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I work in Cork, Ireland. My boss is in Dublin, his boss Singapore, my staff in Nova Scotia, Devs in Manila, clients in London and New York. I'm always working r

I work in Cork, Ireland. My boss is in Dublin, his boss Singapore, my staff in Nova Scotia, Devs in Manila, clients in London and New York. I'm always working remotely, no matter where I am, as is anyone who works in any multi office company. The RTO is being entirely driven from the top by institutional investors wanting to avoid losses on property investments and from the bottom by those who have yet to grapple with the fact they dont have friends or hobbies and need you in the office so that they dont feel like such embarrassing losers. The return to office has nothing to do with productivity, trying to look at things through that lens reflects a total lack of understanding of whats going on.

pid-1 3y ago
How does that work? Are institucional investors writing "plz return to office or we are going bust" emails to every company?
- eptcyka 3y ago
  They don't need to explain themselves. Big enough shareholders just can express their needs to the board, a vote can be held and, if the decision is not implemented, courts can get involved.
  - TheCoelacanth 3y ago
    Courts getting involved over something like that isn't realistic. A more likely outcome is board members getting fired.
- AlexandrB 3y ago
  No they just have board meetings where they stress the importance of being in the office for "spontaneous exchange of ideas" and "culture" while also floating think pieces in business magazines about how important having people in the office is to success.
  - voisin 3y ago
    "Hey Exec team, my other portfolio investments have real estate exposure so I need you to sacrifice the performance you clearly witness from WFH employees and your own personal bonuses that are tied to that performance for the benefit of my other investments." I don't buy it.
- IggleSniggle 3y ago
  I would imagine it's more nuanced cues like expressing skepticism at key moments that encourage alternate choices
- varispeed 3y ago
  Companies have investors / shareholders who are also invested in commercial property. They use their power as shareholders to mandate RTO so that their investments won't lose value. It's going from the top.
  - InCityDreams 3y ago
    Investors have invested in companies that just happen to pay rent to the....investor (now landlord)?
    - Devasta 3y ago
      If you're someone like BlackStone or Vanguard you absolutely manage investments in companies that are paying each other.
- dvfjsdhgfv 3y ago
  I don't know how it works exactly but I can show you how it works in practice. The CEO somehow managed the middle management that RTO is a good thing. Their reasoning was that the lease was signed for several years ahead, so it's a waste of resources for this space to rest unused. "Can't they "renegotiate?" "No, it's already been signed and the owners won't budge" "Can't we just wait until the lease is over and then downsize?" "Well, you need to understand what happens to us if we downsize the office, use your imagination!" These people somehow managed to internally identify the company with the office, and reducing the (open plan) office space with downsizing the company. And they were dead serious. No arguments (we did this during the pandemic and our revenue soared, acting against the wishes of all employees means shooting oneself in the foot) would be accepted. So the best engineers left, end of story.
- kukkeliskuu 3y ago
  I worked under a C-level person who was otherwise a pretty sensible guy, but he had participated in a workshop about this, in a 1000 person company. After the workshop he instituted a RTO policy. The policy was more lenient than the company policy, but still needlessly strict. In personal discussions he stated that in the workshop they discussed that all people would slack away from work given the opportunity. He seemed agitated about it. I guess this was how the C-level was "motivated".
  - gunselginsel 3y ago
    Interesting. Though, to be fair, C-levels are C-levels because they are the best at doing what they're told to do. So I feel like a CEO just has to say, "obviously WFH is bad" and then the sycophants will parrot that as if it was their own idea.
    - kukkeliskuu 3y ago
      Well, yes. I cannot get into details, but I am pretty confident that the CEO was pressured in a similar fashion as well.
chasd00 3y ago
> The RTO is being entirely driven from the top by institutional investors wanting to avoid losses on property investments and from the bottom by those who have yet to grapple with the fact they dont have friends or hobbies and need you in the office so that they dont feel like such embarrassing losers. I know i'm supposed to "contribute to the conversation" but it's important to recognize that the above point is exactly right.
- toolz 3y ago
  also important to read the nuance of them "feeling" like losers. Obviously if you're working in tech there's little chance of you actually being a loser in your career (which is probably the most difficult place to find success) so really they'd just need to put some effort into being social and these people would be doing well for themselves, however, in-office can be a huge crutch for people to pretend like they have a social life.
- benjaminwootton 3y ago
  Is it though? Most companies prioritise their own self interest over nebulous “institutional investment” bogeymen.
  - GenerocUsername 3y ago
    Do they? Odd how coordinated so many companies reach the same conclusions, policies, and follow the same trends. Could it be that the board members of these companies are in that nebulous investor class?
    - NoboruWataya 3y ago
      It's not odd at all that people in a similar situation tend to act the same way, particularly when they can see how the others act and realise that following the crowd is the best way to not get fired. Many companies would benefit financially by reducing their office footprint and thereby paying less rent. The idea that boards everywhere would sabotage their own companies to appease commercial real estate investors is tinfoil hat level stuff.
wkat4242 3y ago
Ireland is crazy for jumping on the real estate ship again. This almost bankrupted the country in 2007 because the economy had become so one-sided. I remember the dreary half-finished shopping malls and whole neighborhoods of concrete slabs falling to pieces. And yes I know some of those bottom feeders in our place too. They're the ones constantly distracting you at work with chitchat. I have several people I try to avoid but unfortunately our pisspoor desk booking system (Planon, never buy that!) doesn't even allow to look up where other people are.
- lawlessone 3y ago
  I don't think we are on it as much this time. prices are sky high again, rents are sky high too. This time though it's more because enough isn't being built to meet demand. A good chunk of property is be gobbled up by AirBNB.
wbobeirne 3y ago
> and from the bottom by those who have yet to grapple with the fact they dont have friends or hobbies and need you in the office so that they dont feel like such embarrassing losers. I can see why office culture doesn't appeal to you, you sound like a grump who doesn't enjoy the comraderie you can form with people that you spend 40 hours a week with. If you can enjoy the cognitive dissonance of socializing with black squares in a zoom, that's great, but I'd rather enjoy the time I spend working, not merely tolerate it. I don't think that makes me a loser.
- isodev 3y ago
  This is exactly why folks should be free to choose remote or to “band together” in a shared workspace - people aren’t the same and it’s so much better when we can tailor our workspace to fit our personalities and way of working.
- lm28469 3y ago
  > who doesn't enjoy the comraderie you can form with people that you spend 40 hours a week with. I'd much rather spend that time with people I chose. Some you of you borderline sound like you're suffering from Stockholm syndrome
  - layer8 3y ago
    What I don’t get is why you would want to spend half of your waking hours, even remotely, working with people on a team whose company you don’t enjoy? The conclusion I would draw is that I’m on the wrong team or at the wrong company, and then switch as quickly as possible.
    - lm28469 3y ago
      I enjoy my friends, yet I don't want to spend 8 hours a day, 5 days a week in sitting 1 meter away from them. It's a job, it's IT, it's easy, it's well paid, as long I don't have a literal archnemesis annoying me every day I literally don't care who I work with. Not everyone has the luxury to quit a job and find a new one right away, especially in the current climate
whywhywhywhy 3y ago
> the fact they dont have friends or hobbies and need you in the office so that they dont feel like such embarrassing losers You must be a great person to work with if this is whats going on with your internal monologue about the people you interact closely with.
- Devasta 3y ago
  Why would this be the internal monologue about people I interact closely with? They aren't the ones forcing everyone in.
- deleted 3y ago
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deleted 3y ago
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tbyehl 3y ago
If you look at RTO mandates coming out of places like IBM and Yahoo during the Before Times, there was clearly an "increase unforced attrition" aspect to them. Layoffs without the pesky WARN notices, severance, etc.
amerkhalid 3y ago
> from the bottom by those who have yet to grapple with the fact they dont have friends or hobbies and need you in the office so that they dont feel like such embarrassing losers. Two anecdotes supporting this. Back in my early career I worked with this dev in their 40s. He always brought his gaming laptop to office and would stay late in the office. He had family and kids, this was the only time he could play games without being bothered. At another job, we had a director who was workaholic and would schedule meetings at insane hours like 7PM. You were not forced to take meetings in person, could dial in but still it was insane. Rumors were that she was going through divorce and work was escape from personal life. Escape from your life is fine but do it without making everyone else's personal life miserable. I can see such people wanting RTO.
coldpie 3y ago
This post is a perfect example of why RTO is bad for everyone, including office-likers like myself. I don't want to have to be anywhere near this guy, lol.
wiseowise 3y ago
> the bottom by those who have yet to grapple with the fact they dont have friends or hobbies and need you in the office so that they dont feel like such embarrassing losers. Projecting much?
- Devasta 3y ago
  Absolutely not... I have loads of hobbies!
mattgreenrocks 3y ago
WFH is existentially painful for those that have coupled their identity too strongly to their jobs. They're confronted daily with the fact that their coworkers just aren't that into them (e.g. the job, and by extension, them) as they'd like. The likelihood this has happened goes up significantly as you move up the ladder, because the volcano gods demand sacrifice for that. There's also a segment of the population that somewhat overlaps with the previous paragraph that uses work as their primary social outlet.
- dogman144 3y ago
  I think this and the slightly less gracious way that OP explained it is the most significant driver of RTO from the employee side. It is also why I am shamelessly pro-WFH. The banality of this mindset as the possibly main major contributing cause from labor for RTO and all the many, many issues that office work causes is too much for me to handle. Get some non-work friends and hobbies. Understand career mobility and productivity, if that’s what you really want to prioritize, is equally there via WFH. Leave the rest of us out of it.
wnolens 3y ago
> The RTO is being entirely driven from the top by institutional investors > The return to office has nothing to do with productivity I agree for many big tech firms, but I'll present the other (or my personal) side. I'm a developer. And I am looking for a job in an office, actually about to take one very soon and get out of my remote-only gig. A lot of engineering cultures don't function well without face-to-face, high bandwidth conversation and whiteboard time. 1. Our design process has suffered greatly, specifically the process of collaborating on high-level design and consecutively lowering the conversation into a low-level design. Instead it becomes: one person writes something up, and we all read a doc with bunch of text and diagrams, add comments, owner iterates. Collaboration is serialized. When we try to get into a room and brainstorm, the limits of voice/video chat take over and we can't effectively communicate 3-4 people at a time like you can in the same room. And unfortunately my company hasn't given everyone iPads to whiteboard together, so I think you cut out an appreciable chunk of the engineering population who are primarily visual thinkers (a la 'Visual Thinking' by Temple Grandin). 2. Junior folks flounder, unable to ramp up quickly drinking through such a thin pipe of information (a lot of which is tribal and needs to be received from the mouth of others). The talented folks were going to succeed anyway and have adapted, but the average kid is isolated and out of sight of management. The senior folks love that isolation and never want to return to office. The junior folks may think it's cool, but in 5 years many more will still be junior engineers. 3. Work is more than productivity. I don't need to drink the kool-aid and take the slide down to the ball-pit, but I need daily face-to-face contact else I start to feel alienated. I wish my social life was nested in a loving community of best friends but it's not. I live in NYC, my friends are a 40 min train ride or too busy to meet up on a nightly basis (as am I). I might feel different about this if I had a partner and kids, but then I'd say anti-RTO is driven from competing priorities for a worker's time. Which is fair, but not the argument here.
voisin 3y ago
> The RTO is being entirely driven from the top by institutional investors wanting to avoid losses on property investments and from the bottom by those who have yet to grapple with the fact they dont have friends or hobbies and need you in the office so that they dont feel like such embarrassing losers. This is argument keeps getting parroted without evidence or skepticism. Where's the evidence? Just because many people don't like RTO doesn't mean that RTO is driven by evil forces up to no good. There's nuance - on both sides of the debate! - and it does no one a service to reduce the arguments to bumper stickers. No, employees wanting to work from home don't universally want to loaf off. No, employees that want to work from an office aren't universally middle managers trying to justify their existence. Some people work better at home, others work better at the office. Some companies have found WFH to improve productivity overall and are flexible, and other companies have found RTO to improve productivity overall. If you work better from home, go work for the former. If you work better from the office, go work for the latter. Let the market decide. If WFH is overall more productive, eventually the RTO companies' performance will suffer, and vice versa. No need to blame things on the boogeyman behind the curtain!
- hellisothers 3y ago
  I think the problem is, if you want to work remote you don’t care if other people work in the office or not. However, if you want to work in the office you really want others in the office as that is the purported main point of being there so one side is forcing the other into their desired working situation. This is exactly what the OP is describing, people above/below/around compelling RTO.
  - voisin 3y ago
    So go to a company that doesn’t have RTO requirements. The market should sift employees and employers to an equilibrium where people work in the environment that suits them. We already have this. People that can’t stand sitting at a screen all day and need to be outdoors to feel good find jobs that suit that. People who need to interact and not do paperwork find jobs that suit this. And vice versa. RTO and WFH will just be the next phase of that. I look forward to the market showing us, objectively, which is most effective on the whole when enough companies with radically different policies compete with each other. I have a strong suspicion which will prevail but I want to see objective real world results.
intended 3y ago
Id be more specific. RTO is pushing commute costs to workers, which is why RTO is miss priced in the market. If your commute time was paid for by the firm, all the firms calculations would shift dramatically. A worker rise up moment, if we ever needed more. The commonly stated goal is to “work together” - something you can do if you have years of experience being in online communities, and alien if you have not.

pid-1 3y ago

How does that work? Are institucional investors writing "plz return to office or we are going bust" emails to every company?

eptcyka 3y ago
They don't need to explain themselves. Big enough shareholders just can express their needs to the board, a vote can be held and, if the decision is not implemented, courts can get involved.
- TheCoelacanth 3y ago
  Courts getting involved over something like that isn't realistic. A more likely outcome is board members getting fired.
AlexandrB 3y ago
No they just have board meetings where they stress the importance of being in the office for "spontaneous exchange of ideas" and "culture" while also floating think pieces in business magazines about how important having people in the office is to success.
- voisin 3y ago
  "Hey Exec team, my other portfolio investments have real estate exposure so I need you to sacrifice the performance you clearly witness from WFH employees and your own personal bonuses that are tied to that performance for the benefit of my other investments." I don't buy it.
IggleSniggle 3y ago
I would imagine it's more nuanced cues like expressing skepticism at key moments that encourage alternate choices
varispeed 3y ago
Companies have investors / shareholders who are also invested in commercial property. They use their power as shareholders to mandate RTO so that their investments won't lose value. It's going from the top.
- InCityDreams 3y ago
  Investors have invested in companies that just happen to pay rent to the....investor (now landlord)?
  - Devasta 3y ago
    If you're someone like BlackStone or Vanguard you absolutely manage investments in companies that are paying each other.
dvfjsdhgfv 3y ago
I don't know how it works exactly but I can show you how it works in practice. The CEO somehow managed the middle management that RTO is a good thing. Their reasoning was that the lease was signed for several years ahead, so it's a waste of resources for this space to rest unused. "Can't they "renegotiate?" "No, it's already been signed and the owners won't budge" "Can't we just wait until the lease is over and then downsize?" "Well, you need to understand what happens to us if we downsize the office, use your imagination!" These people somehow managed to internally identify the company with the office, and reducing the (open plan) office space with downsizing the company. And they were dead serious. No arguments (we did this during the pandemic and our revenue soared, acting against the wishes of all employees means shooting oneself in the foot) would be accepted. So the best engineers left, end of story.
kukkeliskuu 3y ago
I worked under a C-level person who was otherwise a pretty sensible guy, but he had participated in a workshop about this, in a 1000 person company. After the workshop he instituted a RTO policy. The policy was more lenient than the company policy, but still needlessly strict. In personal discussions he stated that in the workshop they discussed that all people would slack away from work given the opportunity. He seemed agitated about it. I guess this was how the C-level was "motivated".
- gunselginsel 3y ago
  Interesting. Though, to be fair, C-levels are C-levels because they are the best at doing what they're told to do. So I feel like a CEO just has to say, "obviously WFH is bad" and then the sycophants will parrot that as if it was their own idea.
  - kukkeliskuu 3y ago
    Well, yes. I cannot get into details, but I am pretty confident that the CEO was pressured in a similar fashion as well.

chasd00 3y ago

toolz 3y ago
also important to read the nuance of them "feeling" like losers. Obviously if you're working in tech there's little chance of you actually being a loser in your career (which is probably the most difficult place to find success) so really they'd just need to put some effort into being social and these people would be doing well for themselves, however, in-office can be a huge crutch for people to pretend like they have a social life.
benjaminwootton 3y ago
Is it though? Most companies prioritise their own self interest over nebulous “institutional investment” bogeymen.
- GenerocUsername 3y ago
  Do they? Odd how coordinated so many companies reach the same conclusions, policies, and follow the same trends. Could it be that the board members of these companies are in that nebulous investor class?
  - NoboruWataya 3y ago
    It's not odd at all that people in a similar situation tend to act the same way, particularly when they can see how the others act and realise that following the crowd is the best way to not get fired. Many companies would benefit financially by reducing their office footprint and thereby paying less rent. The idea that boards everywhere would sabotage their own companies to appease commercial real estate investors is tinfoil hat level stuff.

wkat4242 3y ago

Ireland is crazy for jumping on the real estate ship again. This almost bankrupted the country in 2007 because the economy had become so one-sided. I remember the dreary half-finished shopping malls and whole neighborhoods of concrete slabs falling to pieces. And yes I know some of those bottom feeders in our place too. They're the ones constantly distracting you at work with chitchat. I have several people I try to avoid but unfortunately our pisspoor desk booking system (Planon, never buy that!) doesn't even allow to look up where other people are.

lawlessone 3y ago
I don't think we are on it as much this time. prices are sky high again, rents are sky high too. This time though it's more because enough isn't being built to meet demand. A good chunk of property is be gobbled up by AirBNB.

wbobeirne 3y ago

> and from the bottom by those who have yet to grapple with the fact they dont have friends or hobbies and need you in the office so that they dont feel like such embarrassing losers. I can see why office culture doesn't appeal to you, you sound like a grump who doesn't enjoy the comraderie you can form with people that you spend 40 hours a week with. If you can enjoy the cognitive dissonance of socializing with black squares in a zoom, that's great, but I'd rather enjoy the time I spend working, not merely tolerate it. I don't think that makes me a loser.

isodev 3y ago
This is exactly why folks should be free to choose remote or to “band together” in a shared workspace - people aren’t the same and it’s so much better when we can tailor our workspace to fit our personalities and way of working.
lm28469 3y ago
> who doesn't enjoy the comraderie you can form with people that you spend 40 hours a week with. I'd much rather spend that time with people I chose. Some you of you borderline sound like you're suffering from Stockholm syndrome
- layer8 3y ago
  What I don’t get is why you would want to spend half of your waking hours, even remotely, working with people on a team whose company you don’t enjoy? The conclusion I would draw is that I’m on the wrong team or at the wrong company, and then switch as quickly as possible.
  - lm28469 3y ago
    I enjoy my friends, yet I don't want to spend 8 hours a day, 5 days a week in sitting 1 meter away from them. It's a job, it's IT, it's easy, it's well paid, as long I don't have a literal archnemesis annoying me every day I literally don't care who I work with. Not everyone has the luxury to quit a job and find a new one right away, especially in the current climate

whywhywhywhy 3y ago

> the fact they dont have friends or hobbies and need you in the office so that they dont feel like such embarrassing losers You must be a great person to work with if this is whats going on with your internal monologue about the people you interact closely with.

Devasta 3y ago
Why would this be the internal monologue about people I interact closely with? They aren't the ones forcing everyone in.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

tbyehl 3y ago

If you look at RTO mandates coming out of places like IBM and Yahoo during the Before Times, there was clearly an "increase unforced attrition" aspect to them. Layoffs without the pesky WARN notices, severance, etc.

amerkhalid 3y ago

> from the bottom by those who have yet to grapple with the fact they dont have friends or hobbies and need you in the office so that they dont feel like such embarrassing losers. Two anecdotes supporting this. Back in my early career I worked with this dev in their 40s. He always brought his gaming laptop to office and would stay late in the office. He had family and kids, this was the only time he could play games without being bothered. At another job, we had a director who was workaholic and would schedule meetings at insane hours like 7PM. You were not forced to take meetings in person, could dial in but still it was insane. Rumors were that she was going through divorce and work was escape from personal life. Escape from your life is fine but do it without making everyone else's personal life miserable. I can see such people wanting RTO.

coldpie 3y ago

This post is a perfect example of why RTO is bad for everyone, including office-likers like myself. I don't want to have to be anywhere near this guy, lol.

wiseowise 3y ago

> the bottom by those who have yet to grapple with the fact they dont have friends or hobbies and need you in the office so that they dont feel like such embarrassing losers. Projecting much?

Devasta 3y ago
Absolutely not... I have loads of hobbies!

mattgreenrocks 3y ago

WFH is existentially painful for those that have coupled their identity too strongly to their jobs. They're confronted daily with the fact that their coworkers just aren't that into them (e.g. the job, and by extension, them) as they'd like. The likelihood this has happened goes up significantly as you move up the ladder, because the volcano gods demand sacrifice for that. There's also a segment of the population that somewhat overlaps with the previous paragraph that uses work as their primary social outlet.

dogman144 3y ago
I think this and the slightly less gracious way that OP explained it is the most significant driver of RTO from the employee side. It is also why I am shamelessly pro-WFH. The banality of this mindset as the possibly main major contributing cause from labor for RTO and all the many, many issues that office work causes is too much for me to handle. Get some non-work friends and hobbies. Understand career mobility and productivity, if that’s what you really want to prioritize, is equally there via WFH. Leave the rest of us out of it.

wnolens 3y ago

> The RTO is being entirely driven from the top by institutional investors > The return to office has nothing to do with productivity I agree for many big tech firms, but I'll present the other (or my personal) side. I'm a developer. And I am looking for a job in an office, actually about to take one very soon and get out of my remote-only gig. A lot of engineering cultures don't function well without face-to-face, high bandwidth conversation and whiteboard time. 1. Our design process has suffered greatly, specifically the process of collaborating on high-level design and consecutively lowering the conversation into a low-level design. Instead it becomes: one person writes something up, and we all read a doc with bunch of text and diagrams, add comments, owner iterates. Collaboration is serialized. When we try to get into a room and brainstorm, the limits of voice/video chat take over and we can't effectively communicate 3-4 people at a time like you can in the same room. And unfortunately my company hasn't given everyone iPads to whiteboard together, so I think you cut out an appreciable chunk of the engineering population who are primarily visual thinkers (a la 'Visual Thinking' by Temple Grandin). 2. Junior folks flounder, unable to ramp up quickly drinking through such a thin pipe of information (a lot of which is tribal and needs to be received from the mouth of others). The talented folks were going to succeed anyway and have adapted, but the average kid is isolated and out of sight of management. The senior folks love that isolation and never want to return to office. The junior folks may think it's cool, but in 5 years many more will still be junior engineers. 3. Work is more than productivity. I don't need to drink the kool-aid and take the slide down to the ball-pit, but I need daily face-to-face contact else I start to feel alienated. I wish my social life was nested in a loving community of best friends but it's not. I live in NYC, my friends are a 40 min train ride or too busy to meet up on a nightly basis (as am I). I might feel different about this if I had a partner and kids, but then I'd say anti-RTO is driven from competing priorities for a worker's time. Which is fair, but not the argument here.

voisin 3y ago

> The RTO is being entirely driven from the top by institutional investors wanting to avoid losses on property investments and from the bottom by those who have yet to grapple with the fact they dont have friends or hobbies and need you in the office so that they dont feel like such embarrassing losers. This is argument keeps getting parroted without evidence or skepticism. Where's the evidence? Just because many people don't like RTO doesn't mean that RTO is driven by evil forces up to no good. There's nuance - on both sides of the debate! - and it does no one a service to reduce the arguments to bumper stickers. No, employees wanting to work from home don't universally want to loaf off. No, employees that want to work from an office aren't universally middle managers trying to justify their existence. Some people work better at home, others work better at the office. Some companies have found WFH to improve productivity overall and are flexible, and other companies have found RTO to improve productivity overall. If you work better from home, go work for the former. If you work better from the office, go work for the latter. Let the market decide. If WFH is overall more productive, eventually the RTO companies' performance will suffer, and vice versa. No need to blame things on the boogeyman behind the curtain!

hellisothers 3y ago
I think the problem is, if you want to work remote you don’t care if other people work in the office or not. However, if you want to work in the office you really want others in the office as that is the purported main point of being there so one side is forcing the other into their desired working situation. This is exactly what the OP is describing, people above/below/around compelling RTO.
- voisin 3y ago
  So go to a company that doesn’t have RTO requirements. The market should sift employees and employers to an equilibrium where people work in the environment that suits them. We already have this. People that can’t stand sitting at a screen all day and need to be outdoors to feel good find jobs that suit that. People who need to interact and not do paperwork find jobs that suit this. And vice versa. RTO and WFH will just be the next phase of that. I look forward to the market showing us, objectively, which is most effective on the whole when enough companies with radically different policies compete with each other. I have a strong suspicion which will prevail but I want to see objective real world results.

intended 3y ago

Id be more specific. RTO is pushing commute costs to workers, which is why RTO is miss priced in the market. If your commute time was paid for by the firm, all the firms calculations would shift dramatically. A worker rise up moment, if we ever needed more. The commonly stated goal is to “work together” - something you can do if you have years of experience being in online communities, and alien if you have not.