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> One thing RTO should make plain for everyone is executives and their managers value control over substance.

As one who manages a remote team - substance doesn't come for free.

This sounds great as a dichotomy, but it is not - people who care aniut their work, and collaboration are rare to come across.

We've been talking about learning organisations for years, and the importance of a documental culture has been clear for a long time. However, most companies have never truly implemented these models. Remote work forces them to do so, or they'll fail. So, even though it's been "theorised for a long time" and widely dissected, remote work it's effectively a new thing, and it's sadly normal to encounter many problems, especially with management that lacks even the most basic substantial IT skills to truly work in a virtual company, and not just management, but a large part of all the staff too.

I'm one of those who are very productive working remotely, but not out of loyalty or some "ethics/morals". It's simply because, as an engineer, I seek efficiency, and remote work is efficient. I suffer from inefficiencies, rituals created to placate bipedal cattle, and senseless reactionary attitudes. We are few, I imagine, but we are also the cohort that innovates, at various levels and in various sectors, without whom I don't know how much the West could hold on, and this, indeed, is not free.

Today, with RTO, a social rift is forming between those who want to truly advance and those who merely muddle through, while the world moves forward. If this trend isn't reversed, the West, which has already lost so much, will lose what little remains and discover that its residual military strength amounts to little more than a Romans legio fantasma. At that point, the cost of "saving money" by not innovating will be so high that it will lead to bankruptcy.

I can understand your sentiment in the first two paragraphs, even though I think remote work was bound to fail for most of the companies simply because it is hard to update the culture. Broadcom mandated in-office work even during COVID as soon as the strictest lockdowns were lifted. And yet Broadcom stock is up 5x since 2022, so they are not missing out on anything by embracing the office. Same with Meta (mandated RTO, stock up 7x).

> the West, which has already lost so much, will lose what little remains

The West already advanced a lot until 2020 by working from office. If anything, fully remote conditions are a death knell for software jobs in the rich parts of the world. Most of the SW jobs do not require special talent and can be done for a fraction of the cost from Latin America, Eastern Europe, Africa or India.

The world is changing, yes, once upon a time, most innovation happened in person, because with the technology of the time, it was necessary to be there in person. But today's technology has made being there in person superfluous and inefficient. This means that some will continue remotely and they will be the ones who overtake those who have stuck to the old model.

The Bronze Age was characterised by bronze, which allowed for many advancements. But then we discovered iron, and those who chose it first massacred those who had remained with bronze. Bronze was no longer what had allowed for evolution; it had been surpassed.

This is my feeling and my point. These changes are obviously not that rapid; culture changes across generations, but they will happen, and those who are left bolted behind will not have the long and slow experimentation and refinement that allowed to master the new, and so they will simply be crushed. Software developed around the world matters little; quality software is so rare that only by working globally can we still create it. No single company, not even a single whole population, can truly do it on scale.

> But today's technology has made being there in person superfluous and inefficient.

Hard disagree. Lots of otherwise talented people still have problems with written communication or other norms of remote work. They thrive in an office though.

Mere proof of that is a lot of startups which are still flocking to SF and mandating in-person presence 5 (or 7) days a week so that they can move fast.

This. I am a manager, and frankly, getting a bit tired of people who just cast some degree of in person presence as “pure desire for control”. People require coordination (that’s partly why manager / project manager / product manager roles exist), and that coordination is orders of magnitude easier and faster in person. Sometimes just in the course of going from meeting A to meeting B, I will solve <=3 minutes stuff that would take me 2-3x the amount of time via chat or quick ad hoc meetings.

I am against full RTO 5 days a week, because for focused tasks, WFH is way more productive. But hybrid is not entirely stupid. Sure, if 100% of your work is focused work (say SWE work for instance), anything other than full WFH is a loss to you. But unless you work 100% alone with nobody else, 100% optimal for you may not be 100% optimal for the project / product / organisation. And I’ve seen first hand how conflicts brew when people can’t just go in front of a white board and hash out differences in person

Tl;dr : it’s wayyyyyyyy more nuanced than “RTO is stupid you control freak”

Re [1]: it’s much better than a layoff (for the business), in that you don’t pay any severance, have 0 exposure to wrongful termination lawsuits, and don’t get the “you just fired my friends/will you fire me next?” culture of insecurity.

Except nearly everyone seems to be in on the game at this point. My observation is that RTO mandates tank morale similarly to how layoffs do. I'd be interested to see studies on morale before and after RTO.

Not to mention the challenges it induces on retaining good talent.

I have an acquaintance who was forced to RTO (finance), and they’re both looking for a new remote job on company time and sabotaging [1] [2] internally (not illegally mind you) by doing as little as possible to keep the job until they bounce. Don’t blame them in the slightest.

[1] https://www.cia.gov/stories/story/the-art-of-simple-sabotage...

[2] https://www.cia.gov/static/5c875f3ec660e092cf893f60b4a288df/...

You should look into the work of Nick Bloom, an Economics prof at Standford (active on various social media platforms) who has been researching remote work for quite a while: https://economics.stanford.edu/people/nicholas-bloom

While I can't recall a study on your precise question about morale, he did share a lot of findings strongly supporting hybrid and remote work, including lower attrition.

The BIG downside to the business is that you have little to no control over who you'll lose. I'd even go a step further and argue that you are more likely to lose the most competent employee since they have more options. I suspect, however, that the people enacting these policies are unable to see that dynamic and equate eagerness to come to an office with seriousness and commitment to the business.

> In nearly every case of RTO, there was no recorded dip in productivity associated with the move to remote work.

I've seen this repeated often, and I've never seen any convincing evidence to support it. The studies I have seen always focus on "task-based" roles, where productivity is easily measured and everything is very well-defined. Think call center employees, stuff like that, where they're simply measuring call volumes.

But execs are clearly more worried about the general "disattachment" people have with their job when they're working remotely, and they're worried about reductions in innovation and collaborative idea generation. Those kinds of concerns are much more difficult to measure in a short term study, but I think they're very valid.

Since those things are difficult to measure, I'm not saying there is good evidence one way or the other on remote work's effect on those things. I am saying I think it's disingenuous and just a bad argument to say remote work has no impact on productivity.

>general "disattachment" people have with their job

At least for me this is a consequence of the instability, extracurricular demands from my employer (signaling our relationship is not important to them) and deterioration in the labor market making my career less of a priority than my side projects (as at least in my mind the expected long term payout has dropped.) Being forced to commute would only exacerbate the situation.

BLS did a great job here https://www.bls.gov/opub/btn/volume-13/remote-work-productiv...

Everything in that report basically confirms what I was saying.

Most importantly, it looks primarily at the data from 2019-2022. Most execs (and many have said this publicly) are not that concerned about the short-term impacts on productivity. Indeed, many have argued that a good reason things were able to transition relatively smoothly during the pandemic is all the personal and professional networks and workflows already existed.

But that study can obviously not measure the longer term impacts on overall competitiveness. And again, since I'm talking about longer term impacts, no study that only took place from 2019-2022 could measure these effects. But I think it's important to acknowledge that, rather than just leaning on the "See! Studies prove remote work doesn't hurt productivity!" argument, which is an invalid interpretation IMO.

Not the previous poster - but the study which confirms that remote work is not bad, was one done at Stanford. The devil in the details was that Hybrid resulted in productivity gains - not remote.

Do you have a link to that, I'd be interested to see their methodology. That confirms my experience. Even before the pandemic, I would often work from home one or two days a week when I needed to be in "heads down" mode and just knock shit out. It was more efficient for me because there were fewer distractions and it was easier for me to get in the zone. But then I still had plenty of time for in-person collaboration with my colleagues.

Ugh. I feel bad sharing this, because I am a proponent of Remote.

https://news.stanford.edu/stories/2024/06/hybrid-work-is-a-w...

this should have a link.

Also a correction - it showed increased retention rates, but no change in productivity.

From personal observation, we were at a point in the technology cycle--networks/Zoom et al./etc.--where people were able to work remotely in many cases. Indeed, some organizations I'm involved with now hold at least some meetings remotely rather than spending half a day or more trudging somewhere for a meeting that takes half a day or more.

On the other hand, I felt very disconnected at work latterly with a larger group and mostly kept up tighter connections with people I already knew.

What about all of us that were already working remotely for a decade or more before COVID?

Didn't seem to be a problem then.

>But that study can obviously not measure the longer term impacts on overall competitiveness. And again, since I'm talking about longer term impacts, no study that only took place from 2019-2022 could measure these effects. But I think it's important to acknowledge that, rather than just leaning on the "See! Studies prove remote work doesn't hurt productivity!" argument, which is an invalid interpretation IMO.

It didn't though, and if companies and managers are supposedly results driven, data driven orgs (many claim to be, some times very loudly), why would they go against the actual data? Famously, Amazon's CEO couldn't even show something - anything - that supported their RTO position.

If you start to see issues downstream in a few years, you need to ask questions as to why, but assuming - which is what RTO does - that going back to the office is right because its been the historical norm - without actually truly studying the effects of remote work - is the problem here.

This is simply the executive class flexing what power they have for purposes other than the goal they claim its for

And you have never seen people on the job showing disattachment to their job? Wow. Go to any cafe, any school, any McDonalds, or any restaurant not run by a family that owns only one restaurant. And even those are havens of dedication and inspiration compared to the average government office.

More general, look up the "bullshit jobs" phenomenon.

> And you have never seen people on the job showing disattachment to their job.

I made no such argument.

But the "execs" you write about are making the argument that "disattachment" is a more outsized problem for remote employees vs. onsite employees. Otherwise, they wouldn't have brought it up in the context of why these policies are happening.

> In nearly every case of RTO, there was no recorded dip in productivity associated with the move to remote work.

I am extremely skeptical of this. On the contrary there is a mountain of direct evidence that people barely work when working from home. People have been openly bragging both on the internet and in person about how they do laundry and watch netflix and mow their lawns while looking productive

All you need to do is look at the crowds in the park or lines at the grocery store on any given friday to gauge how much work is being done on wfh days

And I am extremely skeptical of your "direct evidence" (source?). Most jobs are not measurable, they are more like N amount of employees collectively moving a target / goal. And just like in school projects there are the lazies of course, but again, direct measurability is mostly an illusion sold by consultants that get sweet money by lying to executives and telling them what they want to hear.

Consider that you might be in the bubble of yes-people.

Work from home allowed many people to find their exact productive schedule, motivators and rhythm. But we can't have that, 8h or leave!

Make a friend of yours buy one share of the company that doesn't allow you to work remotely. Make him sue that by insisting on RTO they are breaching their fiduciary duty by being deliberately inefficient.