Nothing exploded while most companies had no idea whatsoever on how to implement it properly. Things worked mostly fine even though it was through a panic emergency plan that was completely winged due to sheer necessity.

Imagine if it was a plan properly designed and implemented? All this bullshit of RTO is getting old for me exactly because of this point, nothing was done in what would be even close to the optimal way for working remotely and things are still going ok...

Some parts of it were coupled with parents trying to homeschool their kids (for younger kids, at least, the parental attention required for remote school was high enough it wasn't too far off from simply home-schooling) while "working". Plus the extra stress of, you know, the whole being-in-a-pandemic thing. I recall some grumbling in those days about remote worker productivity and it's like, yeah, no shit, daycares and schools are all closed and households are all dual-income because game theory and zero-sum competition for housing/schools, so....

Those parts ought to be disregarded for any kind of lessons-learned from this, as far as the broader viability of WFH. 2020 through early 2021, at the very least, had some strong confounding factors going on which, one hopes, will not be common in the future.

I don't think it went "just fine". It looked like companies were doing well because we were in a bubble market.

I definitely feel, and observe, a noticeable decrease in productivity and speed of execution compared to where my org was a few years ago. I know others have noticed it too, including management.

On top of all that, companies are expected to run leaner than before because now that the bubble is over, apparently everyone remembered that having a sane balance sheet and making a profit are things that matter. So now we want per-worker productivity to increase because we can't hire as many people.

The basic social contract of work has not changed. Tech workers have better pay and benefits than almost anyone else, and we should not be whiny about this. Most workers in other fields had to return to the office too.

> we did a massive 3-year WFH experiment and overall it went just fine.

Did it go fine because it was massive?

I agree. This is where the people that can draw lines in the sand are even more important.

Hmm... the complaints are getting old? I guess the beatings need to continue until morale improves.

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Hard disagree with "If you were hired with the expectation that you go in the office, RTO is an eventual expected outcome." Ask yourself why do we need to RTO? Who needs the RTO?

1. of all the norm for a couple of years is home office

2. it is an objective benefit

3. the norm is what the majority want it to be

Why does it have to be the norm?

We can't just stick to what's been done previously just because it used to be that way. Clearly, for years, workers have been productive remotely. I get some people like being in the office more than WFH, but the "some" is key here and does not align with an RTO mandate

Agreed. If the expectation was to work from the office when you were hired, you should expect to go back to the office once the pandemic is/was over. Otherwise, why would you take a job in an office if you didn't want to work there (there - as in "in the office")?

3. Separate the wheat from the chaff. The chaff come to the office.

haha. Because loyal == high performing. That is how it works. There is absolutely no way that high performing employees that can get a job by crossing the street will ever think about jumping ship because of the shitty manner they are treated.

Problem is loyal != performant. The most valuable engineers want it all, so they will probably leave because they can.

hah. i have some bad news for them. the cat is out of the bag. they may be able to force people to do things in the short term but long term they are going to become obsolete.

It was rebranded as cancel culture and demonized

Until management can prove being in office drives productivity and all that energy was not merely fueled by lots of people around each other being just as useless, it’s a bias to maintain power and privilege

The economic philosophy of our society is no more a sacrosanct truth than religion

Office life is a social prison that enables their expropriation of agency and outputs

this was due to low interest rates and savings/stimmies not anything about remote work

What did we build exactly? The current model of tech open offices originated in the early 2000s. Before that we had cubicles, starting around the 60s and 70s. And something else before that. Office buildings themselves don't go all that far back, maybe a couple hundred years.

None of these is the "right" model. We will continue to evolve to what suits the present work culture and requirements, and WFH is where we have reached for now.