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If the only incentive to source talent locally was having butts in seats in an office building, what does that say about the current state of office jobs? Since

• derefr 6y ago
  It's not butts-in-seats per se; rather, it's middle-managers being able to create backchannel fiefdoms to increase the leverage they have over rivals. "People who trust only you" is to managers as "code nobody else understands" is to engineers: job security, and a springboard for making you look like a hero and so getting you recognition/promotions. And it's hard to develop relationships like that, if you can't just wander over to those people and have in-person (i.e. not on-the-record in the company's logs) conversations. To exactly the degree that your company resembles a feudalist society, you'll see managers excited to have their own physically distinct office units/departments/working groups, where they can most-effectively hoard and develop private talent pools on the company's dime. And you'll see them heavily resist anything that makes that talent-pool of theirs less private, e.g. WFH, cross-departmental collaboration, "war rooms" during emergencies, etc.