(CTO here, 100m€ public company in the EU, 200-person development organization. Anonymous to let me speak more freely) 1) I don’t care about per-dev productivi

(CTO here, 100m€ public company in the EU, 200-person development organization. Anonymous to let me speak more freely) 1) I don’t care about per-dev productivity. Might well be some teams are more productive fully remote, looking at some numbers I suspect they are. But our biggest problem is not “cranking out lines of code faster” - it’s making sure we are doing the right projects, not wasting time on the wrong things; and dealing well with all the cross-team dependencies. I’m quite consciously making the trade off that I think devs will be more frequently interrupted and get less work done … in return for which they will be much better informed about what the company is doing and we can focus our efforts more effectively. 2) because this development organization works and I want to keep it functional. This is a public company, we have analysts looking over our shoulders and constantly querying our strategy. We have potentially hostile acquisitions always around the corner. If I am running a fully remote organization then I can’t justify a physical office space in the EU and there’s a very clear route to cost-reduction which is “push all the work out to low CoL countries” And honestly it won’t matter whether that is actually feasible or not, the logic looks too compelling and there’s a risk it would be forced on me, which would be a massive headache because I know it won’t work well. On the other hand, if as a dev organization we are mostly back in the office, it is much easier for me to make the argument that offshoring wouldn’t work.