As an employee though, Im happy with WFH :)
In person collaboration is definitely worth it, but this needs to be planned. It doesn't happen automagically if you are being forced to sit at a desk.
I can see why middle management's hates it thought. You can no longer tap on someone shoulder and pester them in prioritising your work above others. You need to make a business case rather than bullying a poor Engineer.
Maybe that's why so many companies push for people to return to the office. In-person working where someone can just walk up and interrupt someone else is equally awful for everyone.
Aside managers like people in the office because they are more tied to the company, change employer often means having to move elsewhere and the worker might be in couple and his/her partner might have issues moving, they might have kids suffering from loosing friends and change schools etc, this means workers more keen to accept bad condition at work at a certain point in time. A remote worker can potentially change employer just changing some login screens.
I don't think such scapegoating will actually help the remote crowd.
But in most companies, it's both.
And people suck at discipline.
Feelings and anecdotes aside, the data shows the model to be effective imho.
I’ll make time to have the Google Sheet cleaned up and shared here as a post.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39858529
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18146703
(Strong believer in putting my money where my mouth is)
Both sides are driven by feelings and anecdotes. The few data points that exist are inconclusive.
There aren't any North American private companies that have an enterprise value of over $120B right now so the company is public, why not just name it?
Recruiting only from the pool of "people who accept to work 100% in an office" is a massive handicap, at least in some regions and positions.
I think a lot of people really like the former but I don't think it works very well. There's a marked tendency of many people to drift apart and communication breaks down within and across teams and the fallout it quite ugly - a lot of people individually doing their jobs (and perhaps doing them well), but nothing really fits together very well. I personally found working in this environment to be torture because my work felt performative and meaningless.
I find that the highly collaborative kind works about as well as working in person - possibly better. However, I think it's only really possible with a lot of camera-on video calls which many people find quite draining.
So effectively you have middle management failing to be fulfilled at an emotional level as well as failing at a professional level to do management, and their plan to deal with this is to first blame others, then try to convince leadership to kill wfh for line workers before anyone notices the real problem.
Nothing against any individuals out there, just seen these things play out a lot and have been having the wfh discussions since long before Covid.
Technical alignment is easy in a sense because it’s clear when two ends of a bridge don’t meet in the middle. Product people or department heads have a harder time of things, but if I were a ceo, I don’t want to buy office space for 2500 when 25 will do.
It’s kind of evil to advocate for back-to-office if you know it’s good for you, but bad for both the company and your coworkers, and I expect many of the most vocal advocates know these things in their secret hearts
I think it's something else. It's providing space for employees to interact spontaneously. In software there's a huge push to have everything public and recorded, which makes me very cautious about how I present myself. When I switch to private messages, I get much higher sense of connection with the other person, because I don't need to stay that formal.