You're still right that plenty of people make irrational decisions under whatever incentive structure they're in, but I think that the steelman version of GP's argument would probably go something like:
If we see a large % of companies going full-RTO, then maybe there's something to be said for the bet that RTO is a long-term competitive advantage.
If there is a very strong impact on competitiveness, maybe we will notice in about a decade, if companies don't collude in stopping it.
Person flatly said no one works in WFH. I am also a manager and responded my team busted their balls the whole time, and delivered results. My personal opinion is my team did 120% of their productivity. I also acknowledge that some people are not built for it and their productivity may fall. I believe a manager can deal with this (either creating the right task-incentive structure, or getting the person off the bus). After my impassioned argument, the person said ..nope .. people just don't work during WFH. This was a social event, just the two of us talking, so I am quite sure this guy was being honest.
I also ran into a different person in a leadership position (just not very high; more like technical leadership; ex-professor; stints at Google). He was convinced the real reason FAANG hired so crazily was because productivity per employee had dropped dramatically. His belief was no one worked during WFH. Again, my impassioned arguments and personal anecdotes did not really move this person.
TL;DR: if there is no data, decision makers are going to stick to what they know best. And what current execs / c-suite knows best is in-office. They haven't learned management techniques for fully-remote yet.
I also started compiling research showing the value of in-person interaction: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34673235
> Workers with full schedule flexibility report 29% higher productivity and 53% greater ability to focus than workers with no ability to shift their schedule, according to a just-announced report from Future Forum. But do bosses trust employees to be productive when working out of the office?
> Microsoft released a new study, where it found that 85% of leaders say that the “shift to hybrid work has made it challenging to have confidence that employees are being productive.” More concretely, 49% of managers of hybrid workers “struggle to trust their employees to do their best work.” This lack of trust in worker productivity has led to what Microsoft researchers termed productivity paranoia: “where leaders fear that lost productivity is due to employees not working, even though hours worked, number of meetings, and other activity metrics have increased.”
So workers are more productive with remote flexibility, working more hours and managers and execs still want more.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/glebtsipursky/2022/11/03/worker...
nothing about this figure from managers says employees are more or less productive, just that managers having a feeling workers are less productive, they can't trust them etc.
sounds like the managers are just projecting their feelings onto employees.
In my opinion and experience, coworker’s performance vary greatly in and of itself and we can hardly ever correctly measure a single person’s “productivity” in a non-faulty way. Many companies’ simply fall back on more-or-less subjective, textual analysis of their workers and base basically every decision on that.
Let's assume none of us have any data to make an informed decision. Then what is our "default path"? In-office arrangement is something that has been tried out for decades if not more. The decision makers, who are typically C-suite or execs, are specifically the ones who progressed and thrived in that system. Guess what they are going to choose when there is a lot of uncertainty? Obviously an in-office setup, with maybe some concessions to working from home 1-2 days a week because that's comfortable even for them.
The only exception would be young founders who haven't learned any setting yet, and in fact who would like the allure of a "digital nomad" lifestyle more to embrace fully-remote.
I've known math wizards, PhD mega-thinkers who would be terrible at leading organizations and pushing projects.
Lots of mgmt is incompetent, and there is a bell curve there just as bell-y and curve-y as other employee ranks. Like, basically by definition 50% are below average like anywhere else.
The missing piece is that plenty of these < 50th percentile can get jobs, often high level ones in respected companies. It's often who you know, how you make people feel, and what sort of connections and optics you bring to the table.