Hybrid work is doomed
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
I think this is a big part of the argument that is not discussed, the office environment is so awful you can take my wfh from my cold dead hands, make the office environment better then we can talk.
I get _so_ much more work done working from home, the extra wins I get each week actually makes me more enthusiastic about my job, I have more time so I have less imposter syndrome and because I'm getting more sleep - I remember more.
Obviously, home office space quality varies wildly, but a whole lot of people who spent their careers until 2020 in open floor plans suddenly got private offices with a door.
I'm not saying I'd never go back to any office, but I'm not interested in a bench desk in big open space again.
I live in 50 m² flat, my homeoffice is my bedroom. Tiny desk, one monitor. Here in the office I have a huge table with 2 monitors, the electronics lab and the workshop is right behind me and my team sits here.
Not all jobs are the same and not all people are the same. There is good reason to like working from the office. The fact that you prefer working from home doesn't mean that only people with private office at work want to work from the office.
One side of the argument allows for the possibility of people working in an office if that works better for them, the other side of the argument insists that everyone does the same thing regardless of suitability.
The "one side of the argument" that I replied to, was the accusation that only people with private offices want to work from there rather then from home.
Also, what's the point your are trying to make?
coffeefirst implied that only people with private offices at work want to work from the office. I gave some counterpoints explaining that there are other good reasons to work from the office. I like working from the office, and I don't have a private room there.
I'm all for remote and hybrid work, but some comments here a bit over the top. Live and let live, why is it a problem for you that I prefer to work from the office? I bend over backwards to make sure the remote people on my team can work from home, even tough this can get pretty annoying if you do hardware.
(At least the office doesn't have screaming kids in it.)
This is where the conversation needs to go. The office could be great, if businesses invested in the best space and furniture in the most vibrant locations, with a variety of working options. Solitude at home doesn’t breed a good culture, but nor does being forced to go to a shitty building in a soulless location to be uncomfortable for 8 hours a day just because an employee needs a paycheck.
Companies may hybrid for a while while WFH jobs are plentiful. Sooner of later, the WFH opportunities will dry or fill up and back to office will be the new normal. Then hybrid will slowly diminish to nothing and in office will be the new normal.
Presumably you mean interesting urban centers? That's fine for people who live in the city. It's mostly awful for anyone who needs to regularly commute in. I worked in the relatively nearby major city for about 18 months a few days a week. I even had a pretty convenient commuter rail line. But it still involved getting up before 6am and spending about 4 hours a day to commute.
I don't care how nice the office equipment is or how great the food options are but I couldn't have susstained that long-term.
“The company just isn’t in a position to do more than 1 day a week of work from home right now.”
Literally every other team does 4 days a week of work from home…
==
"Some higher up doesn't want it to"
My perceptions - wfh is more productive and comfortable for me, the alternative narrative is offices are better (because reasons), and we need to have face to face etc etc. The arguments are presented without facts and contrary to the evidence, there is an alternative reason - control, lack of trust etc, that is being hidden.
as GP said they could make things nice but, nah
"Do you believe your own lying eyes, over me?"
Gaslighting is a specific form of it.
> Also the lost time in travel - say 2 hours a day I can spend walking
My commute to the office was a 35 minute walk each way through a park and a historic city centre. Of course YMMV, but it rubs me the wrong way when people who decided to take on long commutes for better pay talk about how it's being taken away from them and everyone should feel the same way, when lots of people make the compromise of living in a city to not have those problems.
And for that in a hybrid setup you still have the option to walk to work. You can't expect every soul in an office to be able to afford a central place where you can walk to the office, it's simply not feasible. YMMV a lot, not sure why your anecdote should be taken as an argument, very few people have the privilege to afford a central location to live in, many more have to commute.
I have never seen an office like this, except on TV.
Sure, everyone happens to live right next to several good potential employers in their field, but instead choses to take a job further away because money.
Yeah that sounds nice, but it is more comfortable than your own home?
Not everyone lives in a luxury house.
Otherwise it's just a living space with a bed.
In that case I would urge one to get themselves a home rather than an office job with great perks. That's a better investment in my book. No, I don't mean buying, even a shared rented flat could be your home.
(Some of my colleagues returned to the office as soon as it was allowed, just to spend some time away from their families.)
At the home office, I make coffee exactly the way I prefer. If I want variety, I can take a 10 minute break and pop down to the Bucks or McD’s.
Office kitchenettes… feh.
https://tadleckman.wordpress.com/2010/11/10/creamer-hoarder/
how am I supposed to engage in a pointless yet personally significant act of rebellion and defiance without access to the supply closet!?
(/s not /s)
I get less sick, can live near nice walking tracks, and don't need to commute.
I genuinely think most very big cities will slowly die, just like they slowly grew.
Sure, there's a lot of value to working from home. But there is also a lot of value from being in the same room as your co-workers. Engaging in face to face conversations, bonding, joking, etc. I've gained some of my best friends thru work and I just don't think that would have happened over Zoom.
For some individual contributors, 100% remote work is perfect. For some, it's solitary and unfulfilling.
A lot of that was due to good leadership. My PM and tech lead setup a Discord for non-work-related discussions and encouraged its use by posting in there regularly. So we were able to replicate, to some extent, the hallway jokes, conversations, and bonding experience. We also had some infrequent but still valuable face-to-face meetups when COVID was at its low points, which also helped with relationship-building. Importantly, most of our face-to-face meetups were social and not work-oriented, so they left a lot of room for developing friendships.
To date, it's been the closest group that I've worked with by far. Many of us still hang out regularly. In fact, I just had drinks with one former coworker and his girlfriend last night. And I enjoyed the company so much that I wound up coming back to it after a short break.
My point is that it's still possible to create meaningful human interactions via Zoom and other digital tools. You just have to be more creative and hopefully work in a environment that properly supports it.
Disclaimer, I am not talking about forcing employees to sit on a zoom call with a glass of wine in their hands on a friday afternoon. That is the most tactless arrogant stupid shit I have seen in a long time.
I am talking about structured, planned, continuous mentoring and fun in the small moments.
And I'll tell you what -- it was _amazing_. A typical "5-second good morning" conversation turned into a 10-minute catch-up. Which turned into a 30-minute system design discussion. I loved it, we were both juiced. If you could guarantee that all in-person connections in an office would go like that, I would give up remote work in a heartbeat.
Unfortunately, that's not how it works. People get used to the grind, the commute, and their office environment. They don't (generally) bring that kind of impromptu excitement every day. Our interaction was a mix of curiosity, pandemic anxiety, and joy in our work. You can't snap your fingers and expect that to materialize every day.
The bean-counter in me can't justify the millions of dollars in the annual office spend to (hopefully) enable connections like that. Which is why I am fully on the quarterly-or-semi-annual-retreat train. Ditch the office, and point that money towards infrequent in-person events. Pay for people to come in from wherever they are (if they want to). I suspect that's a _much_ better ROI.
You are allowed to bond and have fun on calls. Yes, you can't smell or touch people but that is not something you want in a business context anyway.
Last company I worked with was fully remote and we where super close to each other even though I have never met them in person. I never felt alone. Currently, I am super isolated. The issue is that my current company simply refuses to learn how to do remote properly, so it sucks.
I think it is often simply an ego thing of people who found socializing in the office easy and refuse to learn how to do it remote which has different rules and requires a different skill set.
I hope the people who thrive with remote work do not lose it. But I also hope we don't forget the value of being together.
I’ve been gauging the values of a company lately based on their return-to-office mandates, because now, like seldom before, we have a very clear metric of what the company values.
A company that truly cares about the well-being of it workforce makes for very effective and highly motivated employees that lends itself to higher productivity and, if managed correctly, increased profits…
> _Offices have never been about increased efficiency. Instead, the office has acted as a brake, slowing down a company’s mission to sell products or services_
I think this could signal yet again for disruption in industries. If a company is intentionally throwing away the effectiveness of a happy workforce, a competitor with some common sense could capture that and start killing dinosaurs that might be due to die already.
Anyways, just my two cents :)
Is and always has been nonsense. Team? Yes! Family? Families members don’t get added and removed based on market value. Also the heads of the family don’t split with a huge chunk of the family treasure when a certain goal has been reached, leaving the rest to call someone else father and mother ;)
Always cringed at that one, even when meant well.
It certainly can feel more that way when the majority of employees have worked together in the same place for decades, when management has gone out of their way multiple times to accommodate individuals as difficult personal issues arose, and when most of the staff aren't constantly searching for better pay elsewhere. I have seen it.
However, I think that sort of situation is very much an increasingly rare exception, and unfortunately most of the managers using this kind of language are blowing hot air. It's like success or 'greatness', if you feel compelled to keep telling everyone you have it, you probably don't.
Just demanding people come in, and suffer a decrease in quality of life, is dumb and will backfire.
I think there is no way we are going back to the 100% office life for most workers, as we are not going back to horses and carriages.
I'm a hybrid worker departing my position to go full remote. It's not that I hate the office, but it's so wasteful for me. My worst work is done in the office, and my best at home. Coming to the office feels like an anachronism - collaboration is inefficient because of the noise, meeting rooms are crowded (and I waste 5+ minutes to resettle on a new room) and peers are annoying when they chitchat (including passerbys distracting me).
Junior team members, the ones that are supposedly most eager to come to the office, are working from home more than the allowed maximum.
The only exceptions I'm seeing wanting to come every day are brand new hires who need constant help, the odd office environment fans and people who have poor work environments at home (small children).
I think it would be misguided to completely discard the office, as they can serve well in some scenarios including occasional "bonding get togethers" . And for that we'll see highly flexible hybrid, or largely remote, becoming more and more common.
Ha, I've seen the same thing. I have two junior-ish reports, and when we started the discussion of eventual return to office last year they both said they would be in all the time to soak up the team building and culture establishment they missed out on. We returned to voluntary office work for those that wanted it three months ago and neither one has made it in a single day, they have stayed full remote (and they get their work done so I couldn't care less.)
This is only true for the biggest offices of the largest companies.
The massive majority of firms are just renting something they could easily stop renting.
They just won't because the decision makers are too used to working on the office and scared of the change. It's really that simple, a simple habit bias of the decision makers.
Question is, how much will they be able to change back before a new generation comes in with less of a dogmatic view.
> There, among the scrolls and codices they copied, religious professionals sat at desks and performed skilled labor that couldn’t be done elsewhere.
That is correct, the office as an institution was created to
1. cluster work and
2. enable work to be done that could not be done elsewhere (because of machinery/materials, etc)
The first cause, clustering and organizing work has been disolved by the organizing capabilities of the modern web.
The second cause has (at least in knowledge work) lost importance due to digitalization.
I think all in all the office as an optimized for work space will endure, companies will still have them and nippy small startups will still share them somehow in the future but I do not think our usage of them will ever return any where near what it was pre 2020, especially not with the commuting lifestyle
Plenty of stuff gets built with just email and IRC. My team never turns on their camera because it's just an extra hassle and we get plenty done. Most of our collaboration happens over IM and PRs along with a short scrum at the beginning of the day. We used cameras for a few months and it added nothing to the meetings.
A lot of people mention whiteboards. I only do white boarding a few times a year but IME the best is to get a cheap (under $50) drawing tablet and use a whiteboard app (webex even has one built in, I use whiteboard.com for my side projects and tutoring.) One of my coworkers tried pointing a camera at a physical whiteboard and it was super hard to see much of anything.
Being able to see the faces and body-language of your colleagues by being on-camera during the meetings solves most of that higher-bandwidth comms that in-person brings, and using either a simple drawing app or even something like MS Teams' Whiteboard app lets you get that whiteboard like experience.
I suspect if companies just standardized on some tablet/drawing pad hardware and software--and gave it to employees--a lot of the complaints would go away. I'm not sure it's mostly a technology problem at this point.
Our larger scoping/planning/brainstorming meetings are spread out enough that an hour-long planning call isn't that much of a burden, rarely more than once a sprint if even that frequent. We instead try to pre-plan or hash out things in threads and emails ahead of time, then use those as notes/outlines for a condensed call.
Far more common for us is an impromptu 15-20min discussion after standup to help unblock someone on the team, or a huddle when someone is stuck in the middle of the day. That fluidity feels more like the kind of casual interaction you'd get asking for help in-office.
That's all the pros and cons. It doesn't fundamentally change the work experience itself because in any given conversation at least one other person will be having their remote day, forcing the interactions to take place in a remote-friendly way. You can sit at home or sit in the office, but you're still a remote worker. Many people, especially younger ones, won't take the deal. They have no family burden to escape and everywhere else to be. Therefore the return to office is all or nothing.
Any company doing hybrid right now really wants to be fully in office. And they'll boil the frog to get you there.
More interestingly, what will new companies do? Financial momentum is in favor of remote work. The burden of proof is on new companies to justify why they should reduce their runway by 25% and limit their hiring pool by investing in an office in some place. If there really is an advantage or an efficiency to in-person work that could otherwise be remote, we will find it shortly.
Only because people insist on defining hybrid as "n days per week in the office where n = 3 +/-1". Let teams and their leaders decide what works bet for the team. My team lives all over the country, and once every 2-3 months we meet in the office for a week. Yes, this involves flights and hotels, and I'm not saying it will work for everyone, but it's working for us in a way that 2-3X per week in the office absolutely would not have.
All that said, tech is something of a bubble with respect to this discussion while hardly completely unique. The few times I've had to go into the nearest major city (not to my office), my take is that rush hour traffic is essentially fully back to pre-pandemic levels--although public transit including commuter rail still seems pretty light.
thanks and bye, i'd like to keep my dignity
I like going to the office, I like meeting people there, I like having some meetings face to face. There's a time and place for everything, but for the office, that is no more than 2 days per week.
Agreed, however the problem with this is it only works if I'm in the office the same days as everyone else, meaning we need enough desks for everyone _anyway_ otherwise I might as well just be at home.
Hybrid work has many possible variants with different trade-offs, that can be tailored the needs and wants of each specific team. It's a branching tree of options that can be sliced every which way, not just a binary choice. Unless it's thought of as a binary choice by the management.
That sounds pretty much perfect to me!
> It's a branching tree of options that can be sliced every which way, not just a binary choice
The only way that doesn't work is having management plus some staff in the office while others are hybrid. It's a disaster for everyone involved in my experience!
1) Recognize that you're paying people for different types of work. You spend most of your days in meetings, but hopefully the majority of your company is heads down on product and services. Different jobs have different needs.
2) Provide incentives! Give your employees a reason to return to the office. Have lunch catered once or twice a week, or more. Provide decent coffee. Add EV chargers. Open a game room or gym.
3) Listen to your employees and try to appreciate _why_ they're asking for something different than what you're offering. Solve their problems.
4) Make sure your network is up to the job. Aggressively fix connectivity both away from the office (e.g. VPN) and at the office (Wifi, Ethernet, etc). Upgrade the damn MPLS that's running an office building with 50 MBps for 500 people, that routes all traffic back through your data center regardless of destination.
5) Fix your conference rooms. Are they easy? Do the gadgets actually work? Can people on the phone cut into a conversation? Can all parties hear each other?
6) Fix the AC that's frosting windows in one office and melting furniture in another.
7) Visit your sites without notice to ensure they meet standards. Eat in your cafeterias occasionally. The food isn't the same as in the executive dining room.
8) Completely rethink the open office space and your other floor plans.
> Yet even now, as office space expands like poison gas into our homes, [...]
I am not a big fan of working at an office every day, but I consider effectively giving a part of my home to my employer (so I can work for them) as a significant disadvantage of working from home. Does everyone else just have a spare room which they can use, fully equipped with ergonomic desk and chair, screen etc.? Don't they have partners, house mates, family etc. who would also like to have a say on what happens with that part of the shared house?
What if multiple people in a household have gone to working from home? Does each of them have their own office space at home?
In any case, my understanding is that relatively recent tax law changes make it even less applicable for most people.
Anyway, I doubt that compensation would be enough to move to another apartment that does have an extra room which can be used for an office (for each member of the household, if needed).
Maybe because when you are working from home, you are not commuting and incurring costs on the road network, public transportation, pollution, etc.
> I doubt that compensation would be enough to move to another apartment
Probably not. But if you knew this was the case, you might get a bigger apartment next time you do move, in order to save yourself the commute time, if nothing else.
It was awesome, really enjoyed working in an office without all the distractions from home.
Then on a few days a lot more people came in and it was so loud I had trouble focusing (idiotic open-space WeWork office), and I remembered why I disliked working in an office in the first place.
For some reason in software engineering there is an insane level of disrespect for the workers. We get big empty rooms with +50 desks. The overwhelming majority weren't from my team so the ever present chatter wasn't even relevant to me.
I love interacting with people from my team, but the current office situation is simply too pathetic for me to forgo my quiet home office.
And, yes, white shirts and ties too. Hardly something unique to modern software engineering.
Even with the examples of Microsoft or Apple campuses, think about the miserable traffic on the 405. Employees who live even 30 minutes away are expected to be stuck in traffic for at least an hour one way. All for what? To take one or two meetings that day in person and the rest with people around the world?
People like deterministic days. They like being able to not have to waste their weekends on cleaning from the week beforehand because they’re too busy at work.
I don’t think hybrid work is doomed, just that those who choose to go into the office may be outnumbered by the next generation who prefers to not.
However, when I drove to work, the pool was the last thing on my mind until it was a huge issue.
No thanks to on premise, I am so much happier & productive like this.(its like they WANT us to be less productive lawl)
So I sort of agree but I think its going to tip the other way: companies will try to do hybrid and it will prove to be hard, annoying, expensive and generally a waste of time so it will tip back the other way to full WFH - possibly with some sort of "satellite office" or "shared office" model which is more distributed and flexible so that when people really want to meet up they have somewhere to go.
A significant fraction of the people we've been interviewing has asked for hybrid. All 15 engineers in our office prefer it, as well as the 60-odd sales, marketing etc. Working purely remote can be effective for focus time and some personality types, but on the whole I've seen that it's lonely, alienating, worse for developing a group culture and only works for a privileged few who have a separate working space, aircon etc. Worse, it dehumanizes and turns some employees in some companies into basically faceless mechanical turks who are measured only on their output.
I will never go back to 100% remote.
How else would you measure an engineer?
Personally, I'm not hiring based on "number of algorithms written per day" or "number of Jira tickets done in a week". For one, I'd almost certainly not get the kinds of people I'd love to work with day-in day-out for years. For another, it strips people of their humanity and autonomy whilst also discouraging contributions outside of measurable work. No doubt other EMs thrive running a faceless sweat shop, but it's not for me.
Sounds a bit like we are all family. I must admit I go to work to have an output and get paid for it, and I like producing above the average, though I don't work in a faceless sweatshop, most managers like measuring everything in my experience.
I think you can work hard and have your output measured without being in a sweatshop, and if there is no measures then it's very easy to fall into some sort of open loop with no end. I have friends from places I've worked, but work is work, and a job is a job, its an agreement to produce something for money and at the end of the day I go home and do something else. I do feel covid has shown everyone that this is the case, and to present a job as anything else is disingenuous.
To your other points, the reality is most of us have to work to live. So why not make that work the least painful it can be? There's a reason why we largely obey laws; it's because prisons suck and we want to avoid them. In a prison you are dehumanised, your autonomy is removed, you become a faceless number, you rarely leave your cell, your routine is controlled and you're monitored relentlessly. It's not a great life and I would hate to inflict that on anyone.
It's the "Secret Persuasion Mind Trick"[0] to get you back in the office full time.
When the pandemic happened there were a lot of people (especially on HN) screaming about how the office was over and we were all free, we'd be sipping Martinis on the beach in the Bahamas whilst logging on to zoom. Then the pandemic started to recede and a drum beat emerged of how everyone will come back to the office in the end.
I think the truth is neither. Technology and infrastructure has evolved significantly in the last 2 decades bringing us to the point where we can do significant parts of our jobs from home. And for some people that'll be their preference, and for some companies that'll be a preference too. Either because they see it as a way to win and retain talent, or because they find ways to cut costs.
One of the hilarious side notes to this is in the UK where a particular politician decided he was going to insist every civil servant return to the office - leaving passive aggressive notes on their desk if they were absent. Naturally, this politician isn't a details man, and so wasn't aware of the slightly inconvenient fact that the British Government were saving shed loads of cash by not needing desks for everyone and in some sectors, like the Department for Education, the number of employees out number desks by a factor of 2:1.
Hybrid work is here, it's been here for a while. The pandemic just brought more attention to it.
What I saw at Mozilla with a remote-heavy workforce is that declining office attendance is a vicious cycle. The fewer people there are in the office on any given day, the less incentive there is for those people to keep showing up.
You can mitigate that to some extent by requiring people to be in the office on a few specific days (as many "hybrid work" programs are trying to do). The problem then is the company has a lot of expensive real estate that's only being used 3 days a week. That seems wasteful. I predict that as leases come up for renewal, and as they get more used to remote work, a lot of companies are going to look at their office investments and downsize or eliminate them. The super-rich Big Tech companies and the like will continue to spend eye-watering amounts of money on lightly used office space and services, because they can, but I don't see how that's going to work for normal companies.
Just curious, are you implying that you think declining office attendance is a bad thing, or just writing from the point of view of someone who does?
FWIW I think remote work has many good effects. It's let me live in New Zealand and do interesting work, for example. I think it's good for communities. I'm generally very pleased by the explosion in remote working. But after working from home exclusively for six years I'm enjoying being in an office.
https://medium.learningbyshipping.com/creating-the-future-of...
This really resonated with me:
"It will be tempting for some to continue to believe we will return to the old normal and operate as we once did.
It will be tempting for others to search for a few changes and make those permanent and hope the rest will go back to normal.
Still others will firmly believe that some approach that picks the best changes and just adds them to what was going on will be the path to the future.
If these patterns sound familiar it is because they are the patterns of a failed response to a disruptive change. The idea that everything stays the same except for a few changes around the edges caused every incumbent to lose in the face of step-function change."- WFH to be done well demand a home office, witch means a room with electricity, connectivity, A/C|heating, furniture, ... and a lockable door. This room should be offered to the company in exchange of a contracted fee and then the remote work can be done. This means not all potentially eligible for such jobs can do that in their own actual accommodations and demanding such kind of home office is a good way to make WFH a serious way to work instead of a temporary setup or a way for modern tertiary sector slavery;
- hybrid work is a NONSENSE because demand under-utilized offices and people living near enough them, double or movable gears, commuting etc. Oh hybrid does not means of course meeting sometimes to form new teams etc.
- offices are not a break to innovation are just a way to work, one needed in the past, far less needed now and being in a transitional phase habits play a bad role and that's the real break...
Apple and Google have invested heavily in real estate. Google has over 1mil sqft in NYC. What's going to happen to all that space? My guess is it will take about 5yrs to know. There's going to be some big change to commercial real estate would be my guess.
Do I want to devote nearly all my waking hours to work or do I want to have some modicum of personal time that isn’t devoted to making other people money?
When looked at through that lens, the “WFH debate” seems wildly stupid. The C-suite better wake up to the fact that this is the choice, not the BS narrative they’re pushing. Collaboration isn’t what feeds their egos. Controlling the lives of others is what does, and we can all see it now. The flimsy protests otherwise only make execs look petty and small. The jig is up bros.
This flexible policy is evidently very progressive. How many people could say that was the case before Covid?
Today managers have answers to the unknown factors: employee home office setup, employee competence for maintaining their home computer, and de facto productivity.
I don’t see how we ever go back.
Simply it was not a "return" but a "first time in the office".
I'm sure he had to squash some relictance as well.
Their last few sentences clarified the whole thing for me. The office is an institution separate from where it is physically, and management will work to recreate it (possibly in a new form).
He's right, on the whole. The Office, the institution, gives executives a sense of place and purpose. What fun is it to be in charge if you can't make people squirm? It's not about money for these people (they have enough). It's about power. Of course they want their favorite toy back.
This being said, the Soviet system didn't fall immediately after Chernobyl and neither will global capitalism after Covid-19, but the process seems to be starting. It's possible that things will fall right back where they were; it's also possible that there will be opportunities to force change. I don't think we're even halfway through the Covid era, even if (as I hope) the worst of the disease itself is over.
i think all us desk monkeys with borderline (or fully) bullshit jobs have no good reason to be in an office full time.
Many do not.
This is the central point, I think. The office can be changed, but it won't emerge through the gradual processes (invariably, out of a worker's favor) preferred by capitalism. The bastards in charge didn't even want remote work in March 2020; it will take a nasty motherfucker of a fight to get anything from them.
The problem is that five-day-per-week WFH is mostly a dead end. It can work if you have an independent, international reputation (of the kind that no employer, except in academia, wants a worker ever to get... and that, if you have, you will constantly be accused of favoring over your assigned duties) but otherwise, it's going to put you at a ceiling. If you're WFH all the time, there will be no investment in your career; you will not be perceived as a "go-getter" or a "high potential worker. You are just trading time for money, which no one really respects. Of course, 90% of y'all aren't going to get managerial investment in your career even if you do go into the office, but the fact that the creeping mutual disengagement isn't acknowledged is what keeps you in a job.
At the same time, spending 40+ hours per week in an office where managers (sometimes unintentionally, often deliberately) fuck with your fight-or-flight mechanisms is extremely unhealthy. So, five days per week of ass-in-chair is no good either. And for half of the population, the long-term illnesses it causes cancel out the benefits. Will it go away? Maybe. I'm worried, though.
I think WFH always be something you have to negotiate for. It'll always be "a privilege". (Reminder: under capitalism, housing and food are privileges.) You'll have to do what people did before 2020: start out on 5 ass-in-chair days, perform well, scale up (you're implicitly allowed one day/week of WFH per year) and perform better on your WFH days (feel free to down-moderate your performance on in-office days). That strategy will remain open, and the public sector may move to a more forgiving structure... but private-sector managers are always going to want, at least, the "right" to demand 5 ass-in-chair days as, if nothing else, a way to punish perceived low performers.
I hope I'm wrong. On the outside, I'm an athletic and good-looking middle-aged man, but I'm invisibly disabled (PTSD, digestive issues, Ashkenazi risk factors for even more serious diseases related to stress, etc.) and, while I should be able to live a pretty good life if I can avoid pointless [1] stress, ten years more of standard corporate culture would almost certainly kill me. I fucking hate corporate capitalism and would fight in a war to end it. Realistically, though, I don't think the office is going anywhere. RTO-ers will get the promotions and they'll make the new rules, and if the last fifty years are any indicator, the new rules will be engineered to seem like improvements but be subtly worse than the old ones.
----
[1] The funny thing about stress is that real stress is a lot less damaging to the body than the low-level dysphoric stress of office life. Being in a life-threatening situation isn't nearly as damaging as spending thousands of hours surrounded by people who have malevolent intentions (i.e., a willingness to deprive you of income, even for the slightest personal benefit) but being able to do nothing about it. It's being trapped that fucks people up.