>> For decades, I've been scratching my head as to why can't software people just work from the comfort of their own home and their own hardware. It took a lon

>> For decades, I've been scratching my head as to why can't software people just work from the comfort of their own home and their own hardware. It took a long time for employees to convince companies they can be productive when they're left to their own devices. I've seen both sides of it. Back in 2010, I worked for a large company that was experimenting with some ROWE "Results Orientated Work Environment" which was basically people working off site three days a week. As long as you're productive and hit your metrics, you were good and left alone. We had a major project and two contractors just completely stopped coming in, did barely any work and left the team high and dry three days before a major release of the site we were building. After that, the company killed the experiment and required everybody to be in the office 5 days a week no matter what, no excuses. I also worked for another company that slowly rolled out a similar program. We had three pilot developers. Then you had to apply to be able to get approved to WFH three days a week. Therefore, management was only allowing people who were hitting their numbers and had good metrics to get into the program. This went on for two years until they started relaxing a lot of the rules until they hit some hard times and shut it down completely. I work for a huge health care company and they were VERY leery about letting people WFH even during COVID because they were petrified that production was going to drop off too much. Even at the height of the pandemic they tried several times to get people back into the office - but as usual, there were rarely any takers. It was a bit of a running joke at the time, but after a full calendar year, they relented and they were able to confirm that production had instead actually increased and essentially gave a vote of confidence for a lot of teams they were fully capable of WFH full time without a drop off in productivity.