Return to office so you can join zoom meetings!
As the excellent series Chernobyl put it (in the words crafted by a writer, not an actual scientist) "Every lie we tell incurs a debt to the truth" and at some point someone is going to have to pay all of those debts.
1: Here I'm focusing on Anglosphere/largely US and UK societies, as a monolingual American that's all I can effectively comment on.
2: 'this will make you more productive/more efficient/more creative' whatever
But I can (at least for now) wfh for the most part.
There's like 10 that pay alot, actually hiring, and have remote work available.
I’d also hoped that some major semiconductor company would NOT embrace AI, just so they could differentiate themselves: “Our shit may be too slow for the Terminator to use, but it was designed by and for humans to use as air-gapped spreadsheet running machines with USB-key sneakernet email.”
Given that there is a growing backlash towards LLMs by the general public (not just one writers’ guild), that might sell some stock.
So, Amazon, Apple, ... are close to collapse?
As for Apple, I do love their hardware, but the software side has seen better days.
Unfortunately, you do have a point there. We let companies grow way, way too large - not only does any potential competition just about zero chance to rise against effectively infinite cash coffers, but it also removes any incentive to improve when the moat is so large that one doesn't have to care about anything...
Market reactions are typically neutral to RTO announcements, which confounds some analysts who imagine that RTO adds some kind of value. However, studies have repeatedly shown that while the short-term impact of RTO is neutral these companies typically fair worse than peer companies over longer timeframes. To make it worse for the analysts, similar studies have also shown that companies which do embrace remote first work have outsized returns. Some estimates show that fully WFH organizations bring in about 7.5% higher annual returns on average than peer organizations that RTO.
Leaders continue to ignore the ever growing piles of evidence in favor of those analysts "common sense", and forget that "common sense" is just a laymans term for what scientists refer to as "making shit up."
Those same executives are most tempted to fall into this trap during times of duress, because being perceived as "doing something" is more important than long term impact on share price.
Some companies don't see an appreciable difference in performance between those that can easily find work elsewhere and those who are otherwise unemployable. For those companies RTO is a great, though immoral, way to lower headcount without triggering the WARN act.