I'm often struck by how quickly we went back to old inefficient habits
They feel that way because you know where your local maximum is. But that isn't the maximum for a whole organization.
If the people on the factory floor have to show up for work every day why should you get to stay home? If the business you're in has lots of gray legal risk, working from home means more things in writing. There are good interactions that can happen in bullpens and hallway and (I hate that I'm using this word) synergy from overheard conversations.
I don't think the office as it was (open floor plan) helped any one. I don't think that we all need to go in all the time. There is a happy medium that would give us "the best of all worlds" and we should be looking for that!
Different jobs, different pros and cons?
If sales reps have to be away from home 3 weeks a month, why do the factory floor workers get a stable work site?
Different jobs have different inherent constraints.
> If the business you're in has lots of gray legal risk, working from home means more things in writing.
If the justification for work from home is to avoid creating a documentation trail of illegal actions, that suggests that public policy should oppose RTO.
Your private data, showing up on a screen in someone's home is the reality of NO office. There are plenty of legal an contractual protections in place for that data. It is very easy to screw yourself and your company in the course of doing your job around these things. Good intentioned people make mistakes and now pictures of your last colonsopy are on the internet and in the next version of GPT is not what any one wants.
I didn't say they were legally gray, I said they had gray legal risks not because people are bad but because they are flawed.