most people won't push back against "no exceptions", so they greatly reduce the number of exceptions they have to consider just by saying it.
The article has so many "it's this, not that" contradictions – I counted seven! – that I seriously consider it to be written with a lot of assistance from LLMs.
One thing not mentioned in the article is that now that many software engineers are back to their offices, we get the regular fall / spring viral infections spreading out between employees who feel obliged to go to the office even if they have mild cold symptoms. If RTO is about productivity, I wonder if anyone has accounted the productivity drop caused by viruses in workspace.
The data here matches what I've seen firsthand. Working remote I get roughly 30% more actual work done, mostly because deep focus is way easier to protect. The productivity argument for RTO always felt backwards to me.
IMHO, the majority of companies have run out of high-value ideas to achieve growth. Having nowhere else to turn, executive leadership is clutching at straws and mandating RTO and similar "initiatives". These leaders think it's a productivity problem, while lack of strategy is the real culprit.
I suspect there's a selection bias from poorly run companies using RTO to cut headcount. Now they can have layoffs and put a positive spin on it with AI.
This is interesting because it does not jibe at all with the people I know and how productive they are. The friends I know working big tech hybrid jobs work maybe 25 hours in a good week, whereas the friends I know in office 4/5 days a week are easily at double that. I'd imagine there are some confounding variables here. I wonder if a lot of those hybrid companies driving high revenue growth are just profit machines that don't really rely on employees being productive to grow (i.e. Google). Either way surprising findings to me!
> The friends I know working big tech hybrid jobs work maybe 25 hours in a good week, whereas the friends I know in office 4/5 days a week are easily at double that.
But are they actually more productive, or are they just spending additional hours "looking busy"?
When I worked in office I "worked" 40 hours/week because I had to. Most of that wasn't actually work, maybe about 20-30 hours of actual work, sometimes less. Working from home I have no pressure to pretend to work, there's no "butt-in-chair" requirements. I get slightly more done from home, and exchange I don't have to waste 10-15 hours/week at my desk for no reason other than to make some manager feel good about having butts in chairs.
No, not work, just hey how ya doin, and then someone brings coffee, then there’s a quick gab about the game, then a half baked question before a little catchup about that show. 2-4x salaries and minutes being burnt in small untracked chunks.
I think you may be confusing work with "work". It's easy to find yourself spending 40 hours in an office and accomplishing 6 hours of actual work, and conversely it's easy to spend 25 hours at home and do 20 hours of actual work.
This obviously depends on what the work is. People whose job is to focus on building things for hours at a time have very different optimal work environment from people who meet with and coordinate other people in short bursts. So no one-size-fits-all top-down policy can be effective; local flexibility is required.
> The friends I know working big tech hybrid jobs work maybe 25 hours in a good week, whereas the friends I know in office 4/5 days a week are easily at double that.
If someone is actually working 8 solid hours every day 5 days a week on office work, I would expect they are neurodivergent in some way. Even in college when you were still young, people couldn't sustain that level of focused intensity for very much more than maybe a week ahead of an exam, often with the help of adderall.
You claim a significant amount of qualitative data here; how did you measure it? Sounds like some WAGs. Confounding variables don't matter when the "data" is guesswork.
Same question applies at home. Are you working, or just logged in to Slack/Teams (or whatever) and available if it pings?
I work from home quite a bit, but I'm expected to be available and working during business hours. So other than not commuting to the office, it's not a huge difference.
If you are working from home, you are judged solely by your productivity. If you work in an office, there is productivity and there is also attendance. Someone can show up every day and appear to be working hard, yet get nothing done. You just can't do that working from home (not for very long anyways).
For most professionals, attendance shouldn't really matter. You're not creating value by merely being present. There are exceptions - customer service for example - but even in those cases being just logged into Slack/Teams is perfectly cromulent.
Any analysis that frames this as a productivity or talent-attraction issue is flawed from the start because that was never the point and still isn't.
The point of RTO mandates is to suppress wages. It's to get people to quit rather than having to lay them off. It's part of the permanent layoffs culture we're now in where every year 5-10% of the workers at a company will be laid off. Remaining workers will do more labor for the same money and won't be asking for raises because they're thankful to still have a job. And someone quitting is much cheaper than paying them severance.
Tech workers in particular saw massive wage growth in the 2010s due to tight supply. Companies are now in the business of clawing back thoat wage growth. It's why all these big tech companies started RTO mandates and layoffs at about the exact same time. It's a wink-and-nod collusion rather than overt collusion. We're a long way from the times when Google just hired all the engineers to deny them to their competitors.
None of this is necessary. All of these companies are still insanely profitable. But profits have to keep growing and ultimately that comes down to cutting costs. There's nothing else you can do.
Employers don't want you to be financially secure. They want you drowning in debt with declining real wages because then you're absolutely showing up to work and putting up with whatever they want.
This is the culmination of short-term-profit thinking, and I'm shocked people like YC's @paulgraham support RTO.
What's the long term game plan? It's like hotels and taxis resisting uber and airbnb. there will always be the old way of doing things, but people don't want to work from the office unless they have to. You've become the disruptee instead of the disruptor at that point.
I've been both productive and unproductive while WFH as well as in the office. In either case it was a product of managerial decisions.
I think they expected people to "just be productive" on their own, and then they install surveillance crap on their devices, measure bullshit and deduce RTO isn't needed.
The older way of defining a couple of performance indicator metrics and using that to mange people no longer works, RTO or not. So now, most managers have resorted to a "vibes-based" management technique, where the numbers can be made to mean whatever you want them to mean, so long as the vibe feels right.
So if two people are just as unproductive, but you turn on one of their camera and see a person working from their bed in their pajamas, the vibe will such, so RTO makes sense in their mind.
I don't think RTO will backfire any time too soon, but in the long term, the US has bigger problems in terms a decline as a nation. But if we overcome that somehow, there really is only one game in town: competition.
Can your company be competitive while implementing RTO? Your competition that figures out how to make their people happy and WFH will beat you. not only that, they'll pay their people less money for that privilege.
Technology infrastructure is still a growing thing in most of the world, but i suspect in a decade or so, WFH would be ideal for most humans in the world.
I also speculate that remote-controlled automated things will become very popular. not just waymo support driving the care remotely as needed, but even things like janitors and manual labor jobs could be done via robots controlled remotely.
For office work, it requires a different style of management, in a generation the older people too used to office work will be out of the workforce, but that transition will mean companies with a younger management workforce (who gets paid a lot less typically) will have a competitive advantage.
Teams not performing well with WFH -- with a millennial or younger manager would be a real shocker to me.
Good office with a short walkable or bike able commute is my preference.
I've never had "good" plus that kind of commute. I've only had one of those at a time, and about half the time, neither.
So skipping the commute—and having a private bathroom, and all my own food available for lunch without packing, and fewer infections per year, and being able to deal with kid-emergencies with far less disruption to my work day et c—easily wins.
But yes I prefer a good office and a nice, active commute. I'm on track to literally never have that combo together ever in my life, but it'd be my favorite way to work.
Optional hybrid work is kind of the optimal setup for me IMO. I go in to the office (often carpooling) once a week (skipping occasionally) with a few folks I work with who live locally, and I work remotely the rest of the time. It keeps me from feeling too isolated and makes the work I do feel more tangible while still being flexible and allowing me to work from home when I want to.
RTO is about controlling labor, nothing else. Everything else is a smoke screen. Ask yourself the following questions and you'll understand what happened:
- why did RTO happen seemingly right after salaries jumped and labor became scarce?
- why did RTO happen virtually in lockstep across all of white collar employment?
- why did RTO happen despite no evidence that productivity had anything to do with it? (and in fact, lots of evidence that it made employees more productive!)
- why did RTO happen at the same time that critical equity/diversity viewpoints were increasingly being discussed at work?
- why did RTO happen at the same time that outsourcing ramped up? If businesses are so opposed to remote work, why are they outsourcing so aggressively?
It's not about AI. It's not about CRE. It's not about "synergy" in person. It's about disciplining labor. Businesses will happily tank productivity to prevent the power balance from tipping towards the employee.
In that 2020-2023 period, people started talking seriously about how much value they bring to the table. They started making demands of their employers (especially around diversity, equity, inclusion). They started interviewing at multiple places, seeing their worth, demanding more, and giving only as much effort as strictly required to get the job done. The sudden, overnight, incredibly strong reaction to this period, the hard right turn, that is the whip cracking down on labor.
When you also consider the nation as you know, a nation, and not a rat race of individual interest, the best thing the government could do is encourage working from home. Break the hell up these "hubs" of white collar industry and let's disperse this work and compensation across the country. I'm betting we would see quite a lot more growth anyhow if these jobs were distributed across the country vs just concentrated in like sf/nyc/boston. like there are limits to how much growth little old south san fransisco can sustain. there are finite amount of office space. only finite amount of housing accomodations in the bay area (forgetting for a moment the rampant NIMBYism).
And what else is that everyone loses in this present situation. People in the job hub in SF also lose, because they are operating in this fundamentally broken local economy, way too enriched for high income workers making their home cost 2.5m and their compensation actually pretty poor as far as what it can get in the local economy. West Atherton would be a 400k median home neighborhood in most of the midwest. Literally same floorplans, lot sizes, fit and finish. Same country club down the road. Same private school up the road. Boutique shopping and steak dinners still available.
WFH aside. Any company that hits a certain size, starts to be broken up into multiple offices, buildings, floors, etc. and becomes de-facto remote. Meetings all become phone calls. and the team itself is mostly co-located. I am always a big confused at that point, why have a 20k person campus and 2 10k person campuses. Why not have 40 1k campuses? They are all effectively remote anyways.
On our end COVID also turned every single meeting into a videoconference anyhow, because that is how IT set up the AV inputs for our conference rooms for slideshows. No more direct AV input, ipad in every room now and you start a video conference on it, join with your laptop and share your screen. Most of the time some people had to join in remote anyhow for various reasons. Still, pretty ironic using teleconference software to sit in the same room. 95% the way there, just got to get out of the building lease.
I work for a multinational corporation and I was remote also before the pandemic. It is very smooth and everybody's happy. Once a year we meet in person in a larger group, it if an interesting experience, and then everybody goes back home and continue working as usual. When I see people bending over backwards and doing strange things out of distrust and the desire to control their employees and make their life miserable for no real reason, I feel really sorry, it makes zero sense to me.
Really? Genuine question - I'd like to move there.
Keep in mind "year round perfect weather" does include summers that aren't preposterously hot.
I've found that everywhere else, certainly in the midwest, where I live, either gets too hot in summer or too cold in winter (or is extremely remote, i.e. Hawaii).
> I've found that everywhere else, certainly in the midwest, where I live, either gets too hot in summer or too cold in winter
Much of the midwest gets both. Stifling humidity and temps often in the 90s, sometimes topping 100, for (effectively) a horrid 5- to 6-month-long summer. "Arctic blasts" in the Winter for sustained highs under 10 for days on end, lots of ice storms (and, if you do get a real, good snow, nowhere to ski anyway). 3 months total shared between Spring and Fall when the weather doesn't suck.
> why did RTO happen virtually in lockstep across all of white collar employment?
This makes sense when you consider that all of these big companies are run by leaders who talk in similar networks and listen to the same consultants (McKinsey, BCG, etc). I know someone who is going through a McKinsey run structural re-org, that is identical to one they ran (and failed horribly) at a company I was in 8 years ago.
> why did RTO happen at the same time that critical equity/diversity viewpoints were increasingly being discussed at work?
There was a decent lag between the peak of equity nonsense and RTO, plus the evidence is that DEI/Equity/etc hurt workers and disrupt organizing tremendously.
> why did RTO happen despite no evidence that productivity had anything to do with it? (and in fact, lots of evidence that it made employees more productive!)
Company I was went from 1 quarter talking about the increases in productivity WFH brought to the next quarter town hall talking about RTO for the culture and productivity.
> This makes sense when you consider that all of these big companies are run by leaders who talk in similar networks and listen to the same consultants (McKinsey, BCG, etc
Yes, it certainly does! I'm sure they also talk to Pinkerton :)
> decent lag between the peak of equity nonsense and RTO
Just about the amount of time it would take for management to (1) realize what was happening and what it meant for their power over labor; and (2) align on a policy.
> Company I was went from 1 quarter talking about the increases in productivity WFH brought to the next quarter town hall talking about RTO for the culture and productivity.
Yes, exactly. That's how you know anything about "productivity" is all a load of shit.
Correct. Workers were starting to get power, people had seen through the fog at what was actually happening and were acting out against it. Agency is a direct threat to the owner class.
It is amazing how much the constraints of working in the office shackle people to positions or locations. So many people working below their worth due to spouses ability to get a job in some location for example. Maybe you do land a job in your line of work in this little corner of the earth where your spouses jobs are more a plenty. Now you have to hold on for dear life to this company, do whatever the hell they ask of you and take whatever offer they give you because you have no leverage at all.
The fact that people completely miss this fact and just go "well I like talking to people in person" I mean at a certain point belies ignorance that borders on stupidity with how hard people cling to the "ability to talk to people in the hallway" against even just the obvious negative externalities like the commute and limited home choices. No one ever talks about this career side and juggling a two body problem.
I would say that there was also a deliberate push to save the value of commercial real estate. If it were purely about management vs labor, letting people work from home was a great way to offer an attractive benefit for free (or even while saving money) and it made it easy to hire from lower cost of living areas. Wages were going up regardless because of high inflation rates, remote work if anything was tempering that. I'm sure there were some asshole bosses who just missed their petty kingdoms, but it would be too easy for those who could tolerate the remote work situation to gain an advantage. There had to be a smaller group, such as those heavily invested in real estate, that had an overwhelming incentive for demanding RTO and the pull to force their will on everyone at the same time.
I can't speak to your sector, but from the perspective in my management role (in law) the explanation is quite simple: managing remote workers is more difficult and less pleasant than managing workers in the office. I actually hate it. And even granting that remote and in-office workers are "productive" in the sense that they bill hours (though not even this seems true in my anecdotal experience), we find that people with less in-office time tend to have qualitatively worse performance. At least in my field, being in the office, spending time with your co-workers, and getting to know them has value.
Of course, other things have value too. Often, our folks who prefer to work from home do so because they have small children who they want to spend time with, more fully share parental responsibilities with their partner, etc. I'm glad that they have the opportunity to do that, but it does generally seem to come at some professional cost.
>we find that people with less in-office time tend to have qualitatively worse performance. At least in my field, being in the office, spending time with your co-workers, and getting to know them has value.
I think you are confounded by the fact your most overeager overachievers are going to return to office no matter what.
I'm not persuaded that's the only thing going on here, but I'm sure that is part of it. Nonetheless, I think this is why many employers pushed for RTO.
I think RTO/WFH also kind of hits on a fundamental cultural divide that is beginning to emerge in our society. There is idea of who are we working for that I think people are starting to reckon with: in support of ourselves or in support of someone else, maybe even to the point of detriment to ourselves.
The arguments for and against fall along these lines. For RTO: in favor of the company over the self. It is more "productive" by some invented measure to work in the office, so it is the correct choice damned any other factor. A total trump card to those with this logic, like arguing the sky is blue.
And then what is the for WFH argument but the following: in favor of the self over the company. Perhaps if one pushed as hard as they could, they could get more done. They could sacrifice their sleep. They could grey their hair, increase cortisol, have an early heart attack and die. But in that time, they'd get a whole lot more done for the company certainly. WFH argues that affordances toward the employee ought to be made and even favored. Things like having choice in where one might live, not being saddled with a commute costly in time or money or both, being able to parallelize tasks such as taking the two minutes to start the laundry machine then returning to the desk, being able to see pets and loved ones for more than a few fleeting hours at the end of the day, better food, the list of benefits pretty much endless and also bespoke to the worker in question.
To be pro RTO, you have to be able to sacrifice the self like an ascetic, to deny all these tradeoffs and to grant the company control over you, your family and life outside of work (as where you live and how your family has to then live is a factor with RTO), all to benefit the company over yourself. The company that will never show you loyalty, that will use the same logic you are using to return to work to one day fire you.
Among my peers, on the younger side, no one really likes working in the office at all. They all are stuck with it and would desperately like to not work in the office. I expect over time, RTO will die as the generations that are culturally inclined to put the company over themselves retire from the workforce.
I think this is right. Of course, the trade-off has always been there for all to see between "work" and "life," but greater ability to WFH has rightly cause people to reassess the sacrifices they are willing to make for their careers. I hope I've been clear that, while I think there are real reasons RTO is valuable, they are not necessarily decisive at every margin.
Of course, another side of this is that some people like their workplaces and like to social aspect of going into the office. Not everyone has to, of course, but it also takes a certain critical mass of people in the office in order for anyone to get those benefits. So, on a certain level, this is also just about competing preferences.
Get better or quit then, I don't give a shit about managers, do your job and let the dozens of people you manage live their fucking lives, we're not here to please you or make your job easier
> we're not here to please you or make your job easier
I don't mean to be a jerk but ... if you are one of the people I manage, you literally are employed (at least in part) to make my job easier. That's not the only thing that matters -- which is why we (like many employers) do still allow some remote work. But making management more difficult is absolutely an impact that a rational workplace would take into account.
Your employees are there to make your life easier? As their manager? Do you demand they make you coffee? Rub your feet?
I've been doing this for decades, and I've never seen that attitude work with any 'leader.' I'd hate to work for you. Ever hear of servant leadership? Or hear the line "My job is to clear the runway for you"
Managers are cost centers, 'your' employees are what keep you employed, give them the respect they deserve.
That's not at all what I mean. What I mean is that I am responsible for the output of my team. If someone I am supervising does a bad job, is hard to communicate with, etc. it means that one way or another I have to do more work, which reduces the total output of my team. It can also lead to inferior service, angry clients, adverse outcomes, etc.
It’s the exact opposite, managers are employed to make employees job easier. Employees get the jobs done, managers are there to coordinate that work, remove blockers, and enable workers.
The relationship is reciprocal. I lay the tracks so my supervisees can do their job (and, indeed, have a job to do!). They help me produce far more work for clients than I ever could myself.
Though the truth is probably just that we're not seeing eye-to-eye because we're communicating through an imperfect medium that doesn't encourage a nuanced discussion.
I have the opposite experience (in tech at small or medium companies). Managing remote workers is much easier since outcomes (and outputs) are necessarily more visible.
Before working remotely (pre-2019) when managing teams in person, I found myself necessarily having discussions to get synced with folks. At my most recent role (and previous remote first roles), team members were excellent at providing updates on Github issues (the sources of truth for work items). Of course, this required buy in at all levels and trickling company objectives down through the program(s) and linking work items to OKRs etc. It was very obvious when folks weren't hitting objectives and easy to gather detailed written evidence of this.
And regarding getting to know folks. Most recent offsite was at a villa in Croatia where I got to both meet my team members and ended up getting to know them like friends. Now that I think about it this has happened at previous companies as well during remote offsites.
I wonder if it's field-specific. Sounds like there are multiple anecdotes across a wide distribution of outcomes.
It's worse in the sense that a more senior person has to spend more time fixing it. I guess that's an opportunity in the sense that it allows a firm to bill more hours, but there is generally a reason we wanted that more junior person to do the work originally. (Client cost sensitivity, teal workloads, training, etc.)
But this is blatantly obvious to everyone, I'm not sure this aspect is a taboo in official conversation. People wanted WFH long before the pandemic, but it was a privilege of a few high bosses, the rest had to be packed in cubicles or open-plan offices (not sure which is worse). Then the pandemic came and it turned out most people can work remotely without abusing it. But the management never wanted to give the employees that freedom, it was just a question of time.
Lockstep? Once the major company did it, it was easy for others to follow. No conspiracy here.
You are right, it is about controlling labor, watching the workforce, justifying the office expense. But I think a lot of your questions are just coincidental.
As much as I enjoy working from home (been doing it for most of the last two decades) there are some advantageous to new hires working in the office.
For me it's about choice. Forcing either isn't necessarily good, but why not just allow people to choose?
I sometimes go into the office, but maybe only once or twice per month. But I am allowed that choice, I can work from my house, any of the company's locations, a cafe, or anywhere else I feel like it on any given day.
I value the freedom and flexibility. I'd be miserable being told "You must be in the office" and I'd also equally hate to be told "you must work from a desk in your house only"
I like a full service espresso bar at the office. If I ask my employer for that, guess what they'll say? Fuck you, you're here to work. And I have to take it. I'm sure you can guess why.
Sounds like you are taking 80 minutes away from your family every day. I would not be so proud of that. And you'll likely regret it on your deathbed. #1 regret is not enough time with fanmily.
Most people do need time to shift focus from and to work. You can do groceries during that time, or administrative work like sending letters or going to the citizens office... .
Somewhere I empathize with all the laid off coders and coders worried about the future. I'm not one myself but I know a lot of them, and I never know what to say. The nth refrain of "unionize" doesn't really help when the power to do it is in freefall.
I think these conspiracy theories about RTO are really unhelpful and actually harmful to the viability of hybrid work arrangements.
Please work in a day as a oil rig technician or a nurse. "I should be able to work anywhere and my employer must accommodate me" is an extremely privileged and elitist view of thinking.
A few of your notes are actually just wrong as well. Salaries jumped during covid due to over-hiring and software booming. "Productivity" is not a number, but a business-by-business decision. The vast, vast majority of people don't want politics at work, and it's exclusively the viewpoint of the laptop class who demand that stuff. (Again, people who work toiling jobs for 10 hours a day don't create petitions and demands like that)
At the end of the day, if you don't want to work in an office, you don't have to. But, believe it or not, many many people, including young people, like the office environment.
>Please work in a day as a oil rig technician or a nurse. "I should be able to work anywhere and my employer must accommodate me" is an extremely privileged and elitist view of thinking.
To highlight just how stupid this is, here it is from another angle:
"I have to work on site so everyone else must work on site"
What is the logical conclusion here? That the workforce should be equal in every sense? Come on
Do you understand how rig work or nursing is? These are very flexible jobs. There is demand for nursing everywhere. You can be a travel nurse and go find work in HI or CA or Las Vegas right now if you want. Temp agencies that place you so you don't even need to really hunt either.
Rig work it is weeks on weeks off sort of deal where you then get off that rig back to, quite literally, anywhere in the world where you live otherwise. You could live in the middle of the Amazon rainforest and make six figures a year on a rig in the middle of the ocean (well, maybe US jurisdiction is preferred from a tax perspective for employer payroll).
I'm not sure I understand the point. The vast, vast majority of jobs simply cannot be done remotely. So I have little patience for the entitlement of people thinking they "deserve" it or yell about conspiracy theories about why it is going away.
There is a reason YC is in person. There is a reason why the top companies are in person.
What say you to the fact that there are companies that work remote today and are competitive and doing fine? Anomalous? Or maybe your prior assumptions need adjustment?
Why can't they be? Chances are in 1989, most companies weren't set up to work well with computers either. 5 years later everyone had a desktop an email account.
To expand upon a particular point; near as I understand WFH, or rather more broadly _not_ "RTO" (ie. endure office bound work) has a strong backbone of people wanting to maximise home/work life balance.
The point about rig work, FIFO mine work, nursing (again, FIFO) et al is these are jobs that are a priority choiice for many that are living that somewhat off-grid lives with a big home-life component dream .. and have been doing that for many decades now.
I'm over 60, have worked in a majority of countries across the globe (geophysical exploration field work), and have avoided offices like a plague for the entirity of my career - I enjoy 24/7 field work with weeks off at home to work projects there or to code / build for various projects from home.
We've even built up resource and energy intelligence services and sold them on to FinTech companies that way.
And met and talked to many people that way.
So, from some PoV's you chose the worst possible examples of jobs that supposedly tie people to an office grind.
You say entitlement, but the reality is you have sour grapes about people who can have a flexible work arrangement. Some people pick jobs that are not able to be flexible, that’s a choice. Pick better. People work to live, not live to work, they should not tolerate how they should have to work because some manager or c-level is lucky to be in their position of power.
The UK provides by law the ability to seek and obtain flexible working arrangements on day one of a job [1]. Certainly, the US is behind as it always is, but it will catch up eventually, if only because of structural demographics and total fertility rate declines across the developed world creating perpetual labor shortages in various verticals. We’re just arguing window of time.
YC isn’t a good example, they simply sell lottery tickets to founders and early investors as a confidence play. You say top companies, but that’s an opinion without evidence. According to what metric?
> As of March 2025, approximately 22.8% of U.S. employees worked remotely at least part of the time, equating to about 36 million individuals. This percentage has remained stable between 21% and 23% since early 2024, indicating that remote work has become a consistent component of the workforce.
> What this means: Remote work has stabilized at about one-fifth of the US workforce—this isn't a temporary trend but a permanent shift in how work gets done.
> Approximately 90% of companies plan to maintain or increase remote work options moving forward, indicating a lasting shift despite some return-to-office mandates.
> What this means: The vast majority of companies recognize remote work as a permanent feature—even those mandating office returns are keeping some flexibility.
What's actually really unhelpful and actually harmful to the viability of hybrid work arrangements is RTO.
> "I should be able to work anywhere and my employer must accommodate me" is an extremely privileged and elitist view of thinking.
Nope! You totally missed the point. "You must accomodate me" is a demand, that you can place on your employer, when you have labor power, as an employee. The acceding is what we're talking about here. That is not cultural; it is a matter of market power.
> At the end of the day, if you don't want to work in an office, you don't have to.
What are you talking about? Did you read my post? Yes, I have to! Because of RTO!
Yes, these are some extreme beliefs in a grand, coordinated conspiracy.
As if a bunch of people in suits are sitting around a table in an evil villain’s lair shouting “we need more control over our workers” or needing to prop up commercial real estate prices.
RTO is also about forcing people in cities, the cities that have lost their factories to globalisation, because it was and still is cheaper to produce far away without the problems of density and then move things, rather than everyone staying close together. The cities that are losing their offices, their last economic engine, to remote working, and with them, the giant property owners who want everyone renting their buildings, not owning scattered homes and sheds.
Cities that serve the ruling classes as a means of ensuring conformity, because the closer you are to your neighbour, the more the herd effect is felt. Cities that themselves serve as a means of control: you consume food and water that doesn't come from the city itself; control these and the four main arteries, and the city is yours, no questions asked.
I don’t know why they keep bringing “productivity” as the justification, it never was, never will, it’s about power dynamics, remote work shifted a lot of power back to employees, it also provided flexibility career wise. Another big reason why it got attacked quickly is it gave the people a window to escape the rat race and save money, when the employee doesn’t spend xyz on gas everyday, plus relocating outside of the crowded urban areas to cheaper smaller cities, rent/housing went down, landlords and banks had to lobby to end it, plus the government since less taxes are paid now as a result, all efforts made to bring back the status quo. It was fascinating to see how they gaslit the public, I was even talking to an employer before and the manager was trash talking wfh as “woke” and “real men” must grind 9hrs a day at least! Another employer was demanding a full camera on at least 6hrs a day if you wfh, or you are not “productive”.
Back in the 80s or 90s, working in the office or factory was the default and it made sense, no high speed internet, small town so not much commuting, cheap housing, and affordable life, so if the man worked in the office and the wife stayed home, they can live comfortably. That’s not the case now, wfh balanced that and increased the quality of life instead, so you can now stay with your kids saving the cost of daycare etc, while doing exactly the same work you would do at the office.
I will never go back to the office. There are enough jobs around, even if they pay less. Hell, to live a comfortable life I could work at a job that pays 5x less than what I get paid now (not that much), even though I'll have to sacrifice some stuff. But I'll have to sacrifice luxuries, not my time or mental health.
Personally, I see it like this:
Option 1 - at home:
* stay in my comfortable air-conditioned room in my underpants on my comfortable chair at my comfortable desk or bed,
* surrounded by foods and drinks I like (I a minifridge in my room, it's awesome), and being able to quickly put something in the oven,
* picking my nose or scratching my ass wherever I want to,
* going to the bathroom whenever I want to (maybe with the laptop if I have to be available),
* listening to music on headphones or speakers,
* being able to communicate to and pay attention to family and pets for a few minutes here and there (no, this doesn't mean I'll waste my work time walking the dog or talking with people, but it means I can actually take a minute or two break and have an actual life),
* smoking on the balcony whenever I want to (a 4 second trip),
* alternating between lying on my bed or sitting on my chair or standing or running in place or dancing,
* having my breaks in my most comfortable place - home.
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Option 2 - the office:
* wasting time traveling - driving sucks and the public transportation sucks, for different reasons (and no, I won't relocate just to be close to the office, what the actual fuck, I love my house),
* having to look presentable,
* having to make idle boring chit chat with corporate drones who want to socialize,
* sharing a bathroom,
* having to choose between listening to the office background noise or wearing uncomfortable noise-cancelling headphones,
* having my breaks... in the office (and no, the office PlayStation or ping pong tables don't cut it),
* having to prepare food for the next X hours, then having to eat it or reheat it at the office,
* being able to attend to my house in case of an emergency (fire, floods, robbers, family or pet health issues and so on - yes, they absolutely come first),
* being subjected to cameras and other security theater, as if any employee couldn't wreck the company if they actually wanted to.
If you want me in the office, prepare to pay me a lot more. You won't and I understand. It makes no sense.
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As for productivity - I work hard because I feel obligated, because it's my work ethic and because I don't want to cheat or let people down. If I don't like what I'm doing, I quit instead of "quiet quitting" and doing the bare minimum.
It's much, much easier to get "in the zone" at home, to not burn out, to have time for myself (traffic + actual breaks) and to be happy.
Edit - just to sum it up - it's my only (AFAIK) life and I'm not spending 10-11 hours a day on work. That would leave me with 5-6 hours of "me time" and I'd be too tired to enjoy it.
Edit 2 - similarly, I won't put up with bullshit like:
* installing anything on my personal devices (except things like FOSS TOTP 2FA stuff I can control),
* leaving the camera and mic in my work machines intact (we all know how secure stuff is and how much we can trust corporations),
* taking drug tests.
That said, if you're willing to pay me 50 times what I currently make, I might return to the office with a suit, smile under the cameras, take drug tests, sit on my chair all day and discuss the weather with coworkers on the elevator. I'd be happy to do it for 3 or 4 months.
For something to "backfire" you first have to account for why it was done. This article assumes performance and retention are the only considerations. It does not account for things like commercial real estate value, a buesiness's ability to monitor and control its employees, or excuses for layoffs.
> The better path is to raise the bar on management, not badge swipes.
Real estate may play a role, but terrible management practices are also definitely a factor. And if every other company is doing it, it's safe to copy their behaviour and not stick your neck out.
> Should an employer not be able to see what their employees are doing at work?
There's a difference between visibility into work progress and just mass surveillance of all activity. The only metric that actually matters is the delivery of value.
Monitoring isn't an effective way to lead. It only reinforces employees to optimize for "looking busy" rather than being effective. If you have to audit your employees daily actions to know if they are doing their job, you've failed as a manager at defining their role or hiring the right people.
A good manager defines the what and the when, and leaves the how to the professional being paid to do it.
I mean, maybe. But a company that spends all of it's time "surveilling" their employees rather than adding value will go out of business. So I'm not sure what the point really is when people bring this up when talking about WFH. If someone doesn't want to be surveilled at work they can quit, right?
Not really. Workers produce the thing the company sells. Those workers are mostly trapped so they deal with whatever nonsense management is up to. Management, mostly useless, maintains its control and viability by asserting that workers need policing and they're the ones to do it. If the policing is relatively easy with WFH, they'll do that. If it's much harder, or less demonstrative of their fake value, screw that, they'll just pass that burden on to workers with RTO mandates.
By "excuses for layoffs" I suspect what they meant was that there was an pre-existing desire to reduce headcount and RTO was used under the expectation that some percentage of employees would quit voluntarily so that the company can avoid going through the relatively more costly process of laying them off.
Of course the downside of this approach is that the company has less control over which employees leave, which may result in them losing the employees who have the best alternatives.
If you deliver all tasks in a timely manner, is productive and helpful in a team setting, contribute to discussions and initiatives beyond your immediate assignments... What exactly should I monitor? How many minutes per day your butt is in a seat? If you did a school run and woked a bit more after hours to compensate? If you had a headache and took a short nap after lunchtime?
> What do you mean by "monitor and control"? Should an employer not be able to see what their employees are doing at work?
I don't see any reason to get into a discussion about how much an employer should or shouldn't be able to monitor and control their employees. Some businesses are simply more trusting of their employees and allow a great deal of independence, while others aren't. Those that aren't will naturally face greater barriers to monitoring and controlling employees who are working remotely.
> What is an "excuse" for a layoff, exactly?
It's no secret that when the return-to-office movement began, many businesses used it as a means of achieving a headcount reduction. Employees who could not (or would not) return to the office were let go. Parting ways with difficult employees looks much better to investors than layoffs.
- There are some statistical biases in the article, correlation != causation, Simpsons paradox, etc... things like that
- Company will return-to-the-office mandates will soon disappear or adapt as they will lose their competitive advantage, x1.7 is too big of an effect to ignore
What is possible is that work from home benefit companies in the growth phase while office work is more appropriate for companies that are already well established. So many possible explanations.
The usual narrative here is that work from home is just better and that management mandating return to office are control freaks, but I can't believe it is that simple. It wouldn't make economic sense, real estate is expensive, they would save a lot by not having offices, in addition to all the supposed benefits. Personally, I feel that I am really missing something by working 100% remotely, so much happens by the coffee machine and Slack/Teams/GMeet... doesn't replace that. Hybrid work is what I prefer personally. Office time for exchanging and socializing and at-home time for deep thinking and personal flexibility. Personal experience, but it shows that not just extroverts and managers want to go back to the office sometimes, because I am neither, but I still think some office time is good. In fact, I tend to be more of a lone wolf, but even as a lone wolf, I still need to know what to do, and daily calls often don't give the whole picture.
> Company will return-to-the-office mandates will soon disappear or adapt as they will lose their competitive advantage, x1.7 is too big of an effect to ignore
Lol the market magic hand. At that point it's more of a religious belief than a scientific fact.
My company gave us 3 months notice and said 100% RTO in January 2026. I warned them this was a dealbreaker for me. They said sorry, no exceptions. In January I submitted my two weeks notice, citing RTO. They accepted my resignation letter and then called me a few hours later saying they could make an exception. Now I'm back to 100% remote.
I wouldn't consider myself to be an irreplaceable superstar employee, but they folded almost immediately. Not sure what the point of this dance was.
Most orders are issued assuming compliance, or they'd be more considered (and less of them) or costly to enforce. To say there's "no exception" it's to say "we've done NO analysis whatsoever to understand if there should be any exception so, we'll cross that bridge later".
You did well, because someone with actual some skin in the game considered you irreplaceable at that moment.
> Not sure what the point of this dance was.
It's to reduce dance partners. Most people won't push back against "no exceptions", so they greatly reduce the number of exceptions they have to consider just by saying it.
The article has so many "it's this, not that" contradictions – I counted seven! – that I seriously consider it to be written with a lot of assistance from LLMs.
One thing not mentioned in the article is that now that many software engineers are back to their offices, we get the regular fall / spring viral infections spreading out between employees who feel obliged to go to the office even if they have mild cold symptoms. If RTO is about productivity, I wonder if anyone has accounted the productivity drop caused by viruses in workspace.
Not great in productivity terms, no:
- https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10269830/
- https://www.covermagazine.co.uk/news/2344756/open-plan-offic...
The data here matches what I've seen firsthand. Working remote I get roughly 30% more actual work done, mostly because deep focus is way easier to protect. The productivity argument for RTO always felt backwards to me.
If RTO sacrifices a 1.7x revenue growth, where's the consequence for malfeasance or examples of the buck stopping with shareholders?
If I owned a share of these orgs, I wouldnt want revenue left on the table because some VP had an attachment problem.
IMHO, the majority of companies have run out of high-value ideas to achieve growth. Having nowhere else to turn, executive leadership is clutching at straws and mandating RTO and similar "initiatives". These leaders think it's a productivity problem, while lack of strategy is the real culprit.
I suspect there's a selection bias from poorly run companies using RTO to cut headcount. Now they can have layoffs and put a positive spin on it with AI.
This is interesting because it does not jibe at all with the people I know and how productive they are. The friends I know working big tech hybrid jobs work maybe 25 hours in a good week, whereas the friends I know in office 4/5 days a week are easily at double that. I'd imagine there are some confounding variables here. I wonder if a lot of those hybrid companies driving high revenue growth are just profit machines that don't really rely on employees being productive to grow (i.e. Google). Either way surprising findings to me!
> The friends I know working big tech hybrid jobs work maybe 25 hours in a good week, whereas the friends I know in office 4/5 days a week are easily at double that.
But are they actually more productive, or are they just spending additional hours "looking busy"?
When I worked in office I "worked" 40 hours/week because I had to. Most of that wasn't actually work, maybe about 20-30 hours of actual work, sometimes less. Working from home I have no pressure to pretend to work, there's no "butt-in-chair" requirements. I get slightly more done from home, and exchange I don't have to waste 10-15 hours/week at my desk for no reason other than to make some manager feel good about having butts in chairs.
And what about frequent chats with work friends?
No, not work, just hey how ya doin, and then someone brings coffee, then there’s a quick gab about the game, then a half baked question before a little catchup about that show. 2-4x salaries and minutes being burnt in small untracked chunks.
Hours clocked and hours worked are not the same.
Do they do more work by working longer hours? People often do not. Output is not the same thing as hours worked.
Productivity is output per hour, so its also possible for output to fall and productivity to rise. This will be the usual case with fewer hours.
I think you may be confusing work with "work". It's easy to find yourself spending 40 hours in an office and accomplishing 6 hours of actual work, and conversely it's easy to spend 25 hours at home and do 20 hours of actual work.
This obviously depends on what the work is. People whose job is to focus on building things for hours at a time have very different optimal work environment from people who meet with and coordinate other people in short bursts. So no one-size-fits-all top-down policy can be effective; local flexibility is required.
> The friends I know working big tech hybrid jobs work maybe 25 hours in a good week, whereas the friends I know in office 4/5 days a week are easily at double that.
Hours "worked" != productivity.
If someone is actually working 8 solid hours every day 5 days a week on office work, I would expect they are neurodivergent in some way. Even in college when you were still young, people couldn't sustain that level of focused intensity for very much more than maybe a week ahead of an exam, often with the help of adderall.
> don't really rely on employees being productive to grow (i.e. Google)
How do you think Google grows? They invented PageRank and have been on a set trajectory since?
Google didn't catch up to and surpass OpenAI by doing nothing.
That is a lot of thoughts and feelings. There is plenty of research you can read before throwing out opinions.
You claim a significant amount of qualitative data here; how did you measure it? Sounds like some WAGs. Confounding variables don't matter when the "data" is guesswork.
Do they work or is that just their at the office?
Same question applies at home. Are you working, or just logged in to Slack/Teams (or whatever) and available if it pings?
I work from home quite a bit, but I'm expected to be available and working during business hours. So other than not commuting to the office, it's not a huge difference.
If you are working from home, you are judged solely by your productivity. If you work in an office, there is productivity and there is also attendance. Someone can show up every day and appear to be working hard, yet get nothing done. You just can't do that working from home (not for very long anyways).
For most professionals, attendance shouldn't really matter. You're not creating value by merely being present. There are exceptions - customer service for example - but even in those cases being just logged into Slack/Teams is perfectly cromulent.
Exactly.
It’s rather useless to just look at the clocked hours.
Any analysis that frames this as a productivity or talent-attraction issue is flawed from the start because that was never the point and still isn't.
The point of RTO mandates is to suppress wages. It's to get people to quit rather than having to lay them off. It's part of the permanent layoffs culture we're now in where every year 5-10% of the workers at a company will be laid off. Remaining workers will do more labor for the same money and won't be asking for raises because they're thankful to still have a job. And someone quitting is much cheaper than paying them severance.
Tech workers in particular saw massive wage growth in the 2010s due to tight supply. Companies are now in the business of clawing back thoat wage growth. It's why all these big tech companies started RTO mandates and layoffs at about the exact same time. It's a wink-and-nod collusion rather than overt collusion. We're a long way from the times when Google just hired all the engineers to deny them to their competitors.
None of this is necessary. All of these companies are still insanely profitable. But profits have to keep growing and ultimately that comes down to cutting costs. There's nothing else you can do.
Employers don't want you to be financially secure. They want you drowning in debt with declining real wages because then you're absolutely showing up to work and putting up with whatever they want.
This is the culmination of short-term-profit thinking, and I'm shocked people like YC's @paulgraham support RTO.
What's the long term game plan? It's like hotels and taxis resisting uber and airbnb. there will always be the old way of doing things, but people don't want to work from the office unless they have to. You've become the disruptee instead of the disruptor at that point.
I've been both productive and unproductive while WFH as well as in the office. In either case it was a product of managerial decisions.
I think they expected people to "just be productive" on their own, and then they install surveillance crap on their devices, measure bullshit and deduce RTO isn't needed.
The older way of defining a couple of performance indicator metrics and using that to mange people no longer works, RTO or not. So now, most managers have resorted to a "vibes-based" management technique, where the numbers can be made to mean whatever you want them to mean, so long as the vibe feels right.
So if two people are just as unproductive, but you turn on one of their camera and see a person working from their bed in their pajamas, the vibe will such, so RTO makes sense in their mind.
I don't think RTO will backfire any time too soon, but in the long term, the US has bigger problems in terms a decline as a nation. But if we overcome that somehow, there really is only one game in town: competition.
Can your company be competitive while implementing RTO? Your competition that figures out how to make their people happy and WFH will beat you. not only that, they'll pay their people less money for that privilege.
Technology infrastructure is still a growing thing in most of the world, but i suspect in a decade or so, WFH would be ideal for most humans in the world.
I also speculate that remote-controlled automated things will become very popular. not just waymo support driving the care remotely as needed, but even things like janitors and manual labor jobs could be done via robots controlled remotely.
For office work, it requires a different style of management, in a generation the older people too used to office work will be out of the workforce, but that transition will mean companies with a younger management workforce (who gets paid a lot less typically) will have a competitive advantage.
Teams not performing well with WFH -- with a millennial or younger manager would be a real shocker to me.
What if I actually like the office?
I have a 40min walk to it or 10min bus ride, so no American commute, lol. (Your society is done)
I like my colleagues. Sometimes you want to meet and solve problems face to face, and not have it be planned.
I have a shift schedule, sometimes I am the only one in the office, that is bliss :)
But my work is 100% in office.
Good office with a short walkable or bike able commute is my preference.
I've never had "good" plus that kind of commute. I've only had one of those at a time, and about half the time, neither.
So skipping the commute—and having a private bathroom, and all my own food available for lunch without packing, and fewer infections per year, and being able to deal with kid-emergencies with far less disruption to my work day et c—easily wins.
But yes I prefer a good office and a nice, active commute. I'm on track to literally never have that combo together ever in my life, but it'd be my favorite way to work.
> What if I actually like the office?
We had this discussion like, forever?
If you like the office, that's great - go to the office! Most people want the freedom of choice, RTO is exactly about taking away that freedom.
Optional hybrid work is kind of the optimal setup for me IMO. I go in to the office (often carpooling) once a week (skipping occasionally) with a few folks I work with who live locally, and I work remotely the rest of the time. It keeps me from feeling too isolated and makes the work I do feel more tangible while still being flexible and allowing me to work from home when I want to.
RTO would still be a dealbreaker for me.
> What if I actually like the office?
Then work from the office.
The problem starts of you demand those that don't want to be in the office to be there to satisfy your needs.
Your loneliness is not my desire to be around others.
Man, these stories are just crack for HN commenters. They eat it up, every time.
RTO is about controlling labor, nothing else. Everything else is a smoke screen. Ask yourself the following questions and you'll understand what happened:
- why did RTO happen seemingly right after salaries jumped and labor became scarce?
- why did RTO happen virtually in lockstep across all of white collar employment?
- why did RTO happen despite no evidence that productivity had anything to do with it? (and in fact, lots of evidence that it made employees more productive!)
- why did RTO happen at the same time that critical equity/diversity viewpoints were increasingly being discussed at work?
- why did RTO happen at the same time that outsourcing ramped up? If businesses are so opposed to remote work, why are they outsourcing so aggressively?
It's not about AI. It's not about CRE. It's not about "synergy" in person. It's about disciplining labor. Businesses will happily tank productivity to prevent the power balance from tipping towards the employee.
In that 2020-2023 period, people started talking seriously about how much value they bring to the table. They started making demands of their employers (especially around diversity, equity, inclusion). They started interviewing at multiple places, seeing their worth, demanding more, and giving only as much effort as strictly required to get the job done. The sudden, overnight, incredibly strong reaction to this period, the hard right turn, that is the whip cracking down on labor.
When you also consider the nation as you know, a nation, and not a rat race of individual interest, the best thing the government could do is encourage working from home. Break the hell up these "hubs" of white collar industry and let's disperse this work and compensation across the country. I'm betting we would see quite a lot more growth anyhow if these jobs were distributed across the country vs just concentrated in like sf/nyc/boston. like there are limits to how much growth little old south san fransisco can sustain. there are finite amount of office space. only finite amount of housing accomodations in the bay area (forgetting for a moment the rampant NIMBYism).
And what else is that everyone loses in this present situation. People in the job hub in SF also lose, because they are operating in this fundamentally broken local economy, way too enriched for high income workers making their home cost 2.5m and their compensation actually pretty poor as far as what it can get in the local economy. West Atherton would be a 400k median home neighborhood in most of the midwest. Literally same floorplans, lot sizes, fit and finish. Same country club down the road. Same private school up the road. Boutique shopping and steak dinners still available.
WFH aside. Any company that hits a certain size, starts to be broken up into multiple offices, buildings, floors, etc. and becomes de-facto remote. Meetings all become phone calls. and the team itself is mostly co-located. I am always a big confused at that point, why have a 20k person campus and 2 10k person campuses. Why not have 40 1k campuses? They are all effectively remote anyways.
On our end COVID also turned every single meeting into a videoconference anyhow, because that is how IT set up the AV inputs for our conference rooms for slideshows. No more direct AV input, ipad in every room now and you start a video conference on it, join with your laptop and share your screen. Most of the time some people had to join in remote anyhow for various reasons. Still, pretty ironic using teleconference software to sit in the same room. 95% the way there, just got to get out of the building lease.
I work for a multinational corporation and I was remote also before the pandemic. It is very smooth and everybody's happy. Once a year we meet in person in a larger group, it if an interesting experience, and then everybody goes back home and continue working as usual. When I see people bending over backwards and doing strange things out of distrust and the desire to control their employees and make their life miserable for no real reason, I feel really sorry, it makes zero sense to me.
Except you can't get that year round perfect weather in the midwest.
We are talking about Bay area here, not San Diego. Much of the US experiences 40-50 degree grey bleak cloudy winters.
Really? Genuine question - I'd like to move there.
Keep in mind "year round perfect weather" does include summers that aren't preposterously hot.
I've found that everywhere else, certainly in the midwest, where I live, either gets too hot in summer or too cold in winter (or is extremely remote, i.e. Hawaii).
> I've found that everywhere else, certainly in the midwest, where I live, either gets too hot in summer or too cold in winter
Much of the midwest gets both. Stifling humidity and temps often in the 90s, sometimes topping 100, for (effectively) a horrid 5- to 6-month-long summer. "Arctic blasts" in the Winter for sustained highs under 10 for days on end, lots of ice storms (and, if you do get a real, good snow, nowhere to ski anyway). 3 months total shared between Spring and Fall when the weather doesn't suck.
> why did RTO happen virtually in lockstep across all of white collar employment?
This makes sense when you consider that all of these big companies are run by leaders who talk in similar networks and listen to the same consultants (McKinsey, BCG, etc). I know someone who is going through a McKinsey run structural re-org, that is identical to one they ran (and failed horribly) at a company I was in 8 years ago.
> why did RTO happen at the same time that critical equity/diversity viewpoints were increasingly being discussed at work?
There was a decent lag between the peak of equity nonsense and RTO, plus the evidence is that DEI/Equity/etc hurt workers and disrupt organizing tremendously.
> why did RTO happen despite no evidence that productivity had anything to do with it? (and in fact, lots of evidence that it made employees more productive!)
Company I was went from 1 quarter talking about the increases in productivity WFH brought to the next quarter town hall talking about RTO for the culture and productivity.
> This makes sense when you consider that all of these big companies are run by leaders who talk in similar networks and listen to the same consultants (McKinsey, BCG, etc
Yes, it certainly does! I'm sure they also talk to Pinkerton :)
> decent lag between the peak of equity nonsense and RTO
Just about the amount of time it would take for management to (1) realize what was happening and what it meant for their power over labor; and (2) align on a policy.
> Company I was went from 1 quarter talking about the increases in productivity WFH brought to the next quarter town hall talking about RTO for the culture and productivity.
Yes, exactly. That's how you know anything about "productivity" is all a load of shit.
Correct. Workers were starting to get power, people had seen through the fog at what was actually happening and were acting out against it. Agency is a direct threat to the owner class.
It is amazing how much the constraints of working in the office shackle people to positions or locations. So many people working below their worth due to spouses ability to get a job in some location for example. Maybe you do land a job in your line of work in this little corner of the earth where your spouses jobs are more a plenty. Now you have to hold on for dear life to this company, do whatever the hell they ask of you and take whatever offer they give you because you have no leverage at all.
The fact that people completely miss this fact and just go "well I like talking to people in person" I mean at a certain point belies ignorance that borders on stupidity with how hard people cling to the "ability to talk to people in the hallway" against even just the obvious negative externalities like the commute and limited home choices. No one ever talks about this career side and juggling a two body problem.
I would say that there was also a deliberate push to save the value of commercial real estate. If it were purely about management vs labor, letting people work from home was a great way to offer an attractive benefit for free (or even while saving money) and it made it easy to hire from lower cost of living areas. Wages were going up regardless because of high inflation rates, remote work if anything was tempering that. I'm sure there were some asshole bosses who just missed their petty kingdoms, but it would be too easy for those who could tolerate the remote work situation to gain an advantage. There had to be a smaller group, such as those heavily invested in real estate, that had an overwhelming incentive for demanding RTO and the pull to force their will on everyone at the same time.
I can't speak to your sector, but from the perspective in my management role (in law) the explanation is quite simple: managing remote workers is more difficult and less pleasant than managing workers in the office. I actually hate it. And even granting that remote and in-office workers are "productive" in the sense that they bill hours (though not even this seems true in my anecdotal experience), we find that people with less in-office time tend to have qualitatively worse performance. At least in my field, being in the office, spending time with your co-workers, and getting to know them has value.
Of course, other things have value too. Often, our folks who prefer to work from home do so because they have small children who they want to spend time with, more fully share parental responsibilities with their partner, etc. I'm glad that they have the opportunity to do that, but it does generally seem to come at some professional cost.
>we find that people with less in-office time tend to have qualitatively worse performance. At least in my field, being in the office, spending time with your co-workers, and getting to know them has value.
I think you are confounded by the fact your most overeager overachievers are going to return to office no matter what.
I'm not persuaded that's the only thing going on here, but I'm sure that is part of it. Nonetheless, I think this is why many employers pushed for RTO.
I think RTO/WFH also kind of hits on a fundamental cultural divide that is beginning to emerge in our society. There is idea of who are we working for that I think people are starting to reckon with: in support of ourselves or in support of someone else, maybe even to the point of detriment to ourselves.
The arguments for and against fall along these lines. For RTO: in favor of the company over the self. It is more "productive" by some invented measure to work in the office, so it is the correct choice damned any other factor. A total trump card to those with this logic, like arguing the sky is blue.
And then what is the for WFH argument but the following: in favor of the self over the company. Perhaps if one pushed as hard as they could, they could get more done. They could sacrifice their sleep. They could grey their hair, increase cortisol, have an early heart attack and die. But in that time, they'd get a whole lot more done for the company certainly. WFH argues that affordances toward the employee ought to be made and even favored. Things like having choice in where one might live, not being saddled with a commute costly in time or money or both, being able to parallelize tasks such as taking the two minutes to start the laundry machine then returning to the desk, being able to see pets and loved ones for more than a few fleeting hours at the end of the day, better food, the list of benefits pretty much endless and also bespoke to the worker in question.
To be pro RTO, you have to be able to sacrifice the self like an ascetic, to deny all these tradeoffs and to grant the company control over you, your family and life outside of work (as where you live and how your family has to then live is a factor with RTO), all to benefit the company over yourself. The company that will never show you loyalty, that will use the same logic you are using to return to work to one day fire you.
Among my peers, on the younger side, no one really likes working in the office at all. They all are stuck with it and would desperately like to not work in the office. I expect over time, RTO will die as the generations that are culturally inclined to put the company over themselves retire from the workforce.
I think this is right. Of course, the trade-off has always been there for all to see between "work" and "life," but greater ability to WFH has rightly cause people to reassess the sacrifices they are willing to make for their careers. I hope I've been clear that, while I think there are real reasons RTO is valuable, they are not necessarily decisive at every margin.
Of course, another side of this is that some people like their workplaces and like to social aspect of going into the office. Not everyone has to, of course, but it also takes a certain critical mass of people in the office in order for anyone to get those benefits. So, on a certain level, this is also just about competing preferences.
Get better or quit then, I don't give a shit about managers, do your job and let the dozens of people you manage live their fucking lives, we're not here to please you or make your job easier
> we're not here to please you or make your job easier
I don't mean to be a jerk but ... if you are one of the people I manage, you literally are employed (at least in part) to make my job easier. That's not the only thing that matters -- which is why we (like many employers) do still allow some remote work. But making management more difficult is absolutely an impact that a rational workplace would take into account.
Your employees are there to make your life easier? As their manager? Do you demand they make you coffee? Rub your feet?
I've been doing this for decades, and I've never seen that attitude work with any 'leader.' I'd hate to work for you. Ever hear of servant leadership? Or hear the line "My job is to clear the runway for you"
Managers are cost centers, 'your' employees are what keep you employed, give them the respect they deserve.
That's not at all what I mean. What I mean is that I am responsible for the output of my team. If someone I am supervising does a bad job, is hard to communicate with, etc. it means that one way or another I have to do more work, which reduces the total output of my team. It can also lead to inferior service, angry clients, adverse outcomes, etc.
It’s the exact opposite, managers are employed to make employees job easier. Employees get the jobs done, managers are there to coordinate that work, remove blockers, and enable workers.
The relationship is reciprocal. I lay the tracks so my supervisees can do their job (and, indeed, have a job to do!). They help me produce far more work for clients than I ever could myself.
Congratulations. You have outed yourself as the archetypal manager that every WFH/RTO thread ever complains about.
And you as someone I would never hire!
Though the truth is probably just that we're not seeing eye-to-eye because we're communicating through an imperfect medium that doesn't encourage a nuanced discussion.
https://code-cwa.org/organize
I have the opposite experience (in tech at small or medium companies). Managing remote workers is much easier since outcomes (and outputs) are necessarily more visible.
Before working remotely (pre-2019) when managing teams in person, I found myself necessarily having discussions to get synced with folks. At my most recent role (and previous remote first roles), team members were excellent at providing updates on Github issues (the sources of truth for work items). Of course, this required buy in at all levels and trickling company objectives down through the program(s) and linking work items to OKRs etc. It was very obvious when folks weren't hitting objectives and easy to gather detailed written evidence of this.
And regarding getting to know folks. Most recent offsite was at a villa in Croatia where I got to both meet my team members and ended up getting to know them like friends. Now that I think about it this has happened at previous companies as well during remote offsites.
I wonder if it's field-specific. Sounds like there are multiple anecdotes across a wide distribution of outcomes.
> qualitatively worse performance
How does their quantative performance compare? Is there an opportunity in the differential?
It's worse in the sense that a more senior person has to spend more time fixing it. I guess that's an opportunity in the sense that it allows a firm to bill more hours, but there is generally a reason we wanted that more junior person to do the work originally. (Client cost sensitivity, teal workloads, training, etc.)
Interesting thanks!
But this is blatantly obvious to everyone, I'm not sure this aspect is a taboo in official conversation. People wanted WFH long before the pandemic, but it was a privilege of a few high bosses, the rest had to be packed in cubicles or open-plan offices (not sure which is worse). Then the pandemic came and it turned out most people can work remotely without abusing it. But the management never wanted to give the employees that freedom, it was just a question of time.
or was it capital becoming more expensive as that happened during the same period...
Lockstep? Once the major company did it, it was easy for others to follow. No conspiracy here. You are right, it is about controlling labor, watching the workforce, justifying the office expense. But I think a lot of your questions are just coincidental. As much as I enjoy working from home (been doing it for most of the last two decades) there are some advantageous to new hires working in the office.
What if I actually like the office?
It is a nice building in a nice area.
I have a 40min walk to it or 10min bus ride.
I like my colleagues. Sometimes you need to meet and solve problems face to face, and not have it be planned.
I like dressing up a bit, not a full suit but nice pleated pants and OCBD/sweater/blazer.
I have a shift schedule, sometimes I am the only one in the office, that is bliss :)
But my work is 100% in office. But not being shut at home is nice.
For me it's about choice. Forcing either isn't necessarily good, but why not just allow people to choose?
I sometimes go into the office, but maybe only once or twice per month. But I am allowed that choice, I can work from my house, any of the company's locations, a cafe, or anywhere else I feel like it on any given day.
I value the freedom and flexibility. I'd be miserable being told "You must be in the office" and I'd also equally hate to be told "you must work from a desk in your house only"
I like a full service espresso bar at the office. If I ask my employer for that, guess what they'll say? Fuck you, you're here to work. And I have to take it. I'm sure you can guess why.
> I have a 40min walk to it or 10min bus ride
Sounds like you are taking 80 minutes away from your family every day. I would not be so proud of that. And you'll likely regret it on your deathbed. #1 regret is not enough time with fanmily.
They'll likely have more time with the family because walking and being outside leads to a longer healthier life.
Most people do need time to shift focus from and to work. You can do groceries during that time, or administrative work like sending letters or going to the citizens office... .
True, but not everyone even has a family.
Somewhere I empathize with all the laid off coders and coders worried about the future. I'm not one myself but I know a lot of them, and I never know what to say. The nth refrain of "unionize" doesn't really help when the power to do it is in freefall.
I think these conspiracy theories about RTO are really unhelpful and actually harmful to the viability of hybrid work arrangements.
Please work in a day as a oil rig technician or a nurse. "I should be able to work anywhere and my employer must accommodate me" is an extremely privileged and elitist view of thinking.
A few of your notes are actually just wrong as well. Salaries jumped during covid due to over-hiring and software booming. "Productivity" is not a number, but a business-by-business decision. The vast, vast majority of people don't want politics at work, and it's exclusively the viewpoint of the laptop class who demand that stuff. (Again, people who work toiling jobs for 10 hours a day don't create petitions and demands like that)
At the end of the day, if you don't want to work in an office, you don't have to. But, believe it or not, many many people, including young people, like the office environment.
>Please work in a day as a oil rig technician or a nurse. "I should be able to work anywhere and my employer must accommodate me" is an extremely privileged and elitist view of thinking.
To highlight just how stupid this is, here it is from another angle:
"I have to work on site so everyone else must work on site"
What is the logical conclusion here? That the workforce should be equal in every sense? Come on
“Someone has it worse than you” is always a stupid argument.
Do you understand how rig work or nursing is? These are very flexible jobs. There is demand for nursing everywhere. You can be a travel nurse and go find work in HI or CA or Las Vegas right now if you want. Temp agencies that place you so you don't even need to really hunt either.
Rig work it is weeks on weeks off sort of deal where you then get off that rig back to, quite literally, anywhere in the world where you live otherwise. You could live in the middle of the Amazon rainforest and make six figures a year on a rig in the middle of the ocean (well, maybe US jurisdiction is preferred from a tax perspective for employer payroll).
I'm not sure I understand the point. The vast, vast majority of jobs simply cannot be done remotely. So I have little patience for the entitlement of people thinking they "deserve" it or yell about conspiracy theories about why it is going away.
There is a reason YC is in person. There is a reason why the top companies are in person.
What say you to the fact that there are companies that work remote today and are competitive and doing fine? Anomalous? Or maybe your prior assumptions need adjustment?
I'd say they are outliers.
They have been setup like that from the start and have a management structure that is fully on board with remote work from top to bottom.
Most companies aren't setup like that and don't have the people to make it work.
Why can't they be? Chances are in 1989, most companies weren't set up to work well with computers either. 5 years later everyone had a desktop an email account.
To expand upon a particular point; near as I understand WFH, or rather more broadly _not_ "RTO" (ie. endure office bound work) has a strong backbone of people wanting to maximise home/work life balance.
The point about rig work, FIFO mine work, nursing (again, FIFO) et al is these are jobs that are a priority choiice for many that are living that somewhat off-grid lives with a big home-life component dream .. and have been doing that for many decades now.
I'm over 60, have worked in a majority of countries across the globe (geophysical exploration field work), and have avoided offices like a plague for the entirity of my career - I enjoy 24/7 field work with weeks off at home to work projects there or to code / build for various projects from home.
We've even built up resource and energy intelligence services and sold them on to FinTech companies that way.
And met and talked to many people that way.
So, from some PoV's you chose the worst possible examples of jobs that supposedly tie people to an office grind.
You say entitlement, but the reality is you have sour grapes about people who can have a flexible work arrangement. Some people pick jobs that are not able to be flexible, that’s a choice. Pick better. People work to live, not live to work, they should not tolerate how they should have to work because some manager or c-level is lucky to be in their position of power.
The UK provides by law the ability to seek and obtain flexible working arrangements on day one of a job [1]. Certainly, the US is behind as it always is, but it will catch up eventually, if only because of structural demographics and total fertility rate declines across the developed world creating perpetual labor shortages in various verticals. We’re just arguing window of time.
YC isn’t a good example, they simply sell lottery tickets to founders and early investors as a confidence play. You say top companies, but that’s an opinion without evidence. According to what metric?
[1] https://www.gov.uk/flexible-working
> As of March 2025, approximately 22.8% of U.S. employees worked remotely at least part of the time, equating to about 36 million individuals. This percentage has remained stable between 21% and 23% since early 2024, indicating that remote work has become a consistent component of the workforce.
> What this means: Remote work has stabilized at about one-fifth of the US workforce—this isn't a temporary trend but a permanent shift in how work gets done.
Source: https://wfhresearch.com/
> Approximately 90% of companies plan to maintain or increase remote work options moving forward, indicating a lasting shift despite some return-to-office mandates.
> What this means: The vast majority of companies recognize remote work as a permanent feature—even those mandating office returns are keeping some flexibility.
Source: https://www.gartner.com/en/human-resources/topics/future-of-...
https://www.breeze.pm/blog/remote-work-statistics
What's actually really unhelpful and actually harmful to the viability of hybrid work arrangements is RTO.
> "I should be able to work anywhere and my employer must accommodate me" is an extremely privileged and elitist view of thinking.
Nope! You totally missed the point. "You must accomodate me" is a demand, that you can place on your employer, when you have labor power, as an employee. The acceding is what we're talking about here. That is not cultural; it is a matter of market power.
> At the end of the day, if you don't want to work in an office, you don't have to.
What are you talking about? Did you read my post? Yes, I have to! Because of RTO!
Yes, these are some extreme beliefs in a grand, coordinated conspiracy.
As if a bunch of people in suits are sitting around a table in an evil villain’s lair shouting “we need more control over our workers” or needing to prop up commercial real estate prices.
RTO is also about forcing people in cities, the cities that have lost their factories to globalisation, because it was and still is cheaper to produce far away without the problems of density and then move things, rather than everyone staying close together. The cities that are losing their offices, their last economic engine, to remote working, and with them, the giant property owners who want everyone renting their buildings, not owning scattered homes and sheds.
Cities that serve the ruling classes as a means of ensuring conformity, because the closer you are to your neighbour, the more the herd effect is felt. Cities that themselves serve as a means of control: you consume food and water that doesn't come from the city itself; control these and the four main arteries, and the city is yours, no questions asked.
I don’t know why they keep bringing “productivity” as the justification, it never was, never will, it’s about power dynamics, remote work shifted a lot of power back to employees, it also provided flexibility career wise. Another big reason why it got attacked quickly is it gave the people a window to escape the rat race and save money, when the employee doesn’t spend xyz on gas everyday, plus relocating outside of the crowded urban areas to cheaper smaller cities, rent/housing went down, landlords and banks had to lobby to end it, plus the government since less taxes are paid now as a result, all efforts made to bring back the status quo. It was fascinating to see how they gaslit the public, I was even talking to an employer before and the manager was trash talking wfh as “woke” and “real men” must grind 9hrs a day at least! Another employer was demanding a full camera on at least 6hrs a day if you wfh, or you are not “productive”.
Back in the 80s or 90s, working in the office or factory was the default and it made sense, no high speed internet, small town so not much commuting, cheap housing, and affordable life, so if the man worked in the office and the wife stayed home, they can live comfortably. That’s not the case now, wfh balanced that and increased the quality of life instead, so you can now stay with your kids saving the cost of daycare etc, while doing exactly the same work you would do at the office.
I will never go back to the office. There are enough jobs around, even if they pay less. Hell, to live a comfortable life I could work at a job that pays 5x less than what I get paid now (not that much), even though I'll have to sacrifice some stuff. But I'll have to sacrifice luxuries, not my time or mental health.
Personally, I see it like this:
Option 1 - at home:
* stay in my comfortable air-conditioned room in my underpants on my comfortable chair at my comfortable desk or bed,
* surrounded by foods and drinks I like (I a minifridge in my room, it's awesome), and being able to quickly put something in the oven,
* picking my nose or scratching my ass wherever I want to,
* going to the bathroom whenever I want to (maybe with the laptop if I have to be available),
* listening to music on headphones or speakers,
* being able to communicate to and pay attention to family and pets for a few minutes here and there (no, this doesn't mean I'll waste my work time walking the dog or talking with people, but it means I can actually take a minute or two break and have an actual life),
* smoking on the balcony whenever I want to (a 4 second trip),
* alternating between lying on my bed or sitting on my chair or standing or running in place or dancing,
* having my breaks in my most comfortable place - home.
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Option 2 - the office:
* wasting time traveling - driving sucks and the public transportation sucks, for different reasons (and no, I won't relocate just to be close to the office, what the actual fuck, I love my house),
* having to look presentable,
* having to make idle boring chit chat with corporate drones who want to socialize,
* sharing a bathroom,
* having to choose between listening to the office background noise or wearing uncomfortable noise-cancelling headphones,
* having my breaks... in the office (and no, the office PlayStation or ping pong tables don't cut it),
* having to prepare food for the next X hours, then having to eat it or reheat it at the office,
* being able to attend to my house in case of an emergency (fire, floods, robbers, family or pet health issues and so on - yes, they absolutely come first),
* being subjected to cameras and other security theater, as if any employee couldn't wreck the company if they actually wanted to.
If you want me in the office, prepare to pay me a lot more. You won't and I understand. It makes no sense.
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As for productivity - I work hard because I feel obligated, because it's my work ethic and because I don't want to cheat or let people down. If I don't like what I'm doing, I quit instead of "quiet quitting" and doing the bare minimum.
It's much, much easier to get "in the zone" at home, to not burn out, to have time for myself (traffic + actual breaks) and to be happy.
Edit - just to sum it up - it's my only (AFAIK) life and I'm not spending 10-11 hours a day on work. That would leave me with 5-6 hours of "me time" and I'd be too tired to enjoy it.
Edit 2 - similarly, I won't put up with bullshit like:
* installing anything on my personal devices (except things like FOSS TOTP 2FA stuff I can control),
* leaving the camera and mic in my work machines intact (we all know how secure stuff is and how much we can trust corporations),
* taking drug tests.
That said, if you're willing to pay me 50 times what I currently make, I might return to the office with a suit, smile under the cameras, take drug tests, sit on my chair all day and discuss the weather with coworkers on the elevator. I'd be happy to do it for 3 or 4 months.
> * having to make idle boring chit chat with corporate drones who want to socialize,
This point makes you look like a jerk.
For something to "backfire" you first have to account for why it was done. This article assumes performance and retention are the only considerations. It does not account for things like commercial real estate value, a buesiness's ability to monitor and control its employees, or excuses for layoffs.
The article does say:
> The better path is to raise the bar on management, not badge swipes.
Real estate may play a role, but terrible management practices are also definitely a factor. And if every other company is doing it, it's safe to copy their behaviour and not stick your neck out.
What do you mean by "monitor and control"? Should an employer not be able to see what their employees are doing at work?
What is an "excuse" for a layoff, exactly?
> Should an employer not be able to see what their employees are doing at work?
There's a difference between visibility into work progress and just mass surveillance of all activity. The only metric that actually matters is the delivery of value.
Monitoring isn't an effective way to lead. It only reinforces employees to optimize for "looking busy" rather than being effective. If you have to audit your employees daily actions to know if they are doing their job, you've failed as a manager at defining their role or hiring the right people.
A good manager defines the what and the when, and leaves the how to the professional being paid to do it.
I mean, maybe. But a company that spends all of it's time "surveilling" their employees rather than adding value will go out of business. So I'm not sure what the point really is when people bring this up when talking about WFH. If someone doesn't want to be surveilled at work they can quit, right?
Why continue the cycle of finding a job and quitting it for solvable problems instead of staying and solving the problem?
Not really. Workers produce the thing the company sells. Those workers are mostly trapped so they deal with whatever nonsense management is up to. Management, mostly useless, maintains its control and viability by asserting that workers need policing and they're the ones to do it. If the policing is relatively easy with WFH, they'll do that. If it's much harder, or less demonstrative of their fake value, screw that, they'll just pass that burden on to workers with RTO mandates.
> What is an "excuse" for a layoff, exactly?
By "excuses for layoffs" I suspect what they meant was that there was an pre-existing desire to reduce headcount and RTO was used under the expectation that some percentage of employees would quit voluntarily so that the company can avoid going through the relatively more costly process of laying them off.
Of course the downside of this approach is that the company has less control over which employees leave, which may result in them losing the employees who have the best alternatives.
Gotcha. There was definite over hiring that happened during covid so some of this was a return to normal I think.
Why is the company hiring people it doesn't trust? That sounds like a process failure.
Because they're cheap.
If you deliver all tasks in a timely manner, is productive and helpful in a team setting, contribute to discussions and initiatives beyond your immediate assignments... What exactly should I monitor? How many minutes per day your butt is in a seat? If you did a school run and woked a bit more after hours to compensate? If you had a headache and took a short nap after lunchtime?
How does monitoring you contribute to anything?
> What do you mean by "monitor and control"? Should an employer not be able to see what their employees are doing at work?
I don't see any reason to get into a discussion about how much an employer should or shouldn't be able to monitor and control their employees. Some businesses are simply more trusting of their employees and allow a great deal of independence, while others aren't. Those that aren't will naturally face greater barriers to monitoring and controlling employees who are working remotely.
> What is an "excuse" for a layoff, exactly?
It's no secret that when the return-to-office movement began, many businesses used it as a means of achieving a headcount reduction. Employees who could not (or would not) return to the office were let go. Parting ways with difficult employees looks much better to investors than layoffs.
> commercial real estate value
It's a little bit funny that 100% online businesses bought the most expensive and lavish real estate available.
It's tragic they think their workers should throw good labor after bad investment to make a white collar feel justified.
RTO because of Slackware faking while sleeping and walking dogs. Cheaters
Two possibilities:
- There are some statistical biases in the article, correlation != causation, Simpsons paradox, etc... things like that
- Company will return-to-the-office mandates will soon disappear or adapt as they will lose their competitive advantage, x1.7 is too big of an effect to ignore
What is possible is that work from home benefit companies in the growth phase while office work is more appropriate for companies that are already well established. So many possible explanations.
The usual narrative here is that work from home is just better and that management mandating return to office are control freaks, but I can't believe it is that simple. It wouldn't make economic sense, real estate is expensive, they would save a lot by not having offices, in addition to all the supposed benefits. Personally, I feel that I am really missing something by working 100% remotely, so much happens by the coffee machine and Slack/Teams/GMeet... doesn't replace that. Hybrid work is what I prefer personally. Office time for exchanging and socializing and at-home time for deep thinking and personal flexibility. Personal experience, but it shows that not just extroverts and managers want to go back to the office sometimes, because I am neither, but I still think some office time is good. In fact, I tend to be more of a lone wolf, but even as a lone wolf, I still need to know what to do, and daily calls often don't give the whole picture.
> Company will return-to-the-office mandates will soon disappear or adapt as they will lose their competitive advantage, x1.7 is too big of an effect to ignore
Lol the market magic hand. At that point it's more of a religious belief than a scientific fact.