Solving the in-person/remote work problem is becoming intractable. The people who prefer remote seem to strongly prefer remote. Any arguments against it are di

Solving the in-person/remote work problem is becoming intractable. The people who prefer remote seem to strongly prefer remote. Any arguments against it are dismissed as RTO bootlicking. See the top-level comments here from people who will absolutely not give up remote work and are giving people advice on how to live in a remote-only world. (Just get a hobby, bro! How hard could it be? Can't make friends after work? That's a you problem!) The people who prefer in-person strongly prefer in-person. They think that this is the ONLY way to build a community culture and foster spontaneous collaboration. Moreover, the kind of work the people with "power" in these organizations (executives, salespeople, marketing, etc) have is almost entirely face-to-face, and they are also raising families and dealing with traffic, so there's willful lack of empathy there too. Hybrid work environments make it easy for the "minority" to miss important context. Either extreme (RTO, or full-remote) leads to serious backlash. I think that a mostly-full RTO will win out for the same reason that chain layoffs happened this year. The biggest companies are all _very_ pro return-to-office. I don't know of any big companies that stayed full remote after vaccines were viable. The smaller startups that can do full remote are vying for acquisition or to go public. In both cases, the power dynamics will shift towards making people go back into the office because that's what the people in charge want. (Again, their jobs are mostly face-to-face, and they also raise kids and deal with traffic and doctor's appointments, so empathy is lacking there.)