Millennial here, so there might be some generational differences. One important element of working from an office is that there are other people there I need t

Millennial here, so there might be some generational differences. One important element of working from an office is that there are other people there I need to talk to. If half of the people I am working with aren't in the office then it's moot, I have to spend all I time in zoom anyway. The threshold for creating value is probably closer to 80%. In practice this means working out of the headquarters, or on the same campus as the headquarters. Why is this important? New York City, Mountain View, Palo Alto, San Fransisco, Seattle, Redmond and all the other popular headquarter locations have insanely expensive office space compared to most of the rest of the United States. So companies often choose open office space, which increases the worker per square foot, so they can both save money on office space and fit more people in their headquarters for a critical mass. Yeah, I'd love my own office or to share a closed off room with my two pizza team. If spending this extra per-worker office space means 35% less people are working in the same building then it might not be a tradeoff worth taking. Working out of an office where half of the people I need to communicate with aren't there will not provide a lot of value because I need to do the same amount of zoom and the same amount of written communication to keep everyone looped in. On the topic of getting a critical mass, I wonder how plausible it is for tech companies to maintain the majority of their workers in a central location. There's huge infrastructure costs associated with it. Having 50k+ tech workers in a single location will have a massive impact on transportation, CoL and housing. The tech company is now vulnerable to local governments increasing taxes or reducing required services. There is also a vulnerability during a local natural disaster, something we can expect to see more of with climate change. The private office might help Return to Office pushes in the margin for people that want to reclaim the space they use for their office in home, or do not have a private office at home. For me, I will always choose work from home unless 80%+ of the people I need to work with are also in the office. Ultimately I think WFH beats the network of satellite offices and overseas extensions many tech companies have built, but doubt WFH beats a centralized HQ. I would love to see a comparison of F500 or Nasdaq companies in their return to office strategies and success, but this data isn't public knowledge. In five or ten years it'll be interesting to map Return to Office policies and stock performance, which might be the final nail in the coffin of corporate offices.