Don't get me wrong, I'm pretty much locked into a contract through mid-2024 in a work-from-home capacity so this recent media blitz and companies "changing their minds" about work from home aren't affecting me personally for the time being, but it is interesting to me for several reasons. I don't live in a "tech hub" city so it was recently my first real ability to see what companies are dealing with talent wise. While I haven't worked for any of the tech giants I have been doing modern web development and can say without hesitation that I've been operating far above and beyond what the largest companies in the world seem to expect as far as employee (developer) output. I constantly ask for bigger and broader reach in the projects I do because I know I can handle it but I've found that these companies expect teams to operate at the team's pace which significantly hampers my ability to show what a work-from-home employee can truly produce.
The other thing I can't seem to get out of my head is that it's felt like a waterfall effect with the messaging in the media. First it was the banks, then when they couldn't get people to listen it's become other businesses. Specifically tech businesses most recently. This feels very much like a coercion by wall street. I kind of feel like if I was a fly on the wall in loan negotiations between the largest tech companies and the largest banks, I'm guessing banks may be changing terms of loans based on whether or not the company is doing most of their work as work-from-home or not.
Finally, third interesting insight, I've recently been reading articles about how US worker productivity is falling precipitously. I have so many questions about this. Primarily, how is it possible that employee output is so bad when company profits are so good?