Personally I would never work as an employee to begin with, unless I were in serious financial distress. I would rather be a poor entrepreneur/freelancer than wealthy salaried employee. And office isn't really the factor, but other things, like freedom. But people have different preferences.
Co A offers $X Co B offers $Y
You take whatever makes sense to you.
When applying for jobs, you should negotiate for the things that you value. It doesn't make sense to require all employers to offer WFH when it is only your personal employer in the end who matters. There was WFH jobs before COVID, like there are onsite jobs now, and there will be always jobs for both purposes.
In office jobs should pay at least 30% more than WFH jobs to even be competitive.
People are really upset at Amazon because the office doesn't provide anything more than what they can get at home (and in a lot of cases provides less). At least at the others you can get some extra stuff you can't get at home.
That's the point. The pandemic give employers worldwide an enormous advantage in these negotiations. Personally I would never work for any company that requires RTO.
All these statements are missing the point, which is that commute time is unpaid 99% of the time, and is a complete waste from the employee's standpoint.
So whenever I negotiate with the employer, I have to take that into account, regardless of it being specified in the contract. It's an unstated consideration - an externality.
Past 2024, we should be considering commute time (or at least a portion of it) as a cost to the employee. This should be a firm stance, or worker rights will continue to be eroded.
To add a data point that will sound snarkier than it is:
I used to say very similar things. It is a really wonderful sound bite, and you can get together with all the other starving founders to say things like this to each other.
Looking back on it, I think this philosophy is actually a really important part of the startup-industrial complex. If you can just make it "not cool" to go get a job, and starting a startup is all about "freedom and adventure," then it becomes really easy for VCs to normalize things like "founders paying themselves subsistence salaries." That means the pipeline of new startups will increase in quantity and decrease in unit-cost -- which is exactly what the VCs want.
What they won't tell you about, if you want to chase the founder dream, is the opportunity cost. It turns out that maxing out your 401(k) is pretty great, as is having an infinite supply of sparkling water and spending your days building software with a whole bunch of other brilliant people.
I'm still not going to RTO, though. That part is just dumb, and I think every serious company that truly values engineering productivity will agree.