Those who are entering the workforce, remote working is fun for greybeards and terrible for fresh grads, interns and apprentices.
So completely do away with tech hubs. People can continue to grow organically, they are free to stay or move as makes sense to them individually.
As a society, we should be striving to continue decoupling work from our identity.
New employees, at the bottom of the pay scale, are competing with employees making far more (with vesting) for homes.
Democratizing this across a larger number of cities (and towns!) seems healthy.
Disclaimer: Biased, as have to move regularly for spouse's job, so RTO wouldn't work for me.
- Companies just aren't interested in training people if they can hire someone trained somewhere else.
- Project-based time accounting doesn't account for time spent mentoring and transferring knowledge.
- Some older workers withhold knowledge and aren't punished for it. Some older workers share knowledge and aren't rewarded for it.
All this existed prior to COVID and expansion of work from home.
I see people mention in these threads that in-person mentoring and networking is somehow "just better", but no source or wide-population evidence is ever provided. It's always "trust me bro" and "it helped me", whereas the reality is a lot closer to what you described.
There are lots of companies with shitty in-office cultures where new employees get hazed and bullied, but never productively mentored. Either way, for the last 15-20 years at least, the burden of learning has been almost entirely on the employee, regardless of whatever corporate PR drones may say.
This anecdote to say that I'd probably been terrible at a remote job while in the old structures. Now I'm married with a child, but I get to call the shots on daily routine, so to speak. I can even work late nights without mom coming to admonish.